pricked us for delay, was that to Wigmore, the once impregnable hold
of the Mortimers. As we left Ludlow, we looked back on the looming
grey mass of its own still stupendous castle and were hardly prepared
to find the rival fortress in such utter desolation of decay. Standing
on its sentry height, girdled with its massive walls, it was once a
menace to the English throne. Now such towers as yet remain are rent
and ragged. Only a curtain of ivy guards the inner gate. Trees have
sprung from the dirt-choked embrasures, and purple thistles grow rank
in the empty courts. Yet for all the rich cloaking of vine and
wall-flower, all the carpeting of moss and blossom, Time has not made
peace with this grim ruin. Something sullen and defiant still breathes
from those gigantic fragments. Dark openings in the ground give
glimpses of stone passages and yawning dungeons that must render the
place a paradise for boys. Thence we drove to Wigmore Abbey where the
Mortimers lodged the priestly intercessors who had no light task to
pray away the sins of that proud and ruthless race. We found a farm
resounding with the baaing of sheep and mooing of cows instead of with
Latin chants. Wrought into the texture of the grange itself, a
weather-stained house of stone, with, as we saw it, a row of
decorative pigeons perched on the roof-tree, are remnants of the old
carvings and window traceries. At the rear, a long, low building of
the Shropshire black-and-white, with a great bundle of straw bulging
from an upper window, retains a fine arched gateway. Pleached fruit
trees, climbing roses, and purple clematis do their best to console
the scene for its lost pieties. On the homeward route, by way of
yellow wheat fields, waving woods, and running water, we had a
wonderful view of the Welsh mountains bathed in the opalescent hues of
sunset, a divine lustre through which rang sweetly the vespers of the
thrush, and could hardly persuade ourselves that it was from those
glorified heights the wave of war used to rush down to break in blood
upon the Marches.
[Illustration: WIGMORE ABBEY--GATE HOUSE AND BARN]
Yet even the little round county of Herefordshire, with its soft green
levels, its apple orchards and cider-presses, its hop gardens, and
those broad fields where graze its famous sheep and cattle, has tragic
tales to tell. Wigmore Castle, indeed, is over the Hereford line. A
few miles to the northwest are the ruins of Brampton-Bryan Castle,
which testifies to the latest war-anguish of these western shires, the
struggle to the death between Charles I and Parliament. Here Lady
Harley was besieged for over a month by her royalist neighbour,
Colonel Lingen, who--ill-done for a cavalier--came up against her, in
the absence of her husband and son, with a force of six hundred men.
Cheery, gallant, resourceful while the need lasted, Lady Harley gave
way when the baffled enemy had withdrawn, and wrote her son that if
the castle must undergo another siege, she was sure that God would
spare her the seeing it. And having so written, she died the following
day. In the spring the royalists returned with cannon and battered
down the walls, burning and plundering. At the end of the long strife,
Parliament awarded Sir Robert Harley, as some partial recompense for
his sorrows and losses, the Lingen lands, but Edward Harley, the son
of that brave, tender-hearted mother, called at once on Lady Lingen
and presented her with the title-deeds. It may be doubted if all the
Herefordshire annals record a nobler victory.
The Wars of the Roses were waged with peculiar ferocity in this
section of England. The great battle of Mortimer's Cross, which gave
Edward IV his crown, was fought a little to the west of Leominster.
Here old Owen Tudor, who had wedded Henry V's French Kate, daughter
and widow of kings,--he whose grandson, Henry VII, brought in the
Tudor line of English sovereigns, was taken prisoner. He was executed,
with all the other prisoners of rank, in Hereford market-place, and
his head was "set upon the highest grice of the market cross and a mad
woman kemped his hair and washed away the blood from his face, and she
got candles and set about him burning, more than one hundred. This
Owen Tudor was father unto the Earl of Pembroke, and had wedded Queen
Katherine, King Henry VI's mother, weening and trusting always that he
should not be beheaded till he saw the axe and block, and when he was
in his doublet he trusted on pardon and grace till the collar of his
red velvet doublet was ripped off. Then he said, 'That head shall lie
on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Katherine's lap,' and put
his heart and mind wholly unto God, and full meekly took his
death."[8]
Earlier civil conflicts, that between Edward II and his barons, and
that holier war of liberty, won though lost, by Simon de Montfort
against his king and prince, have left graphic memories in
Herefordshire. But even these strifes seem recent beside the
battle-marks of Offa the Saxon, who built an earthen dyke, still in
fairly good preservation, from the Severn to the Wye, to keep the
Welshmen back; and beside those thick-set British camps and Roman
camps that testify to the stubborn stand of Caractacus and his Silures
against the all-conquering legions.
We were on a peaceful pilgrimage and could well dispense with visiting
Coxwall Knoll, close above Brampton-Bryan, where Caractacus met his
crushing defeat, and Sutton Walla, some five miles to the north of
Hereford, where Offa, King of the Mercians, betrayed to assassination
his guest, King Ethelbert of the East Angles; but we ought to have
sought out Holm Lacy, for the sake of the Sir Scudamour of Spenser's
"Faery Queene," and to have visited Hope End, near Ledbury, in loving
homage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And so we might, had it not been
for the innate depravity of man as exemplified in the dourest driver
that ever handled reins. His one aim throughout that trip was not to
go anywhere we wished. He would sometimes seem to hesitate at a
parting of the ways, but it was only to find out which road was our
desire, when as deaf and dumb to all our protests as if he knew only
the Silurian tongue, as impervious to parasol pokes as if he were
cased in Roman mail, he would take the other. The only comfort that
came to our exasperated souls was the reflection that at sundown we
could dismiss Sir Stiffback with his ill-earned shillings and never
see his iron phiz again, whereas the unfortunate women of his
household, the possible wife, sister, daughter, would have to put up
with the unflinching obduracy of that cross-grained disposition until
he went the way of Roger de Mortimer. But not even this cromlech of a
coachman, though with the worst intentions, could prevent our enjoying
the pastoral charm of the quiet land through which we drove, for this
county, as Fuller wrote, "doth share as deep as any in the alphabet of
our English commodities, though exceeding in the W for wood, wheat,
wool, and water." As for wood, we saw in Harewood Park, by which our
Clod of Wayward Marl inadvertently drove us, chestnuts and beeches
whose height and girth would do credit to California; in point of
wheat the county is said to be so fertile that, for all the wealth of
cattle, the people have not time to make their own butter and cheese;
the wool was reckoned in Fuller's time the finest of all England; and
the salmon-loved Wye, which rises, like the Severn, on the huge
Plinlymmon mountain, flows with many picturesque turns and "crankling
winds" across the county, receiving the Lug, on which Leominster is
situate, and further down, the Monnow, which forms the Monmouth
boundary.
But if we failed to find the white-rose bower of Mrs. Browning's
childhood, and her classic
"garden-ground,
With the laurel on the mound,
And the pear-tree oversweeping
A side-shadow of green air."
--does the turf remember her Hector with "brazen helm of daffodilies"
and "a sword of flashing lilies?"--we were on poetic territory in the
streets of Hereford. It was here, as Mr. Dobell's happy discovery has
shown, that a lyrist, Thomas Traherne, worthy of the fellowship of
Herbert and of Vaughan passed his early years, a shoemaker's son,
like Marlowe in another cathedral city, Canterbury. If we could have
seen Hereford as this humble little lad saw it, it would have been a
celestial vision, for truly he said: "Certainly Adam in Paradise had
not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I
was a child." His own description of this radiant star we so blindly
inhabit as it first dazzled his innocent senses is too exquisite to be
passed over:
"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be
reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from
everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street
were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of
the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one
of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and
unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with
ecstacy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The
Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged
seem! Immortal Cherubim! And young men, glittering and
sparkling angels; and maids, strange seraphic pieces of life
and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving
jewels: I knew not that they were born or should die. But all
things abided eternally as they were in their proper places.
Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something
infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my
expectation and moved my desire. The City seemed to stand in
Eden or to be built in Heaven."
If this were the Hereford of the first half of the seventeenth
century, the city has dimmed a little since, yet we found it a
pleasant town enough, with the Wye murmuring beside it, and its
ancient cathedral of heroic history reposing in its midst. Garrick was
born in Hereford, and poor Nell Gwynne, and in the north transept of
the cathedral is a brass to John Philips, who endeared himself to all
the county by his poem on "Cyder." We went to see the Preaching Cross
that marks the site of a monastery of the Black Friars, neighboured
now by the Red Cross Hospital for old soldiers and servants. One of
these beneficiaries, in the prescribed "fustian suit of ginger
colour," eagerly showed us about and was sorely grieved that we could
not wait to hear his rambling chronicle to the end. The rest of our
time in Hereford outside our hostelry--the Green Dragon, most amiable
of monsters--we spent in the cathedral, an old acquaintance, but so
passing rich in beauties and in curiosities that at the end of our
swift survey we were hardly more satisfied than at the beginning. We
will come back to it some time--to the grave old church that has grown
with the centuries and, unabashed, mingles the styles of various
periods, the church in which Stephen was crowned and Ethelbert buried;
to the croziered bishops in their niches, the two great,
thirteenth-century bishops among them, D'Aquablanca, the worst of
saints with the loveliest of tombs, and Cantilupe, so godly that he
never allowed his sister to kiss him, of such healing virtues that
even sick falcons were cured at his shrine; to the Knights Templars,
mail-clad, treading down fell beasts; to the wimpled dames with
praying hands, shadowed by angel-wings; to the Chapter Library with
its chained tomes; and to that mediæval _Mappa Mundi_ (about 1313)
showing the earth with its encircling ocean, Eden and Paradise above,
and such unwonted geographical features sprinkled about as the
Phoenix, Lot's Wife, and the Burial Place of Moses.
Our surly coachman deposited us at Ross, the little border town with
houses sloping from the hilltop to the Wye, while behind and above the
mall rises a tall grey spire. Here our faith in human nature was
promptly restored by that contemplation of the virtues of The Man of
Ross which even the public-house signboards forced upon us. This John
Kyrle so lauded by Pope, was a cheery old bachelor of modest income,
the most of which he expended for the town in works of practical
benevolence, planting elms, laying out walks, placing fountains, and
caring for the poor.
"Whose cause-way parts the vale with shady rows?
Whose seats the weary traveler repose?
Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?
'The Man of Ross,' each lisping babe replies."
But the lisping babes are wrong as to this last particular, for Kyrle
did not build the spire, although he gave the church its gallery and
pulpit.
At Ross we ought to have taken to the water, for the scenery of the
Lower Wye, with its abrupt cliffs, rich woods, and smiling meadows, is
one of the prides of England, but we had run so far behind our dates,
by the dear fault of Shropshire, that we went on by train. The rail,
however, follows the river, and we had--or thought we had--swift
glimpses of the romantic ruins of Wilton Castle, one of the old
Border keeps, and of Goodrich castle, where Wordsworth met the little
maid of "We are Seven." This valley of the Wye, which was to the poet
Gray the delight of his eyes and "the very seat of pleasure," yields
striking effects in wooded crag and gorge at Symond's Yat, but we
enjoyed hardly less the tranquil reaches of green pasture, where the
afternoon sunshine still lay so warm that little groups of sheep were
cuddled at the foot of every tree. The ancient town of Monmouth, in
its nest of hills, reminded us not merely of its royal native, Henry
V,
--"Ay, he was born at Monmouth,
Captain Gower"--
but of that twelfth-century romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose
"History of the Britons," with its fluent account of the doings of
hitherto unheard-of kings, especially Arthur the Giant Killer and his
false queen Guanhumara, so scandalised his contemporaries that they
did not scruple to call him a "shameless and impudent liar" and to
report that legions of devils had been seen hovering over his
manuscript. About seven miles to the southwest of Monmouth is Raglan
Castle, where Charles I took refuge after Naseby. Its gallant lord,
the Marquis of Worcester, then in his eighty-fourth year, stood a
siege of ten weeks, not capitulating until the loyal little garrison,
fast diminishing, was reduced to such extremities that the horses ate
their halters for want of forage. I had visited, some fifteen years
before, those war-scarred towers, tapestried with marvellous masses of
ivy, and from the windows of the Royal Apartments had looked out on
that lovely western view in which the harassed Stuart took solace.
Lord Herbert, son of the staunch old royalist, invented and
constructed a machine, the terror of the peasantry, which has a good
claim to be counted the first steam-engine. The so-called Yellow Tower
was the scene of his wizard craft. The Great Hall now lies open to
wind and weather, and but one wall of the chapel stands, its two stone
effigies peeping out from their ivy-curtained niches.
We quitted the train at Tintern, where our stay was all too short,
notwithstanding the memory of tranquil weeks spent there in a previous
summer. The ruins of Tintern Abbey are of a peculiarly austere and
noble beauty. Its foundation dates back to 1131, only three years
after the coming of the Cistercians into England. It was the third of
their English houses, which came to number nearly two hundred. It
stood in its full grace, the Gothic style just leaning toward the
Decorated, when the Dissolution struck its uses from it and left it to
gradual decay. Roofed by the blue skies of a summer noon, with wooded
hills looking in through the unglazed mullions of the windows, or in
the glory of the moonlight, the silver lustre flooding empty nave and
silent cloisters, and illuming with its searching rays rare bits of
carven foliage, Tintern wears perhaps a purer loveliness in its
desolation than ever before. Our farewell visit was paid in an early
morning hour. In that freshness of the day, those slender pillars and
arches delicately wrought presented an aspect more than ever grave and
melancholy. There is nothing of the grotesque here, and comparatively
little of ornamental detail to distract the mind from the impression
of the whole. The rooks that peered over from their lofty perch above
the great east window, whose remaining traceries were etched in shadow
on the turf, and the bright-eyed little red-breasts that hopped
fearlessly about did not, it is true, observe the Cistercian rule of
silence; but the shining wings of doves fluttering from one grey wall
to another might well have been the embodied prayers of those White
Monks who so often chanted matins at the long-since fallen altars.
We went from the Abbey to the train. Still the railroad followed the
winding river. A fleeting sight of the towering Wyndcliff reminded me
of a by-gone afternoon when, unexpectedly bringing up on a ramble at
Moss Cottage, I undertook, quite too late for prudence, a solitary
ascent of this inviting steep. From the summit I looked out over
mellow-tinted autumnal woods to the looping ribbon of the Wye, the
white cliffs known as the Twelve Apostles rising beyond, and still
beyond the sail-bearing Severn, with villages and church-towers
discernible in the far distance and, best of all, the rose of sunset
glowing upon the face of the Black Mountains. It was a sublime vision,
but when the western flush had faded out and I must needs descend by
that ever-darkening path which took its zigzag course among thick yews
and down slippery slabs of slate, I came to the conclusion it was not
written that my neck should be broken on this side of the Atlantic.
We had only an hour at Chepstow, but the picturesque river-town was
not new to us, and the hour sufficed to revive our memories of its
rock-based old castle overhanging the Wye, the castle where Jeremy
Taylor was once imprisoned, and its Norman church with deeply recessed
doorway. At Chepstow we took train for Newport, crossing the strip of
garden-land that lies between the Wye, the Gloucestershire boundary,
and its almost parallel stream, the Usk. West Monmouth is Black
Country, forming a part of the South Wales coal-field, and we were not
surprised to find Newport a busy harbour, grimy with its exports of
coal and iron. We heard a strange tongue spoken all about us and
realised that Monmouthshire, nominally English since the time of Henry
VIII, is still largely Welsh in manners and in character. The old
Newport is much obscured by the new. The castle, where Simon de
Montfort took refuge, is in good part hidden behind a flourishing
brewery, but the Church of St. Woollos, built high upon Stow Hill,
still dominates the scene. This church has a history even older than
its fine Norman architecture, for it is told that Harold once
plundered the town, desecrating the original sanctuary and breaking
open the cheeses, which he found filled with blood. Then he was aghast
and repented, but a month later, according to the monastic record,
"for that wickedness and other crimes" he fell at Hastings.
Our goal was Caerleon, three miles up the Usk, a quiet little village
that was once the capital of South Wales, once the Isca Silurum of the
Romans, and once, in the misty realm of romance, that Caerleon-upon-Usk
where Arthur was crowned and where the ninth of his twelve great
battles was fought. Tennyson's Lancelot relates to spellbound listeners
in the Castle of Astolat how
"at Caerleon had he helped his lord,
When the strong neighings of the wild White Horse
Set every gilded parapet shuddering."
But the "Mabinogion," that treasury of fanciful old Welsh tales,
gives, by way of contrast, a naïve and somewhat gaudy picture of the
king enjoying his repose:
"King Arthur was at Caerlleon upon Usk; and one day he sat in
his chamber; and with him were Owain the son of Urien, and
Kynon the son of Clydno, and Kai the son of Kyner; and
Gwenhwyar and her hand-maidens at needlework by the
window.... In the center of the chamber, King Arthur sat upon
a seat of green rushes, over which was spread a covering of
flame-coloured satin; and a cushion of red satin was under
his elbow.... And the King went to sleep."
If the ghosts of the Second Augustan Legion could return for an hour
to this their frontier station, deep in the British wilds, they would
find ranged and labelled in a neat museum shards of their pottery,
broken votive tablets, fragments of sculptured figures, among them a
Medusa whose stony stare might seem to have taken effect, urns whose
ashes were long since scattered, bits of mosaic pavement, coins,
lamps, needles, hairpins, waifs and strays of their "unconsidered
trifles." But the fainter wraith of King Arthur would discover no more
than a weedy mound and hollow in a ragged field, where autumnal
dandelions keep the only glints of his golden memory. We met there an
old labourer stooping beneath the heavy sack upon his shoulder. He
told us that the mound was Arthur's Round Table, but as for the
hollow--apparently the site of a Roman open amphitheatre--he could
only shake his grey head and confide: "They do say as was a grand
palace there long ago and one day it all sunk under,--sunk way down
into the ground."
The Usk, which has reflected such lost splendours, empties into the
broad estuary of the Severn a little lower down than the Wye which
rejoins the greater river at Chepstow. The Severn, which has its
rising not two miles from the Wye in the Welsh mountains, makes a
wider sweep to the east, crossing Shropshire, Worcester, and
Gloucester. Worcester, indeed, mainly consists of the Middle Severn
valley, with ranges of low hills on either side. This fertile basin
abounds, like the Hereford vale of the Wye, in apple-orchards and
pear-orchards, hop-gardens and wheat-fields, but the enterprising
little shire has developed, too, a number of manufacturing industries.
On the north it runs up into the Black Country of Staffordshire;
Dudley, Stourbridge, and Oldbury are murky with the smoke and smudge
of factory chimneys. Glass is a specialty of Stourbridge, carpets of
Kidderminster, salt of Droitwich, and needles and fishhooks of
Redditch. Nail-making used to be the bread and beer of ten thousand
cottages at the foot of the Clent and Lickey Hills.
But intermingled with its thriving crafts and trades is another wealth
of historic associations and natural beauties. In the dense woods
which once covered the county, hostile bands have dodged or sought one
another from time immemorial, notably during the Civil Wars of Simon
de Montfort and of the Roses. Even so late as the Parliamentary War,
there remained forest enough to do good service to a fugitive. It was
in an oak of Boscobel Wood, on the Salop border, that after the
disastrous battle of Worcester
"the younger Charles abode
Till all the paths were dim,
And far below the Roundhead rode
And hummed a surly hymn."
The points of specific literary interest are not many. Little St.
Kenelm underwent his martyrdom by the Clent Hills; Richard Baxter
ministered for twenty-two years to a rough flock in Kidderminster;
Samuel Butler was born in Strensham-on-the-Avon; Samuel Johnson went
to school in Stourbridge; and the Leasowes, near by, was the home of
Shenstone, who made it one of the most attractive estates in England.
But the Malvern Hills keep a great, dim memory, that of the
fourteenth-century visionary associated with the West Midland allegory
of "Piers Plowman." We are not sure of his name, though we speak of
him as Langland; the rugged, vigorous old poem in its three versions
may yet be proved to be of composite rather than single authorship; we
ourselves, though of Long Will's discipleship, had not faith enough in
the personal tradition to visit the reputed birthplace at Cleobury
Mortimer in Shropshire; but on those breezy slopes still seems to
linger the wistful presence of a gaunt, "forwandred" clerk who
"In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne,
On a May mornynge on Malverne hulles"
dreamed the Easter dream, still unfulfilled on earth, of human
brotherhood.
These gracious heights, standing
"Close as brother leans to brother,
When they press beneath the eyes
Of some father praying blessings
From the gifts of Paradise,"