of England, shelters the ashes of John Paslew, last Abbot of Whalley.
Upon the simple stone are cut a floriated cross and chalice, with the
words "_Jesu fili dei miserere mei_." Only the fewest traces, chief of
which is a beautiful gateway with groined roof, remain of this great
abbey, one of the richest in the north of England, charitable,
hospitable, with an especially warm welcome for wandering minstrels.
Its walls have been literally levelled to the ground, like those of
the rival Cistercian foundation at Sawley, a few miles above. But the
"White Church under the Leigh," believed to have been originally
established by the missionary Paulinus in the seventh century,
preserves the abbey choir stalls, whose crocketed pinnacles tower to
the top of the chancel. Their _misereres_ are full of humour and
spirit. An old woman beating her husband with a ladle is one of the
domestic scenes that tickled the merry monks of Whalley. We could have
lingered long in this ancient church for its wealth of fine oak
carving, its pew fashioned like a cage, its heraldic glass, and, in
the churchyard, the three old, old crosses with their interlacing
Runic scrolls, one of which, when a witch read it backward, would do
her the often very convenient service of making her invisible. But we
had time only for the thought of Abbot Paslew, who, refusing to bow to
the storm like the Abbot of Furness, had raised a large body of men
and gone to arms for the defence of the English monasteries against
the royal robber. He was a leader in the revolt of 1537, known as the
Pilgrimage of Grace. The Abbot of Sawley, William Trafford, old
jealousies forgotten, took the field with him. But monks were no
match for Henry VIII's generals, the rebellion was promptly crushed,
the Abbot of Sawley was hanged at Lancaster, and Abbot Paslew was
taken, with a refinement of vengeance, back to Whalley and gibbeted
there, in view of the beautiful abbey over which he had borne sway for
thirty years. The country folk had depended upon it for alms, for
medical aid, for practical counsel, for spiritual direction, and we
may well believe that, as they looked on at the execution, their
hearts were hot against the murderers of him who, when he grasped the
sword, had assumed the title of Earl of Poverty. The mound where he
suffered is well remembered to this day.
The flying hours had been crowded with impressions, tragic, uncanny,
pitiful, and we had yet, in going to the station, to run the gantlet
of a tipsy town, for it was a holiday. We had found Clitheroe
drinking, earlier in the afternoon, and now we found Whalley drunk.
One unsteady individual, wagging his head from side to side and
stretching out a pair of wavering arms, tried to bar my progress.
"Wh-where be g-goin'?" he asked.
"To the train," I answered curtly, dodging by.
He sat down on the wall and wept aloud.
"T-to the tr-train! Oh, the L-Lord bl-bless you! The g-good L-Lord
bl-bless you all the w-way!"
And the last we saw and heard of him, he was still feebly shaking his
hands after us and sobbing maudlin benedictions.
II. CHESHIRE
Drayton the poet once took it upon him to assure Cheshire that what
was true of Lancashire was true also of her:
"Thy natural sister shee--and linkt unto thee so
That Lancashire along with Cheshire still doth goe."
From that great backbone of England, the Pennine Range, both these
counties fall away to the west, but Cheshire quickly opens into the
Shropshire plain. At the northeast it has its share in the treasures
of the deep coal-field rent across by the Pennines, and here, too, are
valuable beds of copper. In this section of the county cluster the
silk towns, among them Macclesfield, the chief seat in England of
this manufacture, and Congleton, whose character we will trust has
grown more spiritual with time. For in 1617 one of the village wags
tugged a bear into the pulpit at the hour of service, and it was a
full twelvemonth before the church was reconsecrated and worship
resumed. Indeed, the Congleton folk had such a liking for bear-baiting
or bear-dancing, or whatever sport it was their town bear afforded
them, that when a few years later this poor beast died, it is told
that
"living far from Godly fear
They sold the Church Bible to buy a bear."
The old Cheshire, everywhere in evidence with its timber-and-plaster
houses, distracts the mind from this new industrial Cheshire. We
visited Macclesfield, but I forgot its factories, its ribbons and
sarcenets, silks and satins and velvets, because of the valiant Leghs.
Two of them sleep in the old Church of St. Michael, under a brass that
states in a stanza ending as abruptly as human life itself:
"Here lyeth the body of Perkin a Legh
That for King Richard the death did die,
Betray'd for righteousness;
And the bones of Sir Peers his sone,
That with King Henrie the fift did wonne
In Paris."
I have read that Sir Perkin was knighted at Crecy and Sir Peers at
Agincourt, and that they were kinsmen of Sir Uryan Legh of Adlington,
the Spanish Lady's Love.
"Will ye hear a Spanish Lady,
How she wooed an Englishman?
Garments gay and rich as may be,
Decked with jewels, she had on."
This Sir Uryan was knighted by Essex at the siege of Calais, and it
was then, apparently, that the poor Spanish lady, beautiful and of
high degree, lost her heart. The Elizabethan ballad, whose wood-cut
shows a voluminously skirted dame entreating an offish personage in a
severely starched ruff, tells us that she had fallen, by some chance
of war, into his custody.
"As his prisoner there he kept her;
In his hands her life did lie;
Cupid's bands did tie them faster
By the liking of an eye.
* * * * *
"But at last there came commandment
For to set all ladies free,
With their jewels still adorned,
None to do them injury."
But freedom was no boon to her.
"Gallant Captain, take some pity
On a woman in distress;
Leave me not within this city
For to die in heaviness."
In vain he urges that he is the enemy of her country.
"Blessed be the time and season
That you came on Spanish ground;
If you may our foes be termed,
Gentle foes we have you found."
He suggests that she would have no difficulty in getting a Spanish
husband, but she replies that Spaniards are "fraught with jealousy."
"Still to serve thee day and night
My mind is prest;
The wife of every Englishman
Is counted blest."
He objects that it is not the custom of English soldiers to be
attended by women.
"I will quickly change myself,
If it be so,
And like a page will follow thee
Where e'er thou go."
But still he makes excuse:
"I have neither gold nor silver
To maintain thee in this case,
And to travel is great charges,
As you know, in every place."
She puts her fortune at his disposal, but he has hit upon a new
deterrent:
"On the seas are many dangers,
Many storms do there arise,
Which will be to ladies dreadful
And force tears from watry eyes."
She implies that she would gladly die, even of seasickness, for his
sake, and at that the truth breaks forth:
"Courteous lady, leave this folly;
Here comes all that breeds this strife:--
I in England have already
A sweet woman to my wife.
"I will not falsify my vow
For gold nor gain,
Nor yet for all the fairest dames
That live in Spain."
Her reply, with its high Spanish breeding, puts his blunt English
manners to shame:
"Oh how happy is that woman
That enjoys so true a friend.
Many happy days God lend her!
Of my suit I'll make an end.
* * * * *
"Commend me to that gallant lady;
Bear to her this chain of gold;
With these bracelets for a token;
Grieving that I was so bold.
* * * * *
"I will spend my days in prayer,
Love and all her laws defy;
In a nunnery I will shroud me,
Far from any company.
"But e'er my prayer have an end,
Be sure of this,--
To pray for thee and for thy Love
I will not miss.
* * * * *
"Joy and true prosperity
Remain with thee!"
"The like fall unto thy share,
Most fair lady!"
This ballad, which Shakespeare might have bought for a penny "at the
Looking-glass on London bridge" and sung to the tune of "Flying Fame,"
is still a favourite throughout Cheshire.
But we are driving from Macclesfield up into the Cheshire
highlands,--velvety hills, green to the top, all smoothed off as trim
as sofa-cushions and adorned with ruffles of foliage. Nature is a neat
housekeeper even here in the wildest corner of Cheshire. What was
once savage forest is now tranquil grazing-ground, and the walls that
cross the slopes and summits, dividing the sward into separate
cattle-ranges, run in tidy parallels. But most of the county is
flat,--so flat that it all can be viewed from Alderly Edge, a cliff
six hundred and fifty feet high, a little to the west of Macclesfield.
Along the Mersey, the Lancastrian boundary, rise the clustered
chimneys of Cheshire's cotton towns. Yet cotton is not the only
industry of this northern strip. The neighbourhood of Manchester makes
market-gardening profitable; potatoes and onions flourish amain; and
Altrincham, a pleasant little place where many of the Manchester
mill-owners reside, proudly contributes to their felicity its famous
specialty of the "green-top carrot."
I suppose these cotton-lords only smile disdainfully at the tales of
the old wizard who keeps nine hundred and ninety-nine armed steeds in
the deep caverns of Alderly Edge, waiting for war. What is his
wizardry to theirs! But I wonder if any of them are earning a sweeter
epitaph than the one which may be read in Alderly Church to a rector,
Edward Shipton, M.A.,--it might grieve his gentle ghost, should we
omit those letters,--who died in 1630:
"Here lies below an aged sheep-heard clad in heavy clay,
Those stubborne weedes which come not of unto the judgment day.
Whilom hee led and fed with welcome paine his careful sheepe,
He did not feare the mountaines' highest tops, nor vallies deep,
That he might save from hurte his fearful flocks, which were his care.
To make them strong he lost his strengthe, and fasted for their fare.
How they might feed, and grow, and prosper, he did daily tell,
Then having shew'd them how to feed, he bade them all farewell."
Good men have come out of Cheshire. In the Rectory House of Alderly
was born Dean Stanley. Bishop Heber is a Cheshire worthy, as are the
old chroniclers, Higden and Holinshead. Even the phraseology of
Cheshire wills I have fancied peculiarly devout, as, for instance,
Matthew Legh's, in 1512:
"_Imprimis_, I bequeath my sole to almightie god and to his
blessed moder seynt Mary, and to all the selestiall company
in heaven, and my bodi to be buried in the Chappell of Seynt
Anne within the parish Church of Handley or there where it
shall please almightie god to call for me at his pleasure."
The men of Cheshire have on occasion, and conspicuously during the
Civil War, approved themselves for valour. When the royalist garrison
of Beeston Castle, the "other hill" of this pancake county, was at
last forced to accept terms from the Roundhead troops, there was
"neither meat nor drink found in the Castle, but only a piece of a
turkey pie, two biscuits, and a live pea-cock and pea-hen."
Yet Cheshire is famed rather for the virtues of peace,--for thrift,
civility, and neighbourly kindness. An early-seventeenth-century
"Treatise on Cheshire" says: "The people of the country are of a
nature very gentle and courteous, ready to help and further one
another; and that is to be seen chiefly in the harvest time, how
careful are they of one another." A few years later, in 1616, a native
of the county wrote of it not only as producing "the best cheese of
all Europe," but as blessed with women "very friendly and loving,
painful in labour, and in all other kind of housewifery expert."
The accepted chronicler of Cheshire womanhood, however, is Mrs.
Gaskell. As we lingered along the pleasant streets of Knutsford--her
Cranford--and went in and out of the quiet shops, we blessed her
memory for having so delectably distilled the lavender essences of
that sweet, old-fashioned village life. She had known it and loved it
all the way from her motherless babyhood, and she wrote of it with a
tender humour that has endeared it to thousands. Our first Knutsford
pilgrimage was to her grave beside the old Unitarian chapel, for both
her father and her husband were clergymen of that faith. We had seen
in Manchester--her Drumble--the chapel where Mr. Gaskell ministered,
and had read her "Mary Barton," that sympathetic presentation of the
life of Lancashire mill-hands which awoke the anger and perhaps the
consciences of the manufacturers. She served the poor of Manchester
not with her pen alone, but when our war brought in its train the
cotton famine of 1862-63, she came effectively to their relief by
organizing sewing-rooms and other means of employment for women.
Husband and wife, fulfilled of good works, now rest together in that
sloping little churchyard which we trod with reverent feet.
It must be confessed that Knutsford is becoming villaized. It has
even suffered the erection, in memory of Mrs. Gaskell, of an ornate
Italian tower, which Deborah certainly would not have approved. It was
not May-day, so we could not witness the Knutsford revival of the
May-queen court, and we looked in vain for the Knutsford wedding sand.
On those very rare occasions when a bridegroom can be found, the kith
and kin of the happy pair make a welcoming path for Hymen by trickling
coloured sands through a funnel so as to form a pavement decoration of
hearts, doves, true-love knots, and the like, each artist in front of
his own house. But no minor disappointments could break the Cranford
spell, which still held us as we drove out into the surrounding
country. How sunny and serene! With what awe we passed the timbered
mansions of the county families! What green hedgerows! What golden
harvest-fields! What pink roses clambering to the cottage-thatch! What
gardens, and what pastures on pastures, grazed over by sleek kine that
called to mind Miss Matty's whimsical old lover and his "six and
twenty cows, named after the different letters of the alphabet."
Here in central Cheshire we ought not to have been intent on scenery,
but on salt, for of this, as of silk, our smiling county has almost a
monopoly. And only too soon the blue day was darkened by the smoke of
Northwich, the principal seat of the salt trade and quite the dirtiest
town in the county. The valley of the Weaver, the river that crosses
Cheshire about midway between its northern boundary, the Mersey, and
its southern, the Dee, has the richest salt-mines and brine-springs of
England. The salt towns, whose chimneys belch blackness at intervals
along the course of the stream, are seen at their best, or worst, in
Northwich, though Nantwich, an ancient centre of this industry, has
charming traditions of the village hymn that used to be sung about the
flower-crowned pits, especially the "Old Brine," on Ascension Day, in
thanksgiving for the salt. We tried to take due note of railways and
canals, docks and foundries, and the queer unevenness of the soil
caused by the mining and the pumping up of brine,--such an uncertain
site that the houses, though bolted, screwed, and buttressed,
continually sag and sink. The mines themselves are on the outskirts of
the town, and we looked at the ugly sheds and scaffoldings above
ground, and did our best to imagine the strange white galleries and
gleaming pillars below. There was no time to go down because it had
taken our leisurely Knutsford coachman till ten o'clock to get his
"bit of breakfast." Dear Miss Matty would have been gentle with him,
and so we strove not to glower at his unbending back, but to gather in
what we could, as he drove us to the train, of the beauties by the
way.
We left the salt to the care of the Weaver, which was duly bearing it
on, white blocks, ruddy lumps, rock-salt and table-salt, to Runcorn
and to Liverpool. We put the brine-pits out of mind, and enjoyed the
lovely fresh-water meres, social resorts of the most amiable of ducks
and the most dignified of geese, which dot the Cheshire landscape. We
had visited Rostherne Mere on our way out, and caught a glint from the
fallen church-bell which a Mermaid rings over those dim waters every
Easter dawn. We paused at Lower Peover for a glimpse of its
black-and-white timbered church, deeply impressive and almost unique
as an architectural survival. Among its curiosities we saw a chest
hollowed out of solid oak with an inscription to the effect that any
girl who can raise the lid with one arm is strong enough to be a
Cheshire farmer's wife. Sturdy arms they needs must have, these
Cheshire women, for the valley of the Weaver, like the more southerly
Vale of Dee, is largely given up to dairy farms and to the production
of cheeses. A popular song betrays the county pride:
"A Cheshire man went o'er to Spain
To trade in merchandise,
And when arrived across the main
A Spaniard there he spies.
"'Thou Cheshire man,' quoth he, 'look here,--
These fruits and spices fine.
Our country yields these twice a year;
Thou hast not such in thine.'
"The Cheshire man soon sought the hold,
Then brought a Cheshire cheese.
'You Spanish dog, look here!' said he.
'You have not such as these.'
"'Your land produces twice a year
Spices and fruits, you say,
But such as in my hand I bear.
Our land yields twice a day.'"
But the best songs of Cheshire go to the music of the river Dee. We
have all had our moments of envying its heart-free Miller.
"There was a jolly Miller once
Lived on the river Dee;
He worked and sang from morn till night,
No lark more blithe than he;
And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be:
_I care for nobody, no, not I,
And nobody cares for me_."
Kingsley's tragic lyric of
"Mary, go and call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee,"
reports too truly the perils of that wide estuary where Lycidas was
lost. On the corresponding estuary of the Mersey stands Birkenhead,
the bustling modern port of Cheshire; but it was at Chester that
Milton's college mate had embarked for another haven than the one he
reached.
Chester itself is to many an American tourist the old-world city first
seen and best remembered. Liverpool and Birkenhead are of to-day, but
Chester, walled, turreted, with its arched gateways, its
timber-and-plaster houses, its gables and lattices, its quaint Rows,
its cathedral, is the mediæval made actual. The city abounds in
memories of Romans, Britons, Saxons, of King Alfred who drove out the
Danes, of King Edgar who, "toucht with imperious affection of glory,"
compelled six subject kings to row him up the Dee to St. John's
Church, of King Charles who stood with the Mayor on the leads of the
wall-tower now called by his name and beheld the defeat of the royal
army on Rowton Moor. As we walked around the walls,--where, as
everywhere in the county, the camera sought in vain for a Cheshire
cat,--we talked of the brave old city's "strange, eventful history,"
but if it had been in the power of a wish to recall any one hour of
all its past, I would have chosen mine out of some long-faded
Whitsuntide, that I might see a Miracle pageant in its mediæval
sincerity,--the tanners playing the tragedy of Lucifer's fall,
perhaps, or the water-carriers the comedy of Noah's flood.
III. STAFFORDSHIRE
This is the Black Country _par excellence_,--a county whose heraldic
blazon should be the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by
night. It belongs to the central plain of England, save on the
northeast, where the lower end of the Pennine chain breaks into
picturesque highlands. Its gently undulating reaches are still largely
given over to agriculture, but the bulk of its population, the most of
its energy and wealth, are concentrated in the manufacturing towns
that so thickly stud the surface over its two coal-fields. The
northern is the last of that long line of coal-measures running down
from Lancashire; the southern is much larger, though not so workable,
and extends across all South Staffordshire. Both north and south, iron
in rich quantities is found with the coal, so that for many years
Staffordshire controlled the iron trade of the world. Of late, South
Wales and other regions are successfully disputing its supremacy.
We had, in previous visits to England, crossed Staffordshire several
times by train, and memory retained an unattractive impression of
netted railways, forests of factory chimneys, and grimy miners
sweethearting with rough pitgirls under smoke and cinders. If we must
enter it now, the occasion seemed propitious for a trial of the
automobile,--a mode of conveyance which we had deemed too sacrilegious
for the Border and the Lake Country.
Toward ten o'clock on an August morning--for the chauffeur, like our
Cheshire coachman, could not be hurried over his "bit of
breakfast"--we tucked ourselves and a confiding Shrewsbury lady into a
snug motor-car, and away we sped through northeastern Shropshire
across the county line. In a gasp or two the name Eccleshall glimmered
through the dust that flew against our goggles. This little town has
one of the finest churches in the county, but the frenzy of speed was
on us, and we tore by. Suddenly we came upon the Trent, winding along,
at what struck us as a contemptibly sluggish pace, down Staffordshire
on its circuitous route to the Humber. We tooted our horn and honked
up its western side to the Potteries. Here the machine suffered an
attack of cramps, and while it was groaning and running around in a
circle and pawing the air, we had our first opportunity to look about
us.
The region known as the Potteries, the chief seat of the earthenware
manufactures of England, consists of a strip of densely populated land
in this upper basin of the Trent, a strip some ten miles long by two
miles broad, whose serried towns and villages give the aspect of one
continuous street. Within this narrow district are over three hundred
potteries, whose employees number nearly forty thousand, apart from the
accessory industries of clay-grinding, bone-grinding, flint-grinding,
and the like. It draws on its own beds of coal and iron, but the
china-clay comes from Cornwall by way of Runcorn and the Grand Trunk
Canal, while for flints it depends on the south coast of England and on
France. Genius here is named Josiah Wedgwood. This inventor of fine
porcelains, whose "Queen's ware" gained him the title of "Queen's
Potter," was born in 1759 at Burslem, which had been making brown
butter-pots as far back as the days of Charles I. When Burslem grew too
small for his enterprise, Wedgwood established the pottery village of
Etruria, to which the automobile passionately refused to take us. It
dashed us into Newcastle-under-Lyme, where we did not particularly want
to go, and rushed barking by Stoke-under-Trent, the capital of the
Potteries and also--though we had not breath to mention it--the
birthplace of Dinah Mulock Craik. In the last town of the line,
Longtown, our machine fairly balked, and the chauffeur with dignity
retired under it. A crowd of keen-faced men and children gathered about
us, while we ungoggled to observe the endless ranks of house-doors
opening into baby-peopled passages,--and, looming through the murky
air, the bulging ovens of the china factories. At last our monster
snorted on again, wiggling up the hill sideways with a grace peculiar
to itself and exciting vain hopes of a wreck in the hearts of our
attendant urchins. It must have been the Potteries that disagreed with
it, for no sooner were their files of chimneys left behind than it set
off at a mad pace for Uttoxeter, on whose outskirts we "alighted," like
Royalty, for a wayside luncheon of sandwiches, ale, and dust.
[Illustration: IN THE POTTERIES--A CHILD-MOTHER]
Uttoxeter is no longer the idle little town that Hawthorne found it,
when he made pilgrimage thither in honour of Dr. Johnson's penance,
for the good Doctor, heart-troubled for fifty years because in boyhood
he once refused to serve in his father's stead at the market
bookstall, had doomed himself to stand, the whole day long, in the
staring market-place, wind and rain beating against his bared grey
head, "a central image of Memory and Remorse." Lichfield, Dr.
Johnson's native city, commemorates this characteristic act by a
bas-relief on the pedestal of the statue standing opposite the
three-pillared house where the greatest of her sons was born.