At Keldholme, though the priory is marked on the map as though still in existence, only some stones built into a wall are left to show where de Stutteville's nunnery stood. As for the de Stutteville's own castle, which once rose proudly on the hill to our right, the stones of it form the walls of the neighbouring prison, and the site of it is a pasturage for the neighbouring cows.
The prison in question—a dark, repellent spot in a pretty street—is in the market-place of Kirbymoorside. Nearly facing it is the "Black Swan," whose pretty red-tiled porch bears the date 1632; but it was the "King's Head," further up the street, to which Pope alluded when he said, neither truthfully nor politely, that the second Duke of Buckingham died at Kirbymoorside "in the worst inn's worst room." This trim, modern-looking house with the sober front of grey, so unsuggestive of the rakish duke, has never formed a part of the inn, and it was in its best room that Buckingham, on his deathbed, declared he had always had the greatest veneration for religion and reason. We may not cross the threshold of the room into which the dying man was carried—and, indeed, even penitent upon his deathbed, George Villiers the second was hardly an object for pilgrimages!—but here is its little window overlooking the street, the middle window of the three that are next the inn. Many writers, following Macaulay and Pope, assume that Buckingham died in this house because he had squandered his fortune so thoroughly that he could not secure a more comfortable place to die in. But some tell a more likely, if less edifying, tale. The duke was injured or taken ill, they say, while hunting near this town, and as his own castle of Helmsley was several miles away he was carried hither, to the house of one of his tenants. It seems certain that the estate of Helmsley was still his at his death, since his executors received nearly ninety thousand pounds for it from Charles Duncombe, banker and goldsmith. A man who had once possessed all that the Buckinghams had taken from their kings might be said to have squandered his fortune without being actually in want of a roof to die under. He had at one time a very fine roof of his own here at Kirbymoorside, but this may have been one of the many things he had lost, or possibly the Civil War had left it in a state even less luxurious than this little grey house. By following a stony lane we may see, in a farmyard above the town, the few fragments of masonry that are the last remains of the castle of the Nevilles and the Buckinghams. Queen Elizabeth took it from the Nevilles, and her successor gave it to the man of whom he said: "You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than any one else."
The second duke, who died so humbly, was buried with his betters—among whom, I think, we may include his father—in Westminster Abbey. His body was embalmed, and the oft-quoted line in the register of burials at Kirbymoorside refers only to the viscera: "1687 April 17th. Gorges vilaus Lord dooke of bookingam."
About a mile beyond Kirbymoorside there is a little valley, not far from the high-road, of which perhaps the greater number of us have never heard. The appeal of Kirkdale, like that of Lastingham, is not to the many, and for that very reason it is irresistible to some; not only to the man of science and the historian, but to all those who can best hear the voices of the dead in places where there are no voices of the living. There is silence in Kirkdale.
A steep hill with a preposterous surface leads down to Hodge Beck; to the wooden footbridge among the trees, and the quarry where the hyænas used to live, and the splash that we must cross. Those limestone rocks to the right are famous in the world of science, for that dark cave whose entrance we may see was discovered, about a hundred years ago, to be strewn with the bones of strange beasts. It was a veritable treasury for geologists, for the hyænas who lived and died here in such quantities not only bequeathed their own bones to us, but also many bones of the uncouth creatures they were in the habit of eating, creatures most happily no longer with us. There were once tigers and elephants, it appears, in quiet Kirkdale.
HODGE BECK.
We climb out of the beck and turn to the right. The narrow glen is thickly wooded, after the manner of Yorkshire dales both large and small, and in a clump of firs stands the Minster of St. Gregory. This is a fine name for so small a building; but it was called a minster nearly nine hundred years ago, and we need not deny it the distinction in its venerable age. It is not for its beauty that we come to see it, though it is picturesque enough in its setting of trees; but chiefly it is for the sake of one stone in its wall, and of the names inscribed upon it—names familiar yet remote, the names of Edward the King and Tosti the Earl. Here they are, carved in the lifetime of those who bore them. It is plain that this great stone was not always, as it is now, under a porch; for it was once a sundial, and here it is always in the shadow. The words upon it are deeply and clearly graven, easily distinguished, and, except for a few words, easily understood. This is the whole inscription, carved in two columns, with one line below the dial:—