Until it becomes a tidal river, which does not happen till the huge pillar of smoke that announces Newcastle comes in sight, the Tyne in ordinary seasons is a broad and shallow stream, with occasional deep and quiet pools dreaming in shadowy places. Below Warden its banks are open on either side to the far-away hills, and it has but a bare, starved look among these level and almost naked shores. Yet it is a rich, fertile, and famous country, through which now flows this “water of Tyne.” Hexham, renowned for its market-gardens, is close at hand. Its roofs peer out of a wide circle of trees, and above them all, massive and conspicuous, stands sentinel the broad square tower of the Abbey Church.
“The heart of all England” is a designation which was long ago claimed for their town by the Hexham folk. Just as Boston is held to be the hub of the universe, so Hexham was declared to be the centre of our right little, tight little island. Hence radiated such Gospel light and such imperfect learning as illumined these wild northern parts in Saxon times. Mr. Green has said of St. Wilfred, whom he calls Wilfrith of York, that his life was made up of flights to Rome and returns to England, which is but a churlish description of a great career; for St. Wilfred, the most magnificent and wealthy ecclesiastic of his period, not only restored York and built the church at Ripon, but erected here at Hexham an abbey and a cathedral of which Richard, the Prior, who assisted to restore it from its ruins, wrote:—“It surpassed in the excellence of its architecture all the buildings of England; and, in truth, there was nothing like it at that time to be found on this side of the Alps.” The time to which Prior Richard refers was the latter portion of the seventh century. Wilfred, who was trained at Lindisfarne, visited France and Italy in his youth, and came back full of great architectural ideas. There were then, it is probable, no stone churches in England. At any rate, the first five churches of stone were York, Lincoln, Ripon, Withern, and Hexham; of which Wilfred certainly built three. Never had bishop a vaster diocese. Wilfred, Archbishop of York and Bishop of Hexham, had supreme ecclesiastical control over a district which—during his lifetime, and when he was in misfortune—was divided by Theodore of Tarsus into the four bishoprics of York, Hexham, Withern, and Lindisfarne. Of Wilfred’s cathedral of Hexham nothing remains but the underground oratory, built about 674. The church was fired by incursive Danes in 875. Three centuries later the canons of Hexham piously went to work to rebuild and restore; but then the unruly Scots made a raid into England, taking Hexham on their way, and not only destroyed the restored buildings, but slaughtered the townsfolk, and burned to death two hundred children whom they found at school.
Hexham was once, says Prior Richard, “very large and stately.” However, it diminished in importance under the influence of successive battles, tumults, incursions, and changes. Hexham ceased to be the seat of a bishopric at an early period of its history; and though the monks donned armour and girded swords to their sides when Henry VIII.’s commissioners came, declaring that, “we be twenty free men in this house, and will die all or that you shall enter here,” their bravery nothing availed them, and the dissolution of the monastery still further depressed Hexham in the list of English towns. There is a story that the last Superior was hanged at the priory gates, and several of his monks along with him. The beautiful Abbey Church was restored, greatly to its detriment, in 1858. But even the restorers could not spoil it utterly, and it still gives an air of grandeur and stateliness to the quiet town which it adorns.
It is all an old battlefield, the land around Hexham. “Wallace wight,” who is frequently heard of on Tyneside, generally to his disadvantage, and part of whose body was hung up on the bridge at Newcastle when he was executed, came here and slaughtered the people in 1297. One of the decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses was fought close by Hexham in 1464, on which occasion, as one of the most romantic stories in our history narrates, Queen Margaret and her son found shelter and hiding in a robbers’ cave. “Hexham,” writes Defoe, “is famous, or rather infamous, for having the first blood drawn at it in the war against their Prince by the Scots in King Charles’s time.” A good deal of the blood of the families of these parts was shed for the Stuart cause, then and long afterwards. Three miles below Hexham, and near to the scene of the Yorkist and Lancastrian battle, Devil’s Water flows into the Tyne, past the grey old tower which is all that remains to attest the former splendour of the Earls of Derwentwater. This Devil’s Water—which was Dyvelle’s Water in bygone days, so called from an ancient family of these parts—tears its way swiftly between high and verdurous walls of rock—
“It’s eddying foam-balls prettily distrest
By ever-changing shape and want of rest.”
The hillsides of Dilston are clothed in magnificent woods. The scene is such as those which the old-fashioned writers were wont to describe as “beautifully sylvan.” There are wild wood-paths and beds of fern, the green tangle of underwood, and the varied shade and brightness of interlacing boughs. And hence, with hesitation and a doubtful mind, the last Earl of Derwentwater set out on that rash and unlucky expedition which caused him the loss of his head.
PRUDHOE CASTLE.
