Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

In a clear day can be seen from this tower, a dozen or so miles to the south, the ruins of a castle built by Earl Randel Blundeville. He was the Earl Randel of whom Roger Lacy, constable of Cheshire in 1204, made a famous rescue, once on a time. The earl, it seems, was in a desperate strait, besieged in one of his castles by the Welsh; perhaps in this very castle. Roger Lacy, hearing of the earl's situation, forthwith made a muster of all the tramps, beggars, and rapscallions he could find,—"a tumultuous rout," says the chronicle, "of loose, disorderly, and dissolute persons, players, minstrels, shoemakers and the like,—and marched speedily towards the enemy." The Welsh, seeing so great a multitude coming, raised their siege and fled; and the earl, thus delivered, showed his gratitude to Constable Roger by conferring upon him perpetual authority over the loose, idle persons in Cheshire; making the office hereditary in the Lacy family. A thankless dignity, one would suppose, at best; by no means a sinecure, at any time, and during the season of the Midsummer Fairs a terrible responsibility: it being the law of the land that during those fairs the city of Chester was for the space of one month a free city of refuge for all criminals, of whatsoever degree; in token of which a glove was hung out at St. Peter's Church, on the first day of the fairs.

There is another good tale of Roger Lacy's prowess. He seems to have been a roving fighter, for he once held a castle in Normandy, for King John, against the French, "with such gallantry that after all his victuals were spent, having been besieged almost a year, and many assaults of the enemy made, but still repulsed by him, he mounts his horse, and issues out of the castle with his troop into the middest of his enemies, chusing rather to die like a soldier, than to starve to death. He slew many of the enemy, but was at last with much difficulty taken prisoner; so he and his soldiers were brought prisoners to the King of France, where, by the command of the king, Roger Lacy was to be held no strict prisoner, for his great honesty and trust in keeping the Castle so gallantly.... King John's letter to Roger Lacy concerning the keeping of the said castle, you may see among the Norman writings put out by Andrew du Chesne, and printed at Paris in 1619." Of all of which, if no ballad have ever been written, it is certain that songs must have been sung by minstrels at the time; and the name of the brave Roger's lady-love was well suited to minstrelsy, she being one Maud de Clare. Plain Roger Lacy and Maud de Clare! The dullest fancy takes a leap at the sound of the two names.

In the same old chronicle which gives these and many other narratives of Roger Lacy is the history of a singular, half-witted being, who was known in Vale-Royale, in the fifteenth century, as Nixon the Prophet. How much that the old records claim for him, in the way of minute and minutely fulfilled prophecies, is to be set down to the score of ignorant superstition, it is hard now to say; but there must have been some foundation in fact for the narrative. Robert Nixon was the son of a farmer in Cheshire County, and was born in the year 1467. His stupidity and ignorance were said to be "invincible." No efforts could make him understand anything save the care of cattle, and even in this he showed at times a brutish and idiotic cruelty. He had a very rough, coarse voice, but said little, sometimes passing whole months without opening his lips to speak. He began very early to foretell events, and with an apparently preternatural accuracy. When he was a lad, he was seen, one day, to abuse an ox belonging to his brother. To a person threatening to inform his brother of this act, Robert replied that three days later his brother would not own the ox. Sure enough, on the next day a life inheritance came into the estate on which his brother was a tenant, and that very ox was taken for the "heriot bond to the new owner." One of the abbey monks having displeased him, he exclaimed,—

"When you the harrow come on high,

Soon a raven's nest will be."

The couplet was thought at the time to be simple nonsense; but as it turned out, the last abbot of that monastery was named Harrow, and when the king suppressed the monastery he gave the domain to Sir Thomas Holcroft, whose crest was a raven.

It was also one of Nixon's predictions that the two abbeys of Vale-Royale and Norton should meet on Orton bridge and the thorn growing in the abbey yard should be its door.

When the abbeys were pulled down, in the time of the Reformation, stones taken from each of them were used in rebuilding that bridge; and the thorn-tree was cut down, and placed as a barrier across the entrance to the abbey court, to keep the sheep from entering there.

The most remarkable of Nixon's predictions or revelations was at the time of the battle on Bosworth Field between Richard III. and Henry VII. On that day, as he was driving a pair of oxen, he stopped suddenly, and with his whip pointing now one way, now another, cried aloud, "Now, Richard," "Now, Harry!" At last he said, "Now, Harry, get over that ditch, and you gain the day!" The ploughmen with him were greatly amazed, and related to many persons what had passed. When a courier came through the country announcing the result of the battle, he verified every word Nixon had said.

This courier, when he returned to court, recounted Nixon's predictions; and King Henry was so impressed by them that he at once sent orders to have him brought to the palace.