“In summer time, when leaves grow green,
And flowers are fresh and gay,
Robin Hood and his merry men
Were disposed to play.”
And when Robin, overjoyed at Little John’s skill, exclaims that he would ride a hundred miles to find one to match him,
“That caused Will Scadlocke to laugh,
He laught full heartily:
There lives a curtall fryer in Fountaines Abbey
Will beate both him and thee.”
A right sturdy friar, who with his fifty dogs kept Robin and his fifty men at bay, until Little John’s shooting brought him to terms:
“This curtall fryer had kept Fountaines dale
Seven long yeares and more,
There was neither knight, lord, nor earle
Could make him yeeld before.”
Of old Jenkins, it is recorded that he was once steward to Lord Conyers, who used to send him at times with a message to the Abbot of Fountains Abbey; and that the abbot always gave him, “besides wassel, a quarter of a yard of roast beef for his dinner, and a great black jack of strong beer.” The Abbot of Fountains was one of three Yorkshire abbots beheaded on Tower-hill for their share in the Pilgrimage of Grace.
Judging from the one to whom we were allotted, the guides are civil, and not uninformed as to the traditions and history of Studley Royal and its neighbourhood. They are instructed not to lose sight of their party, and to conduct them only by the prescribed paths. So there is no opportunity for wandering at will, or a leisurely meditation among the ruins.
I walked back to the railway-station at Ripon, and journeyed thence to Thirsk, where a pleasant stroll finished the evening. Of the castle of the Mowbrays—the rendezvous of the English troops when marching to the Battle of the Standard—the site alone remains on the south-west of the town. The chantry, founded by one of the Mowbrays in Old Thirsk, has also disappeared. And the great tree that stood on the green in the same suburb has gone too. It was under the tree on Thirsk green, and not at Topcliffe, as some say, that the fourth Earl Percy was massacred; certain it is, that the elections of members to serve in Parliament were held under the wide-spreading branches even from the earliest times. It was burnt down in 1818 by a party of boys who lit a fire in the hollow trunk. But the ugly old shambles had not disappeared from the market-place: their destruction, however, so said the bookseller, was imminent.
The church, dating from the fifteenth century, has recently been restored, and well repays an examination. Among the epitaphs on the tombstones, I noticed a variation of the old familiar strain:
Afflictions sore he long time bore,
Which wore his strength away,
That made him long for heavenly rest
Which never will decay.