"'Pass, pass who will, yon chantry door;
And, through the chink in the fractured floor
Look down, and see a griesly sight;
A vault where the bodies are buried upright!
There, face by face, and hand by hand,
The Claphams and Mauleverers stand.'
"Whitaker, however, could never see this 'griesly sight' through the chink in the floor; and it is perhaps altogether traditional. The ruined portion of the church is entirely Decorated, with the exception of the lower walls of the choir. The transepts had eastern aisles. The north transept is nearly perfect: the south retains only its western wall, in which are two decorated windows. The piers of a central tower remain; but at what period it was destroyed, or if it was ever completed, is uncertain. The choir is long and aisleless. Some fragments of tracery remain in the south window, which was a very fine one. Below the window runs a Transitional Norman arcade. Some portions of tomb-slabs remain in the choir.... The church-yard lies on the north side of the ruins. This has been made classic ground by Wordsworth's poem."
II. (See [p. 118].)
... the shy recess
Of Barden's lowly quietness.
Compare the poem [The Force of Prayer, or the Founding of Bolton Priory, p. 204]. Whitaker writes thus of the district of Upper Wharfedale at Barden. "Grey tower-like projections of rock, stained with the various hues of lichens, and hung with loose and streaming canopies of ling, start out at intervals." Before the restoration of Henry Clifford, the Shepherd-lord, to the estates of his ancestors—on the accession of Henry VII.—there was only a keeper's lodge or tower at Barden, "one of six which existed in different parts of Barden Forest. The Shepherd-lord, whose early life among the Cumberland Fells led him to seek quiet and retirement after his restoration, preferred Barden to his greater castles, and enlarged (or rather rebuilt) it so as to provide accommodation for a moderate train of attendants."
III. (See [p. 121].)
It was the time when England's Queen
Twelve years had reigned, a Sovereign dread;
·······
But now the inly-working North
Was ripe to send its thousands forth,
A potent vassalage, to fight
In Percy's and in Neville's right, etc.
The circumstances which led to the Rising in the North, and the chief incidents of that unfortunate episode in English history, are traced in detail by Mr. Froude, in the fifty-third chapter of his History of England. They are also summarized, in a lecture on [The White Doe of Rylstone], by the late Principal Shairp, in his Aspects of Poetry, from which the following passage is an extract (pp. 346-48).
"The incidents on which the [White Doe] is founded belong to the year 1569, the twelfth of Queen Elizabeth.
"It is well known that as soon as Queen Mary of Scotland was imprisoned in England, she became the centre around which gathered all the intrigues which were then on foot, not only in England but throughout Catholic Europe, to dethrone the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Abroad, the Catholic world was collecting all its strength to crush the heretical island. The bigot Pope, Pius V., with the dark intriguer, Philip II. of Spain, and the savage Duke of Alva, were ready to pour their forces on the shores of England.