RICHMOND
For the purposes of this book we may consider Richmond as the gateway of
the dale country. There are other gates and approaches, some of which
may have advocates who claim their superiority over Richmond as
starting-places for an exploration of this description, but for my part,
I can find no spot on any side of the mountainous region so entirely
satisfactory. If we were to commence at Bedale or Leyburn, there is no
exact point where the open country ceases and the dale begins; but here
at Richmond there is not the very smallest doubt, for on reaching the
foot of the mass of rock dominated by the castle and the town, Swaledale
commences in the form of a narrow ravine, and from that point westwards
the valley never ceases to be shut in by steep sides, which become
narrower and grander with every mile.
The railway that keeps Richmond in touch with the world does its work in
a most inoffensive manner, and by running to the bottom of the hill on
which the town stands, and by there stopping short, we seem to have a
strong hint that we have been brought to the edge of a new element in
which railways have no rights whatever. This is as it should be, and we
can congratulate the North-Eastern Company for its discretion and its
sense of fitness. Even the station is built of solid stonework, with a
strong flavour of medievalism in its design, and its attractiveness is
enhanced by the complete absence of other modern buildings. We are thus
welcomed to the charms of Richmond at once. The rich sloping meadows by
the river, crowned with dense woodlands, surround us and form a
beautiful setting of green for the town, which has come down from the
fantastic days of the Norman Conquest without any drastic or unseemly
changes, and thus has still the compactness and the romantic outline of
feudal times.
By some means Richmond avoided the manufactories that have entirely
altered the character of such places as Skipton and Durham, but if we
wish to see what might have happened or what may still befall this town,
it is only necessary for us to go a little way above the new bridge,
and there, beneath the castle heights, see one of the most conspicuously
and unnecessarily ugly gasworks that was ever dumped upon a fair scene.
I suppose a day will arrive when the Mayor and Corporation will lay
their heads together with the object of devising a plan for the removal
of these dismal buildings to some site where they will be less
offensive, but until that day they will continue to mar the charms of a
town whose situation is almost unequalled in this island.
From whatever side you approach it, Richmond has always some fine
combination of towers overlooking a confusion of old red roofs and of
rocky heights crowned with ivy-mantled walls, all set in the most
sumptuous surroundings of silvery river and wooded hills, such as the
artists of the age of steel-engraving loved to depict. Every one of
these views has in it one dominating feature in the magnificent Norman
keep of the castle. It overlooks church towers and everything else with
precisely the same aloofness of manner it must have assumed as soon as
the builders of nearly eight hundred years ago had put the last stone in
place. Externally, at least, it is as complete to-day as it was then,
and as there is no ivy upon it, I cannot help thinking that the Bretons
who built it in that long-distant time would swell with pride were they
able to see how their ambitious work has come down the centuries
unharmed.
We can go across the modern bridge, with its castellated parapets, and
climb up the steep ascent on the further side, passing on the way the
parish church, standing on the steep ground outside the circumscribed
limits of the wall that used to enclose the town in early times. Turning
towards the castle, we go breathlessly up the cobbled street that climbs
resolutely to the market-place in a foolishly direct fashion, which
might be understood if it were a Roman road. There is a sleepy quietness
about this way up from the station, which is quite a short distance, and
we look for much movement and human activity in the wide space we have
reached; but here, too, on this warm and sunny afternoon, the few folks
who are about seem to find ample time for conversation and loitering. At
the further end of the great square there are some vast tents erected
close to the big obelisk that forms the market-cross of the present day.
Quantities of straw are spread upon the cobbles, and the youth of
Richmond watches with intense interest the bulgings of the canvas walls
of the tents. With this they are obliged to be content for a time, but
just as we reach this end of the square two huge swaying elephants issue
forth to take their afternoon stroll in company with their son, whose
height is scarcely more than half that of his parents. The children have
not waited in vain, and they gaze awe-struck at the furrowed sides of
the slate-gray monsters as they are led, slowly padding their way,
across the square. We watch them as they pass under the shadow of Holy
Trinity Church, then out in the sunshine again they go lurching past the
old-fashioned houses until they turn down Frenchgate and disappear, with
the excited but respectful knot of children following close behind.
On one side of us is the King’s Head, whose steep tiled roof and square
front has just that air of respectable importance that one expects to
find in an old-established English hotel. It looks across the cobbled
space to the curious block of buildings that seems to have been intended
for a church but has relapsed into shops. The shouldering of secular
buildings against the walls of churches is a sight so familiar in parts
of France that this market-place has an almost Continental flavour, in
keeping with the fact that Richmond grew up under the protection of the
formidable castle built by that Alan Rufus of Brittany who was the
Conqueror’s second cousin. The town ceased to be a possession of the
Dukes of Brittany in the reign of Richard II., but there had evidently
been sufficient time to allow French ideals to percolate into the minds
of the men of Richmond, for how otherwise can we account for this
strange familiarity of shops with a sacred building which is unheard of
in any other English town? Where else can one find a pork-butcher’s shop
inserted between the tower and the nave, or a tobacconist doing business
in the aisle of a church? Even the lower parts of the tower have been
given up to secular uses, so that one only realizes the existence of the
church by keeping far enough away to see the sturdy pinnacled tower that
rises above the desecrated lower portions of the building. In this tower
hangs the curfew-bell, which is rung at 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., a custom,
according to one writer, ‘that has continued ever since the time of
William the Conqueror.’ The bell, we know, is not Norman, and the tower
belongs to the Perpendicular period, but the church is referred to in
Norman times, and Leland, writing in the reign of Henry VIII., suggests
an earlier survival. He may, of course, be describing Norman grotesque
carvings, but, on the other hand, he may be recording some relics of a
more barbarous age when he writes: ‘There is a Chapel in _Richemont_
Toune with straung Figures in the Waulles of it. The Peple there dreme
that it was ons [a temple of] Idoles.’ I wonder if those carved figures
were entirely destroyed in the days of the Commonwealth, or whether they
were merely thrown aside during some restoration, and are waiting for
digging or building operations to bring them to light.
All the while we have been lingering in the market-place the great keep
has been looking at us over some old red roofs, and urging us to go on
at once to the finest sight that Richmond can offer, and, resisting the
appeal no longer, we make our way down a narrow little street leading
out to a walk that goes right round the castle cliffs at the base of the
ivy-draped walls. If this walk were at Harrogate or Buxton, we can
easily imagine that its charms would be vitiated by some evidences of a
popular recognition of its attractiveness. There would be a strong
ornamental iron railing on the exposed side of the path; there would
probably be an automatic-machine waiting to supply a souvenir picture
post-card of the view; there would be notices--most excellent where they
are needed--requesting visitors not to throw paper or orange-peel
anywhere but in the receptacle supplied; and, besides all this, there
would, I have no doubt, be ornamental shrubberies, and here and there a
few beds of flowers, kept with all the neatness of municipal
horticulture. Such efforts would meet with some sort of response on the
part of the public, and the castle walk would be sufficiently populous
to prevent anyone from appreciating its charms. No; instead of all this
we find a simple asphalt path without any fence at all. There are two or
three seats that are perfectly welcome, but there is a delightful
absence of shrubberies or flower-beds, and the notices to the public
fixed to the castle walls are weathered and quite inconspicuous. Beyond
all this, the castle walk is generally a place in which one can be
alone, and yet
‘This is not solitude; ’tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and see those charms unfold.’
From down below comes the sound of the river, ceaselessly chafing its
rocky bottom and the big boulders that lie in the way. You can
distinguish the hollow sound of the waters as they fall over ledges into
deep pools, and you can watch the
[Illustration: RICHMOND CASTLE FROM THE RIVER
THIS well-known view of the castle from the banks of the Swale is only
one of the numerous romantic pictures that can be found in Richmond. The
great Norman keep, built about the year 1150, forms the dominating
feature of every aspect of the town.]
silvery gleams of broken water between the old stone bridge and the dark
shade of the woods. The masses of trees clothing the side of the gorge
add a note of mystery to the picture by swallowing up the river in their
heavy shade, for, owing to its sinuous course among the cliffs, one can
see only a short piece of water beyond the bridge.
The old corner of the town at the foot of Bargate appears over the edge
of the rocky slope, but on the opposite side of the Swale there is
little to be seen beside the green meadows and shady coppices that cover
the heights above the river.
There is a fascination in this view in its capacity for change. It
responds to every mood of the weather, and every sunset that glows
across the sombre woods has some freshness, some feature that is quite
unlike any other. Autumn, too, is a memorable time for those who can
watch the face of Nature from this spot, for when one of those opulent
evenings of the fall of the year turns the sky into a golden sea of
glory, studded with strange purple islands, there is unutterable beauty
in the flaming woods and the pale river.
On the way back to the market-place we pass a decayed arch that was
probably a postern in the walls of the town. There can be no doubt
whatever of the existence of these walls, for Leland begins his
description of the town with the words ‘_Richemont_ Towne is waullid,’
and in another place he says: ‘Waullid it was, but the waul is now
decayid. The Names and Partes of 4 or 5 Gates yet remaine.’ He also
tells us the names of some of these gates: ‘_Frenchegate_ yn the North
Parte of the Towne, and is the most occupied Gate of the Towne.
_Finkel-streate Gate, Bargate_, all iii be downe.’ Leland also details
how the wall enclosed little beside the market-place, the houses
adjoining it, and the gardens behind them, and that the area occupied by
the castle was practically the same as that of the town. We wonder why
Richmond could not have preserved her gates as York has done, or why she
did not even make the effort sufficient to retain a single one, as
Bridlington and Beverley did. The two posterns--one we have just
mentioned, and the other in Friar’s Wynd, on the north side of the
market-place, with a piece of wall 6 feet thick adjoining--are
interesting, but we would have preferred something much finer than these
mere arches; and while we are grumbling over what Richmond has lost, we
may also measure the disaster which befell the market-place in 1771,
when the old cross was destroyed. Before that year there stood on the
site of the present obelisk a very fine cross which Clarkson, who wrote
about a century ago, mentions as being the greatest beauty of the town
to an antiquary. A high flight of steps led up to a square platform,
which was enclosed by a richly ornamented wall about 6 feet high, having
buttresses at the corners, each surmounted with a dog seated on its
hind-legs. Within the wall rose the cross, with its shaft made from one
piece of stone. There were ‘many curious compartments’ in the wall, says
Clarkson, and ‘a door that opened into the middle of the square,’ but
this may have been merely an arched opening. The enrichments, either of
the cross itself or the wall, included four shields bearing the arms of
the great families of Fitz-Hugh, Scrope (quartering Tibetot), Conyers,
and Neville. From the description there is little doubt that this cross
was a very beautiful example of Perpendicular or perhaps Decorated
Gothic, in place of which we have a crude and bulging obelisk bearing
the inscription: ‘Rebuilt (!) A.D. 1771, Christopher Wayne, Esq.,
Mayor’; it should surely have read: ‘Perpetrated during the Mayoralty of
Christopher Wayne, Goth.’ The old cross was pulled down ‘for particular
reasons,’ says Clarkson, but, even if those reasons had been valid, the
stones might have been carefully marked, and the whole structure could
have been rebuilt in some other part of the market-place.
Although, as we have seen, Leland, who wrote in 1538, mentions
Frenchgate and Finkel Street Gate as ‘down,’ yet they must have been
only partially destroyed, or were rebuilt afterwards, for Whitaker,
writing in 1823, mentions that they were pulled down ‘not many years
ago’ to allow the passage of broad and high-laden waggons. There can be
little doubt, therefore, that, swollen with success after the demolition
of the cross, the Mayor and Corporation proceeded to attack the
remaining gateways, so that now not the smallest suggestion of either
remains. But even here we have not completed the list of barbarisms that
took place about this time. The Barley Cross, which stood near the
larger one, must have been quite an interesting feature. It consisted of
a lofty pillar with a cross at the top, and rings were fastened either
on the shaft or to the steps upon which it stood, so that the cross
might answer the purpose of a whipping-post. The pillory stood not far
away, and the may-pole is also mentioned.
But despite all this squandering of the treasures that it should have
been the business of the town authorities to preserve, the tower of the
Grey Friars has survived, and, next to the castle, it is one of the
chief ornaments of the town. Whitaker is by no means sure of the motives
that led to its preservation--perhaps because he knew the Richmond
people too well to expect much of them--for he writes: ‘Taste, however,
or veneration, or lucky accident, has preserved the great tower of the
“Freres” of Richmond.’ Certainly none of these causes saved any other
portions of the buildings, for the beautiful Perpendicular tower stands
quite alone. It is on the north side of the town, outside the narrow
limits of the walls, and was probably only finished in time to witness
the dispersal of the friars who had built it. It is even possible that
it was part of a new church that was still incomplete when the
Dissolution of the Monasteries made the work of no account except as
building materials for the townsfolk. The actual day of the surrender
was January 19, 1538, and we wonder if Robert Sanderson, the Prior, and
the fourteen brethren under him, suffered much from the privations that
must have attended them at that coldest period of the year. At one time
the friars, being of a mendicant order, and inured to hard living and
scanty fare, might have made light of such a disaster, but in these
later times they had expanded somewhat from their austere ways of
living, and the dispersal must have cost them much suffering. Almost in
this actual year Leland writes of ‘their Howse, Medow, Orchard, and a
litle Wood,’ which he mentions as being walled in, and, seeing that the
wall enclosed nearly sixteen acres, it appears probable that the
gray-cloaked men can scarcely have been ignorant of all the luxuries of
life. Notwithstanding this, they stoutly refused to acknowledge the
King’s supremacy, and suffered accordingly.
Going back to the reign of Henry VII. or thereabouts, we come across the
curious ballad of ‘The Felon Sow of Rokeby and the Freres of Richmond’
quoted from an old manuscript by Sir Walter Scott in ‘Rokeby.’ It may
have been as a practical joke, or merely as a good way of getting rid of
such a terrible beast, that
‘Ralph of Rokeby, with goodwill,
The fryers of Richmond gaver her till.’
Friar Middleton, who with two lusty men was sent to fetch the sow from
Rokeby, could scarcely have known that she was
‘The grisliest beast that ere might be,
Her head was great and gray:
She was bred in Rokeby Wood;
There were few that thither goed,
That came on live [= alive] away.
‘She was so grisley for to meete,
She rave the earth up with her feete,
And bark came fro the tree;
When fryer Middleton her saugh,
Weet ye well he might not laugh,
Full earnestly look’d hee.’
To calm the terrible beast when they found it almost impossible to hold
her, the friar began to read ‘in St. John his Gospell,’ but
‘The sow she would not Latin heare,
But rudely rushed at the frear,’
who, turning very white, dodged to the shelter of a tree, whence he saw
with horror that the sow had got clear of the other two men. At this
their courage evaporated, and all three fled for their lives along the
Watling Street. When they came to Richmond and told their tale of the
‘feind of hell’ in the garb of a sow, the warden decided to hire on the
next day two of the ‘boldest men that ever were borne.’ These two,
Gilbert Griffin and a ‘bastard son of Spaine,’ went to Rokeby clad in
armour and carrying their shields and swords of war, and even then they
only just overcame the grisly sow. They lifted the dead brute on to the
back of a horse, so that it rested across the two panniers,
‘And to Richmond they did hay:
When they saw her come,
They sang merrily _Te Deum_,
The fryers on that day.’
If we go across the river by the modern bridge, we can see the humble
remains of St. Martin’s Priory standing in a meadow by the railway. The
ruins consist of part of a Perpendicular tower and a Norman doorway.
Perhaps the tower was built in order that the Grey Friars might not
eclipse the older foundation, for St. Martin’s was a cell belonging to
St. Mary’s Abbey at York, and was founded by Wyman, steward or dapifer
to the Earl of Richmond about the year 1100, whereas the Franciscans in
the town owed their establishment to Radulph Fitz-Ranulph, a lord of
Middleham in 1258. The doorway of St. Martin’s, with its zigzag
mouldings, must be part of Wyman’s building, but no other traces of it
remain. Having come back so rapidly to the Norman age, we may well stay
there for a time while we make our way over the bridge again and up the
steep ascent of Frenchgate to the castle.
On entering the small outer barbican, which is reached by a lane from
the market-place, we come to the base of the Norman keep. Its great
height of nearly 100 feet is quite unbroken from foundations to summit,
and the flat buttresses are featureless. The recent pointing of the
masonry has also taken away any pronounced weathering, and has left the
tower with almost the same gaunt appearance that it had when Duke Conan
saw it completed. Passing through the arch in the wall abutting the
keep, we come into the grassy space of over two acres, that is enclosed
by the ramparts. There are some modern quarters for soldiers on the
western side which we had not noticed before, and the grass is levelled
in places for lawn tennis, but we had not expected to discover imposing
views inside the walls, where the advantage of the cliffs is lost. We do
find, however, architectural details which are missing outside. The
basement of the keep was vaulted in a massive fashion in the Decorated
period, but the walls are probably those of the first Earl Alan, who was
the first ‘Frenchman’ who owned the great part of Yorkshire which had
formerly belonged to Edwin, the Saxon Earl. It is not definitely known
by what stages the keep reached its present form, though there is every
reason to believe that Conan, the fifth Earl of Richmond, left the tower
externally as we see it to-day. This puts the date of the completion of
the keep between 1146 and 1171. The floors are now a store for the
uniforms and accoutrements of the soldiers quartered at Richmond, so
that there is little to be seen as we climb a staircase in the walls, 11
feet thick, and reach the battlemented turrets. Looking downwards, we
gaze right into the chimneys of the nearest houses, and we see the old
roofs of the town packed closely together in the shelter of the mighty
tower. A few tiny people are moving about in the market-place, and there
is a thin web of drifting smoke between us and them. Everything is
peaceful and remote; even the sound of the river is lost in the wind
that blows freely upon us from the great moorland wastes stretching away
to the western horizon. It is a romantic country that lays around us,
and though the cultivated area must be infinitely greater than in the
fighting days when these battlements were finished, yet I suppose the
Vale
[Illustration: RICHMOND FROM THE WEST
FROM this point of view, a great stretch of fertile and richly wooded
country is seen. The mediæval-looking town, perched on its rocky height
above one of the deep windings of the Swale, plainly shows how its name
of the Rich Mount suggested itself. The castle keep shows most
prominently, but to the left of it can be seen the Grey Friar’s Tower
and those of the two churches.]
of Mowbray which we gaze upon to the east must have been green, and to
some extent fertile, when that Conan who was Duke of Brittany and also
Earl of Richmond looked out over the innumerable manors that were his
Yorkshire possessions. I can imagine his eye glancing down on a far more
thrilling scene than the green three-sided courtyard enclosed by a
crumbling gray wall, though to him the buildings, the men, and every
detail that filled the great space, were no doubt quite prosaic. It did
not thrill him to see a man-at-arms cleaning weapons, when the man and
his clothes, and even the sword, were as modern and everyday as the
soldier’s wife and child that we can see ourselves, but how much would
we not give for a half an hour of his vision, or even a part of a
second, with a good camera in our hands?
Instead of wasting time on vain thoughts of this character, it would
perhaps be wiser to go down and examine the actual remains of these
times that have survived all the intervening centuries.
In the lower part of what is called Robin Hood’s Tower is the Chapel of
St. Nicholas, with arcaded walls of early Norman date, and a long and
narrow slit forming the east window. More interesting than this is the
Norman hall at the south-east angle of the walls. It was possibly used
as the banqueting-room of the castle, and is remarkable as being one of
the best preserved of the Norman halls forming separate buildings that
are to be found in this country. The hall is roofless, but the corbels
remain in a perfect state, and the windows on each side are well
preserved. The builder was probably Earl Conan, for the keep has details
of much the same character. It is generally called Scolland’s Hall,
after the Lord of Bedale of that name, who was a sewer or dapifer to the
first Earl Alan of Richmond. Scolland was one of the tenants of the
Earl, and under the feudal system of tenure he took part in the regular
guarding of the castle.
There is probably much Norman work in various parts of the crumbling
curtain walls, and at the south-west corner a Norman turret is still to
be seen.
Unless the Romans established at Catterick had a station there, it seems
very probable that before the Norman Conquest the actual site of
Richmond was entirely vacant; for, though the Domesday Survey makes
mention of one or two names that indicate some lost villages in the
neighbourhood, there are no traces in the town of anything earlier than
the Norman period. No stones of Saxon origin, so far as evidence exists,
have come to light during any restorations of the churches, and the only
suggestion of anything pre-Norman is Leland’s mention of those ‘idoles’
that were in his time to be seen in the walls of Holy Trinity Church.
For some reason this magnificent position for a stronghold was
overlooked by the Saxons, the seat of their government in this part of
Yorkshire being at Gilling, less than three miles to the north. The
importance of this place, which is now nothing more than a village, is
shown by the fact that it gave its name to the Gillingshire of early
times as well as to the wapentakes of Gilling East and Gilling West.
There was no naturally defensive site for a castle at Gilling, and the
new owners of the land familiar with the enormous advantages of such
sites as Falaise and Domfront were not slow to discover the bold cliff
above the Swale just to the south. Alan Rufus, one of the sons of the
Duke of Brittany, who received from the Conqueror the vast possessions
of Earl Edwin, was no doubt the founder of Richmond. He probably
received this splendid reward for his services soon after the
suppression of the Saxon efforts for liberty under the northern Earls.
William, having crushed out the rebellion in the remorseless fashion
which finally gave him peace in his new possessions, distributed the
devastated Saxon lands among his supporters; thus a great part of the
earldom of Mercia fell to this Breton.
The site of Richmond was fixed as the new centre of power, and the name,
with its apparently obvious meaning, may date from that time, unless the
suggested Anglo-Saxon derivation which gives it as Rice-munt--the hill
of rule--is correct. After this Gilling must soon have ceased to be of
any account. There can be little doubt that the castle was at once
planned to occupy the whole area enclosed by the walls as they exist
to-day, although the full strength of the place was not realized until
the time of the fifth Earl, who, as we have seen, was most probably the
builder of the keep in its final form, as well as other parts of the
castle. Richmond must then have been considered almost impregnable, and
this may account for the fact that it appears to have never been
besieged. In 1174, when William the Lion of Scotland was invading
England, we are told in Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle that Henry II.,
anxious for the safety of the honour of Richmond, and perhaps of its
custodian as well, asked: ‘Randulf de Glanvile est-il en Richemunt?’ The
King was in France, his possessions were threatened from several
quarters, and it would doubtless be a relief to him to know that a
stronghold of such importance was under the personal command of so able
a man as Glanville. In July of that year the danger from the Scots was
averted by a victory at Alnwick, in which fight Glanville was one of the
chief commanders of the English, and he probably led the men of
Richmondshire.
It is a strange thing that Richmond Castle, despite its great
pre-eminence, should have been allowed to become a ruin in the reign of
Edward III.--a time when castles had obviously lost none of the
advantages to the barons which they had possessed in Norman times. The
only explanation must have been the divided interests of the owners,
for, as Dukes of Brittany, as well as Earls of Richmond, their English
possessions were frequently endangered when France and England were at
war. And so it came about that when a Duke of Brittany gave his support
to the King of France in a quarrel with the English, his possessions
north of the Channel became Crown property. How such a condition of
affairs could have continued for so long is difficult to understand, but
the final severing came at last, when the unhappy Richard II. was on the
throne of England. The honour of Richmond then passed to Ralph Neville,
the first Earl of Westmoreland, but the title was given to Edmund Tudor,
whose mother was Queen Catherine, the widow of Henry V. Edmund Tudor, as
all know, married Margaret Beaufort, the heiress of John of Gaunt, and
died about two months before his wife--then scarcely fourteen years
old--gave birth to his only son, who succeeded to the throne of England
as Henry VII. He was Earl of Richmond from his birth, and it was he who
carried the name to the Thames by giving it to his splendid palace which
he built at Shene. Even the ballad of ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill’ is
said to come from Yorkshire, although it is commonly considered a
possession of Surrey.
Protected by the great castle, there came into existence the town of
Richmond, which grew and flourished. The houses must have been packed
closely together to provide the numerous people with quarters inside the
wall which was built to protect the place from the raiding Scots. The
area of the town was scarcely larger than the castle, and although in
this way the inhabitants gained security from one danger, they ran a
greater risk from a far more insidious foe, which took the form of
pestilences of a most virulent character. After one of these visitations
the town of Richmond would be left in a pitiable plight. Many houses
would be deserted, and fields became ‘overrun with briars, nettles, and
other noxious weeds.’
There is a record of the desolation and misery that was found to exist
in Richmond during the reign of Edward III. A plague had carried off
about 2,000 people; the Scots, presumably before the building of the
wall, had by their inroads added to the distress in the town, and the
castle was in such a state of dilapidation as to be worth nothing a
year. In the thirteenth century Richmond had been the mart of a very
large district. It was a great centre for the distribution of corn, and
goods were brought from Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland to be
sold in the market on Saturdays. Such an extensive trade produced a
large class of burgesses, merchants, and craftsmen, who were
sufficiently numerous to form themselves into no less than thirteen
separate guilds. There were the mercers, grocers, and haberdashers
united into one company; the glovers and skinners, who combined under
the name of fellmongers. There were the butchers, tailors, tanners,
blacksmiths, and cappers, who kept themselves apart as distinct
companies; and the remaining nineteen trades were massed together in six
guilds, such ill-assorted people as drapers, vintners, and surgeons
going together. With various charters, giving all sorts of rights and
immunities, these companies survived the disasters which befell the
place, although the growth of other market towns, such as Bedale,
Masham, and Middleham, undermined their position, and sometimes gave
rise to loud complaints and petitions to be eased of the payments by
which the citizens held their charter. With keen competition to contend
against, the poor Richmond folk must have thought their lot a miserable
one when a fresh pestilential scourge was inflicted upon them.
The first death took place on August 17, 1597, when Roger Sharp
succumbed to a disease which spread with such rapidity that by December
15 in the following year 1,050 had died within the parish, and
altogether there were 2,200 deaths in the rural deanery of Richmond.
This plague was by no means confined to Richmond, and so great was the
mortality that the assizes at Durham were not held, and business
generally in the northern parts of England was paralyzed.
In the Civil War the town was spared the disaster of a siege, perhaps
because the castle was not in a proper state for defence. If fighting
had occurred, there is little doubt that the keep would have been
partially wrecked, as at Scarborough, and Richmond would have lost the
distinction of possessing such an imposing feature.
As soon as one digs down a little into the story of a town with so rich
a history as this, it is tantalizing not to go deeper. One would like to
study every record that throws light on the events that were associated
with the growth of both the castle and the town, so that one might
discard the mistakes of the earlier writers and build up such a picture
of feudal times as few places in England could equal. Richmond of to-day
is so silent, so lacking in pageantry, that one must needs go to some
lonely spot, and there dream of all the semi-barbarous splendours that
the old walls have looked down upon when the cement between the great
stones still bore the marks of the masons’ trowels. One thinks of the
days when the occupants of the castle were newly come from Brittany,
when an alien tongue was heard on this cliff above the Swale, even as
had happened when the riverside echoes had had to accustom themselves to
an earlier change when Romans had laughed and talked on the same spot.
The men one dreams of are wearing suits of chain mail, or are in the
dress so quaintly drawn in the tapestry at Bayeux, and they have brought
with them their wives, their servants, and even their dogs. Thus
Richmond began as a foreign town, and the folks ate and drank and slept
as they had always done before they left France. Much of this alien
blood was no doubt absorbed by the already mixed Anglo-Saxon and Danish
population of Yorkshire, and perhaps, if his descent could be traced,
one would find that the passer-by who has just disturbed our dreaming
has Breton blood in his veins.
Easby Abbey is so much a possession of Richmond that we cannot go
towards the mountains until we have seen something of its charms. The
ruins slumber in such unutterable peace by the riverside that the place
is well suited to our mood to go a-dreaming of the centuries which have
been so long dead that our imaginations are not cumbered with any of the
dull times that may have often set the canons of St. Agatha’s yawning.
The walk along the steep shady bank above the river is beautiful all
the way, and the surroundings of the broken walls and traceried windows
are singularly rich. There is nothing, however, at Easby that makes a
striking picture, although there are many architectural fragments that
are full of beauty. Fountains, Rievaulx and Tintern, all leave Easby far
behind, but there are charms enough here with which to be content, and
it is, perhaps, a pleasant thought to know that, although on this sunny
afternoon these meadows by the Swale seem to reach perfection, yet in
the neighbourhood of Ripon there is something still finer waiting for
us. Of the abbey church scarcely more than enough has survived for the
preparation of a ground-plan, and many of the evidences are now
concealed by the grass. The range of domestic buildings that surrounded
the cloister garth are, therefore, the chief interest, although these
also are broken and roofless. We can wander among the ivy-grown walls
which, in the refectory, retain some semblance of their original form,
and we can see the picturesque remains of the common-room, the
guest-hall, the chapter-house, and the sacristy. Beyond the ruins of the
north transept, a corridor leads into the infirmary, which, besides
having an unusual position, is remarkable as being one of the most
complete groups of buildings set apart for this object. A noticeable
feature of the cloister garth is a Norman arch belonging to a doorway
that appears to be of later date. This is probably the only survival of
the first monastery founded, it is said, by Roald, Constable of Richmond
Castle in 1152. Building of an extensive character was, therefore, in
progress at the same time in these sloping meadows, as on the castle
heights, and St. Martin’s Priory, close to the town, had not long been
completed. Whoever may have been the founder of the abbey, it is
definitely known that the great family of Scrope obtained the privileges
that had been possessed by the constable, and they added so much to the
property of the monastery that in the reign of Henry VIII. the Scropes
were considered the original founders. Easby thus became the stately
burying-place of the family, and the splendid tombs that appeared in the
choir of their church were a constant reminder to the canons of the
greatness of the lords of Bolton. Sir Henry le Scrope was buried beneath
a great stone effigy, bearing the arms--azure, a bend or--of his house.
Near by lay Sir William le Scrope’s armed figure, and round about were
many others of the family buried beneath flat stones. We know this from
the statement of an Abbot of Easby in the fourteenth century; and but
for the record of his words there would be nothing to tell us anything
of these ponderous memorials, which have disappeared as completely as
though they had had no more permanence than the yellow leaves that are
just beginning to flutter from the trees. The splendid church, the
tombs, and even the very family of Scrope, have disappeared; but across
the hills, in the valley of the Ure, their castle still stands, and in
the little church of Wensley there can still be seen the parclose screen
of Perpendicular date that one of the Scropes must have rescued when the
monastery was being stripped and plundered.
The fine gatehouse of Easby Abbey, which is in a good state of
preservation, stands a little to the east of the parish church, and the
granary is even now in use.
On the sides of the parvise over the porch of the parish church are the
arms of Scrope, Conyers, and Aske; and in the chancel of this extremely
interesting old building there can be seen a series of wall-paintings,
some of which probably date from the reign of Henry III. This would make
them earlier than those at Pickering.
SWALEDALE