At Knaresborough, only three miles further on, we are in a very different world, the world of old houses and older tales, of monarchs and saints, of William the Conqueror and the proud de Stutteville, of Richard, king in name but not in deed, and of Oliver, king in deed but not in name—an inspiring world, one would think. The first view of the town, too—the river, and the high, unusual bridge, and the red houses on the hillside, and above them the castle that had once so proud a crown of towers—seems to promise much. Looking at that fragment of a fortress we remember those who have owned it; the de Burgh who built it; the de Stutteville who fought in the Battle of the Standard; Piers Gaveston, who is better forgotten; de Morville, murderer of Beckett, hiding here from justice; Queen Philippa, whom we are glad to remember for any reason; John of Gaunt; Charles I. And we remember Richard II., a prisoner in the one tower that still stands, alone with his humiliating memories.
This one glimpse of the castle and its past, however, is all that Knaresborough can give us of romance. It is almost best to ask no more, for a nearer view of the crumbling keep will leave us very sad. The path that leads to it, the path that took de Morville to safety and Richard to prison, is neatly asphalted, and lighted with gas-lamps on stone bases, which the local guide-book describes as "ornamental." Hard by the door through which the sad king passed from his shame at Westminster, and went forth again to the mystery of Pontefract, stands a penny-in-the-slot machine. A custodian will show us the guardroom and its relics, and even the dungeon; but we must be careful to look at them in the right order, or we shall be rebuked. The wolf-trap must be seen before the Conqueror's chest, and Philippa's chest before the armour from Marston Moor. By this time the glamour has faded. Even the fine view from the castle rock must be inspected—inspected is the right word—from nicely painted seats, placed at regular intervals in the shelter of clipped evergreens.
The most satisfactory place in Knaresborough is the Old Manor beside the river, where the original "roof-tree" round which the house was built still grows up through the rooms, and would be taller if a too zealous workman had not aspired to "make it tidy." A great deal of beautiful furniture has been gathered in the panelled rooms, including the sturdy and simple oak bedstead in which Oliver Cromwell slept when he was staying in the house that faces the Crown Hotel, in the upper part of the town. Perhaps the bed was brought here when Oliver's lodging was pulled down and rebuilt, as happened some time ago. The floor of his room was carefully preserved; that floor on which the landlady's little girl, peeping through the keyhole at "this extraordinary person," saw him kneeling at his prayers. It was in this town that he gathered his troops to meet the Scottish invasion, and from hence that he marched out, by way of Otley, Skipton, and Clitheroe, to defeat the Duke of Hamilton at Preston. The siege of the castle was not his work: Fairfax had taken it by assault some years earlier. Cromwell had sad memories in connection with Knaresborough, for it was somewhere in its neighbourhood that his second boy, Oliver, was killed. "I thought he looked sad and wearied," said a contemporary who met him just before the battle of Marston Moor, "for he had had a sad loss—young Oliver had got killed to death not long before, I heard; it was near Knaresborough."
To see the Dropping Well we must cross the river by bridge or ferry, and walk along a pretty path under the beeches. Here, as everywhere in Knaresborough, disillusion dogs our steps. This beautiful curiosity of nature, this great overhanging rock, worn smooth by the perpetual dripping of the water, framed in moss and ferns, has been made into a "side-show," with a railing, an entrance fee, and a row of bowler hats, stuffed parrots, and other ornaments in process of petrifaction. On the other side of the river is St. Robert's Chapel. Here, too, the world is too much with us.
Leland, that stout traveller, who "was totally enflammid with a love to see thoroughly al those partes of this opulente and ample reaulme ... and notid yn so doing a hole worlde of thinges very memorable," tells us how Robert Flower, the son of a man "that had beene 2 tymes mair of York," came to these rocks by the river Nidd "desiring a solitarie life as an hermite." He made himself this chapel, "hewen owte of the mayne stone"; and he seems to have had some persuasive power of goodness or wisdom that turned his enemies into friends. "King John was ons of an il-wille to this Robert Flour," yet ended by benefiting him and his, an unusual developement in the case of King John; and de Stutteville, who lived up at the castle, had actually set out to raid the hermitage, suspecting it to harbour thieves, when he too, persuaded by a vision or otherwise, suddenly became the hermit's friend. This tiny sanctuary, eight or nine feet long, with its altar and groined roof and recesses for relics, all wrought in the solid rock, would be a place to stimulate the imagination if it were not that the surroundings and the guide are such as would cause the strongest imagination to wilt.
Some say that the black slab of marble which is now a memorial to Sir Henry Slingsby in the parish church once formed the altar-top in St. Robert's Chapel; others say it came from the Priory, and was raised there in honour of the saint who "forsook his fair lands" and caused the Priory's foundation. The slab lies in the Slingsby chapel, and records that Sir Henry was executed "by order of the tyrant Cromwell." Carlyle tells us that this Slingsby, "a very constant Royalist all along," was condemned for plotting the betrayal of Hull to the Royalists.
The road from Knaresborough to Ripon follows the valley of the Nidd as far as Ripley. This village has the air of being a feudal survival. Its cottages with their neatness and their flowers, its Hôtel de Ville, and even the "treated" surface of its excellent road, all bear the stamp of a close connection with the castle whose park gates are at the corner. In the sixteenth century the village of Ripley was under the eye of a very masterful lady. It was to this castle that Oliver Cromwell, tired from fighting on Marston Moor, came in search of rest. Rest, however, was denied him. His hostess, whose husband was away, had no sympathy with fatigue that came from resisting the King's Majesty, and so poor Oliver—"sad and wearied," as we know, even before the battle—spent the night on a chair in the hall, while Lady Ingilby, seated opposite to him with a couple of pistols in her hands, kept her relentless eye upon him till the morning. When he rode away she told him it was fortunate for him that he had been so tractable. I think this fierce lady must have been agreeable to Oliver's grim humour.
The approach to Ripon is pretty, by a road shaded with trees. Above the town rises the cathedral, massive and stately if not superlatively beautiful. Though it is not one of our largest cathedrals, its history is immense.
Even St. Wilfrid's seventh-century church was not the first that stood here, for before his remote day Eata had founded a monastery that was hardly built before the Danes burnt it. Indeed, the monastery was destroyed so often—by Danes, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Scots in turn—that every style of architecture, from Saxon to Perpendicular, is represented in the various restorations. There are even, I believe, in the crypt and chapter-house, fragments of Wilfrid's own church, among them being the curious slit called Wilfrid's Needle, which has been "mighty famous," as Camden said, for a great many centuries. The saint himself was mighty famous in his day, as he well deserved to be. Even still we know a good deal about him, through Bede and others: how, when he was a poor and ignorant boy of fourteen, "not enduring the frowardness of his stepmother, he went to seek his fortune," and was brought to the notice of Queen Eanfled, "whom for his wit and beauty he was not unfit to serve"; and how she sent him to Lindisfarne, where, "being of an acute understanding, he in a very short time learnt the psalms and some books"; and how he refused a wife in France; and was presented by King Alfred of Deira with a monastery at Rhypum, here on this very hill; and was consecrated at Compiègne in a golden chair carried by singing bishops; and how he converted the people of Bosham by teaching them to fish with eel-nets, so that "they began more readily at his preaching to hope for heavenly goods"; and how he won the day in the great controversy at Whitby, and finally died as an archbishop and was buried at the south end of the altar here at Ripon. He was a very human saint, and much beloved. His church was destroyed by Edred, but his monastery grew in power. The most beautiful part of the present building is the Early English west front, which dates from the reign of Henry III.
Ripon is altogether charming, and still does homage very prettily to its patron, King Alfred, who made it a royal borough. He it was who ordained that every night a horn should be blown by the wakeman, and that any one who was robbed between the blowing of the horn and the hour of sunrise should be repaid by the townsfolk. From his day to ours each night at nine o'clock the men of Ripon have heard the horn—three long, penetrating blasts before the town hall and three before the wakeman's house. Several centuries ago the wakeman became the mayor, and now he blows the horn by deputy. "Except ye Lord keep ye Cittie," are the words on the town hall, "ye wakeman waketh in vain"; and not far away, at one corner of the market-square, is a pretty old gabled house bearing this legend: "1604. In thys house lived a long time Hugh Ripley, ye last Wakeman and first Mayore of Rippon."