Shaping fantasies that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends,
still lingers, and the voices of tradition may occasionally be heard in the embowered gloom of its solitary cloughs and dingles; but under the disenchanting influences of steam Pendle has lost much of that weird character of wonder and fear with which the shaping power of the imagination had enshrouded it, though it still retains much of its wild and uncultivated character, and there are spots that remain almost as savage and unfrequented, if not as much feared, as in the days of the “British Solomon,” when its secluded hollows and heathery wastes were commonly believed to be the scenes of midnight feasting and diabolical revelries, and everything and everybody were supposed to be under the evil influence of decrepit hags who had sworn to do the devil service, and were endowed by the Prince of Darkness with the power to work destruction on man and beast. Happily, in these days, a gentler species of witchcraft prevails. Though the spells of the Lancashire witches are as potent as ever, they are exercised without fear of judge or jury. Few escape the fascinations, and, it may be added, still fewer desire to do so. But Pendle has other associations than those with which the pedantic Master Potts and Harrison Ainsworth have made us familiar. It was upon its broad peak that George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, received his “first illumination.” There, as he tells us in his Journal, “the Lord let me see in what places He had a great people to be gathered together;” and then he adds, “As I went down I found a spring of water in the side of the hill, with which I refreshed myself, having eaten or drunken but little for several days before.” The spring is still there, and to this day is known in the neighbourhood as George Fox’s well.
Wiswall, uprising in peaceful serenity upon the skirts of Pendle, calls to remembrance the conflict between monarchy and monasticism—the “Pilgrimage of Grace,” and the penalty that Paslew, the last abbot of Whalley, paid for his share in that uprising—the destruction of himself and the house over which he had so long presided, for it was upon a gallows erected in front of Wiswall Hall, the place of his birth, and in sight of the abbey, which had then passed into profane hands, that Paslew was ignominiously hanged. A flat gravestone, in the north aisle of Whalley Church, marks the last resting-place of the ill-fated ecclesiastic. A floriated cross and a chalice, the emblems of his office, are carved upon it, with the simple and touching inscription—
Jhu fili dei miserere mei
J P
Well might he ask pity from above, for, poor man, in the days of his adversity he found none below. Let us hope, however, that the malediction which tradition says the dying man pronounced upon those who should despoil his house has lost its force, if it ever had any, and that a Braddyll and an Assheton may now step across his grave without risk of destruction.
But the glory of Whalley is the famous abbey, with which Whitaker’s history has made us so familiar. Though it is now only a picturesque ruin—
A pile decayed,