In a step or two we are passing the higher end of King Street, formerly Barn Lane, at the corner of which stands an ancient hostelry, yclept the “Pied Bull.” Here again we have before us the degenerate type of those strange old Rows, which so filled you with amaze in our earlier rambles. There can be no doubt that, originally, these wondrous piazzas ran continuously along the four great streets of the city, except where they verge upon the confines of the Abbey; but these isolated portions are gradually disappearing before the “march of improvement.” Doctors differ, alas! in Chester, as elsewhere, about the actual wisdom of this aforesaid “march!”
Again we move onwards, passing under a substantial arch of white stone, referred to in our “Walk round the Walls” as the Northgate of the city. While the other three Gates were vested, by serjeantship, from time immemorial, in various noble families, this, the porta septentrionalis, as anciently belonged to the commorant citizens. Prior to 1808, when the present arch was erected, the Northgate, if we may credit the engravings handed down to us, was a miserably effete and incongruous erection. What made it appear more so was the Gaol, or common prison of the city, which occupied a great part of the space around, above, and below it. A prison existed here from the earliest period; it is quoted in documents of the Norman earldom, and was at the time of its demolition a terrible specimen of legalised corruption—an establishment defying even the besom of a Howard to purge or purify. The city sheriff here saw execution done on all criminals capitally convicted within the county; here again the unfortunate debtor got “whitewashed,” and relieved of his “little odd scores;” and here were practised those “tortures thrice refined” which might put even the Great Inquisition to the blush. Far away from human gaze, fathoms deep in the solid rock, were chambers hewn, dreadful to survey, horrifying to think upon. Of these, two bore the distinguishing titles of “Little Ease,” and the “Dead Man’s Room.” The latter was the spot where condemned criminals awaited their execution, and was “a dark stinking place” in which snakes and other venomous reptiles gambolled at discretion. The “Little Ease,” as we read from a contemporary work, “was a hole hewed out in a rock; the breadth and cross from side to side was seventeen inches from the back to the inside of the great door; at the top seven inches, at the shoulders eight inches, and at the breast nine inches and a-half; with a device to lessen the height as they were minded to torture the person put in, by drawboards which shot over across the two sides, to a yard in height, or thereabouts.”
In those blissful times when Oliver Cromwell ruled England with an iron sceptre, these two “pleasantly situated furnished apartments” were in great request by the Barebones magistracy; and it is matter of record that,
Locked in their cold embrace,
numerous unoffending, peaceloving Quakers endured the rod of persecution for conscience sake. And yet, forsooth, those were your oft-vaunted days of civil and religious liberty! Away with them all, say we! The Gaol, with its attendant miseries, has gone, but the dungeons we have pictured abide there still, beneath the ground we are now standing on,—though filled up, it is true, and for ever absolved from their ancient uses.
Having just passed under one arch, we are now walking over another which spans an abyss formed by the deep cut of the Ellesmere and Chester Canal. Yon little parallel archway, a few yards to the westward of us, is the Bridge of Death,—the path along which the felons about to die usually went to receive the “last consolation of the church” in the Chapel of St. John, on the opposite side of the gulf.
Pass we on once more for a few yards, and then turning round, a prospect awaits us the very similitude of that depicted in our engraving. To the left we have the Northgate, and portion of the Walls—those rare old Walls!—while the foreground to the right is occupied by that useful charitable institution, the Blue-Coat Hospital. For centuries prior to the great Civil War there stood, on this site, a venerable asylum, founded by Randal, Earl of Chester, for “poore and sillie persons,” under the name of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist. In the reign of Edward III., a jury of free citizens was sworn to report on the “vested rights” of this house, and the verdict these worthies returned was this:—
“That there ought to be, and have accustomed to be, in the said Hospital, three chaplains to say mass daily—two in the church, and the third in the chapel—before the poor and feeble sustained in the said Hospital; and that one lamp ought to be sustained at mass every day in the said Hospital, and to burn every night in the whole year; and that thirteen beds, competently clothed, should be sustained in the same Hospital, and receive thirteen poor men of the same city; whereof each shall have for daily allowance a loaf of bread, a dish of pottage, half a gallon of competent ale, and a piece of fish or flesh, as the day shall require.”
Not bad fare this for the thirteen brethren, “poore and feeble,” who, from all we can judge,