Motor tours in Yorkshire

by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell

The later abbots, the three who in the fourteenth century raised the choir that has been called peerless, were men of another fashion—not especially humble—members of Parliament, entertainers of kings, men of the world. Yet to them, too, we owe much gratitude for all this splendour of ornament, these capitals and bosses, this great east window, this flowing parapet that is so often repeated. And, as a nation, we owe gratitude to all those whose work or money has helped in the recent restoration.[7]

There is nothing but the abbey itself to keep us in Selby. There is no sign by which we may know the spot where Sir Thomas Fairfax, by defeating the Royalists and capturing their colonel, first made his name honoured. We do know, however, that he and his troops marched to Selby on that occasion by this wondrously level road upon which we drive away. For the first mile or so, until we turn away from the Ouse, we are on the road that used to be, in the old coaching days, called the lower road to York. It diverges from the Great North Road at Barnet, and though not the main highway, was the more direct route, and therefore the one chosen by those who were in a hurry. It is for a very short time that we are on it; but surely, for a moment, above the humming of the engine, above the rushing of the wind, we hear the ringing of Black Bess's hoofs.

Five level miles bring us to the door of Hemingborough Church, which is large and renowned, but of a dreariness so gaunt and bare that it altogether fails to charm. Its walls, unsoftened by creepers, rise from the treeless landscape in uncompromising severity; and inside the building the colourless effect is equally depressing, in spite of some fine woodwork. The tall and slender spire is really beautiful, however, and may be seen for miles across the plain.

To visit Wressle Castle we must leave the direct road to Howden, turning to the left immediately after crossing the Derwent. Here again the sad landscape seems to have infected the building. Theoretically it has all the elements of romance, and to read of it without seeing it is to conjure up a picture of decaying splendour, of venerable walls eloquent of revelry and war, a picture worthy of the great names of Percy and Lacy and Seymour. A castle founded by that Earl of Worcester whose headless body lies in Shrewsbury Abbey because he fought for Richard II.'s lost cause, a castle that has seen all the might of the Northumberlands and all the tragedy of civil war, must surely have "the grand air." So one thinks till one has seen Wressle. In the background is a building, shabby but not ruined; in the foreground is a cabbage-patch.

Yet once this place was all magnificence, made "al of very fair and greate squarid stone both withyn and withoute." Leland tells us of its halls and great chambers, and its five towers, and its brewhouse without the wall, and its "botery, pantery, pastery, lardery, and kechyn." All these things were exceedingly fair, he says, and so were the gardens within the moat and the orchards without. It was here where the cabbages are that those fair gardens grew. And in the orchards were mounds, "writhen about with degrees like turninges of cokilshilles, to cum to the top without payn." Most fondly of all he describes the "study caullid Paradise," with the ingenious device of ledged desks for holding books. There, looking down upon us from the upper part of the tower nearest to the road, are the empty windows of that Paradise whose inhabitants were driven out of it for ever by the flaming sword of Civil War.

This is only a fragment of the original castle. The Northumberlands needed a considerable amount of house-room, for they had, it appears, two hundred and twenty-nine servants. There were gentlemen to wait before noon and gentlemen to wait after noon, and gentlemen to wait after supper; there were yeoman officers, and groom officers, and grooms of the chambers; there was a groom for brushing clothes, a groom of the stirrup, a groom to dress the hobbies and nags, a groom to keep the hounds, a groom to keep the gates, and an endless list of others. The day came when the servants in this house were called upon by the Parliament to demolish it themselves, and were given a month to do it in. This one side of the quadrangle was all they left. It is possible, I believe, to climb one of the towers to see the view—but I cannot think it desirable. The view from the bottom of the tower is not so attractive as to make one wish for more.

A very great relief to the eye is Howden, about three miles further on. The town itself is not without a certain degree of picturesqueness, though it was scarcely a happy thought to surmount the ancient steps of the cross in the market-place by a modern street lamp. However, from that same market-place we see, behind the red houses, the ruined gable-end of the church that is Howden's pride, whose lovely tower is one of the landmarks of the plain. The peculiarly slender and graceful effect of this tower is partly owing, I think, to the unusual height of the lower stage compared with the upper. Those tall lancets were the work of Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, whose palace stood over there to the east of the church, where the pretty gardens are. If we venture a little way on foot along that lane at the corner of the square, we may see, without trespassing, the beautiful old ivy-covered wall and the blocked gatehouse with the shield upon it, within which the bishops of Durham were wont to seek rest and change. Camden's tale, to the effect that Bishop Skirlaw built "the huge tall steeple" as a refuge for the inhabitants in times of flood, need not be believed; it was probably the invention, as a certain quaint old book suggests, of "some doating scribe, desirous of assimilating the steeple of Howden Church to the tower of Babel."

In the thirteenth century the Archbishop of York, seeing that this church was "very wide and large," and rich enough to support "many spiritual men," made it collegiate. Hence arose the need for the chapter-house that Walter Skirlaw built on the south side of the choir, and made so wonderfully beautiful that even now, robbed as it is of its groined roof and much of its rich ornament, it dwells in one's mind as a thing apart. The Decorated choir, which was first the work and afterwards the shrine of the thirteenth-century poet, John Hoveden, is itself a ruin; for when the church lost its prebends and its riches in the reign of Edward VI. there was neither need nor means left for keeping this part of the building in repair. The nave is still the parish church.