railway times, when by a quick train you may reach Shrewsbury from
London in three hours and thirty-five minutes, arriving, without turning
a hair, at the castellated building that serves for a railway station,
say, by the 2.10 p.m. train from Paddington, bringing you to the capital
of the “proud Salopians” at 5.45, not too late for tea. Thus, between
lunch and the afternoon cup you have accomplished what the “Wonder” at
its best took fourteen hours and three-quarters to do. This
forty-eight-miles-an-hour gait is, of course, not remarkable as railway
travelling goes, but it would have sufficiently startled the old
Shropshire squires, who thought they knew something of pace, aye, and
went it themselves, in every sense.
Those were fine fellows, and their grand and beautiful old town of the
Three Loggerheads still keeps an air—historic, racy, and individual—even
in these levelling days. The memory of the hard-drinking, hard-swearing,
and anything and everything but hard-working, Shropshire squires of the
first quarter of the nineteenth century, who drank deep and left no
heeltaps, “to friends all round the Wrekin,” will not readily fade. The
heritages of their descendants—gout and encumbered estates—forbid the
generous capacity of their forbears for old port and gambling to be
forgot, and such things, however excellent they may be as vouchers for
the fact that they lived their lives of old, are little desired by a
generation that also desires to live and go the pace after its own
ideals.
There remain in Shrewsbury many signs of this fine old free-handed way
of living, when the town was not only the capital of the Marches of
Wales, but resorted to for its “season” by the county families, who had
their own town houses here, and came to them from their rural seats just
as do their descendants to the London season. For another thing, the
picturesque old town—seated so grandly within the girdle of the yellow
Severn that enfolds it lovingly—is full of the queerest, quaintest inns
that can be imagined; their strangely roomy and cavernous construction
equalled only by their uniquely incongruous signs.
Much has already been said of the “Lion” inn, in connection with
coaching, and let it now be more particularly treated, first of all with
the remark that it was the foremost inn of its day. It was also the
scene of some of Mytton’s mad exploits: that Jack Mytton, of Halston,
who was a true pattern and faithful exemplar of the old-time Shropshire
squire. They still show the window through which he leaped, for pure
devilment, when he was being chaired, shoulder-high, by the enthusiastic
burgesses on his return for Parliament in 1819. He sprang from the chair
on that occasion, and alighted, amid a shower of broken glass, in the
bar. No one was particularly surprised, for his was a freakish nature;
but they _would_ have been astonished if he had walked in, in the usual
way, by the door.
It was here, too, that the adventure of the foxes, narrated by “Nimrod,”
occurred. Mytton, “on going into the bar of the ‘Lion Inn’ one evening
when somewhat ‘sprung’ by wine, was told there was a box in the
coach-office for him, which contained two brace of foxes. He requested
it might be brought to him, when, taking up the poker, he knocked the
lid off it, and let the foxes out in the room in which the landlady and
some of her female friends were assembled—giving a thrilling view-halloa
at the time. Now it cannot be said they ‘broke cover’ in good style; but
it may safely be asserted that they broke such a great quantity of
bottles, glasses, and crockery-ware as to have rendered the joke an
expensive one.”
It will not be matter for surprise, after this, when it is said that
Jack Mytton was absolutely the most fearless and dare-devil among the
courageous, reckless spirits of his time. He was always ready to risk
breaking his own neck, and that of any one else who might have the
misfortune to be thrown into his company while driving; and the story
told of him and his nervous friend in a gig together is perfectly true.
The friend gently remonstrated with him on his wild driving. “We may be
upset,” said he. “Were you ever much hurt, then, by being upset in a
gig?” inquired Mytton. “No, thank God!” exclaimed the friend, “for I was
never upset in one.” “What!” replied the squire, “never upset in a gig?
What a d—d slow fellow you must be,” and, running his near wheel up the
bank, over they both went.
XXIV
The “Lion” was the hotel to which De Quincey came in 1802, when, as a
youth, he was setting forth in his unpractical way for London. He had
walked in from Oswestry, reaching Shrewsbury two hours after nightfall.
Innkeepers in those times knew little of pedestrians who footed it for
pleasure, and classed all who walked when they might have rode as
tramps. Therefore, it will be allowed that De Quincey timed his arrival
well, at an hour when dusty feet are not so easily seen. However, had
his shoes been noticed, he was ready with a defence, for he came to the
“Lion” as a passenger already booked to London by the Mail. An Oswestry
friend had performed that service for him, and here he was come to wait
the arrival of that conveyance.
“This character,” he says, “at once installed me as rightfully a guest
of the inn, however profligate a life I might have previously led as a
pedestrian. Accordingly I was received with special courtesy, and it so
happened with something even like pomp. Four wax-lights carried before
me by obedient mutes, these were but ordinary honours, meant (as old
experience had instructed me) for the first engineering step towards
effecting a lodgment upon the stranger’s purse. In fact, the wax-lights
are used by innkeepers, both abroad and at home, to ‘try the range of
their guns.’ If the stranger submits quietly, as a good anti-pedestrian
ought surely to do, and fires no counter-gun by way of protest, then he
is recognised at once as passively within range, and amenable to orders.
I have always looked upon this fine of 5_s._ or 7_s._ (for wax that you
do not absolutely need) as a sort of inaugural _honorarium_
entrance-money, what in jails used to be known as _smart_ money,
proclaiming me to be a man _comme il faut_, and no toll in this world of
tolls do I pay so cheerfully. This, meantime, as I have said, was too
customary a form to confer much distinction. The wax-lights, to use the
magnificent Grecian phrase επομπ ευε, moved pompously before me, as the
holy-holy fire (the inextinguishable fire and its golden hearth) moved
before Cæsar _semper_ Augustus, when he made his official or ceremonial
_avatars_. Yet still this moved along the ancient channels of
glorification: it rolled along ancient grooves—I might say, indeed, like
one of the twelve Cæsars when dying, _Ut puto, Deus fio_ (It’s my
private opinion that at this very moment I am turning into a god), but
still the metamorphosis was not complete. _That_ was accomplished when I
stepped into the sumptuous room allotted to me. It was a ball-room of
noble proportions—lighted, if I chose to issue orders, by three gorgeous
chandeliers, not basely wrapped up in paper, but sparkling through all
their thickets of crystal branches, and flashing back the soft rays of
my tall waxen lights. There were, moreover, two orchestras, which money
would have filled within thirty minutes. And, upon the whole, one thing
only was wanting—viz., a throne, for the completion of my _apotheosis_.
“It might be seven p.m. when first I entered upon my kingdom. About
three hours later I rose from my chair, and with considerable interest
looked out into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds
arising; and the whole atmosphere had by this time become one vast
laboratory of hostile movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a
distracting wilderness of dim sights, and of those awful “Sounds that
live in darkness” (Wordsworth’s _Excursion_), never had I consciously
witnessed.... Long before midnight the household (with the exception of
a solitary waiter) had retired to rest. Two hours, at least, were left
to me, after twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflections,
and the local circumstances around me deepened and intensified these
reflections, impressed upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even
horror....
“The unusual dimensions of the rooms, especially their towering height,
brought up continually and obstinately, through natural links of
associated feelings or images, the mighty vision of London waiting me,
afar off. An altitude of nineteen or twenty feet showed itself
unavoidably upon an exaggerated scale in some of the smaller
side-rooms—meant probably for cards or for refreshments. This single
feature of the rooms——their unusual altitude, and the echoing hollowness
which had become the exponent of that altitude—this one terrific feature
(for terrific it was in its effect), together with the crowding and
evanescent images of the flying feet that so often had spread gladness
through these halls on the wings of youth and hope at seasons when every
room rang with music—all this, rising in tumultuous vision, whilst the
dead hours of the night were stealing along, all around me—household and
town—sleeping, and whilst against the windows more and more the storm
was raving, and to all appearance endlessly growing, threw me into the
deadliest condition of nervous emotion under contradictory forces, high
over which predominated horror recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in
London into which I was now so wilfully precipitating myself.
“... Such thoughts, and visions without number corresponding to them,
were moving across the _camera obscura_ of my fermenting fancy, when
suddenly I heard a sound of wheels, which, however, soon died off into
some remote quarter. I guessed at the truth, viz., that it was the
Holyhead Mail,[3] wheeling off on its primary duty of delivering its
bags at the post-office. In a few minutes it was announced as having
changed horses; and I was off to London.”
Footnote 3:
_Not_ the Holyhead Mail. De Quincey is writing of 1802, when the
Holyhead Mail, as already shown, went through Chester. He refers to
the London, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury Mail, which, started in 1785,
lasted until 1808. It was by this he travelled.
XXV
“All the mails in the kingdom,” he continues, “with one solitary
exception (that of Liverpool), were so arranged as to reach London early
in the morning. Between the hours of four and six a.m., one after the
other, according to their station upon the roll, all the mails from the
N[orth]—the E[ast]—the W[est]—the S[outh]—whence, according to some
curious etymologists, comes the magical word NEWS—drove up successively
to the post-office and rendered up their heart-shaking budgets; none
earlier than four o’clock, none later than six. I am speaking of days
when all things moved slowly. The condition of the roads was then such,
that, in order to face it, a corresponding build of coaches,
hyperbolically massive, was rendered necessary; the mails were, upon
principle, made so strong as to be the heaviest of all carriages known
to the wit or the experience of man; and from these joint evils of
ponderous coaches and roads that were quagmires, it was impossible for
even the picked breed of English coach-horses, all bone and blood, to
carry forward their huge tonnage at a greater rate than six and a half
miles an hour. Consequently, it cost eight-and-twenty massy[4] hours for
us, leaving Shrewsbury at two o’clock in the dead of night, to reach the
General Post-office, and faithfully to deposit upon the threshing-floors
of Lombard Street all that weight of love and hatred which Ireland had
found herself able to muster through twenty-four hours in the great
depôt of Dublin, by way of donation to England.”
Footnote 4:
The “solid” hours, or the “mortal” hours, of modern colloquial speech.
No apology, it will be conceded, is necessary for having quoted De
Quincey at this length, especially as these passages are omitted from
many editions, and so are little known. The eloquence that thus gives
expression to the morbid imagination of this forerunner of modern
neurotics is well employed here, and so largely has mind usurped
dominion over matter in later years that few of the present generation
will altogether fail to sympathise with his nocturnal terrors.
The circumstance that led to his being shown into the ball-room of the
“Lion,” was that of the house being under repair. That room is still in
existence, and a noble and impressive room it is, occupying the upper
floor of a two-storeyed building, added to the back of the older house
perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago. Lofty, as he describes it, and
lighted by tall windows, the features of the two music-galleries and the
chandeliers are still there, together with the supper-room at one end,
divided off from the greater saloon, and so disproportionately lofty.
The ball-room is additionally lighted from the ceiling by a domed
skylight. The moulded plaster decorations on walls and ceiling, in the
Adams style—that style which so beautifully recast classic
conventions—are exquisite, and even yet keep their delicate colouring,
as do the emblematic figures of Music and Dancing painted on the
door-panels. At rare intervals the room is used for its original
purpose, but it more commonly serves, throughout the year, that of a
commercial travellers’ stock-room.
The way to this derelict haunt of eighteenth-century gaiety lies down
the yard of the inn, and up a fine broad stone stairway, now much
chipped, dirty and neglected. On the ground floor is the billiard-room
of the present day, formerly the coach dining-room. In crepuscular
apartments adjoining, in these times given over to forgotten lumber, the
curious may find the deserted kitchens of a bygone age, with the lifts
and hatches to upper floors that once conveyed their abundant meals to a
vanished generation of John Bulls.
[Illustration: THE “LION” YARD.]
This portion of the house is seen to advantage at the end of the
cobble-stoned yard, passing the old coach office remaining there,
unchanged, and proceeding to the other end, where the yard passes out
into a steep and narrow lane called Stony Bank. Looking back, the great
red brick bulk of the ball room, with the stone effigy of a lion on the
parapet is seen; the surrounding buildings giving a very powerful
impression of the extensive business done here in days of old.
The “Lion” suffered severely when the railway was opened to Shrewsbury,
and the more so because its position, from being the most favourable,
was suddenly changed into the most unfavourable; the railway-station
lying at the other end of the town, and travellers no longer passing as
a matter of necessity by Wyle Cop.
For many years the “Lion” has therefore been all too large for present
needs, and its upper floors unfurnished and given over to rats, mice and
spiders. But it has had better fortune than befell the “Talbot.”
The “Talbot,” in Market street, was the great rival of the “Lion.” It
was the house to which came John Jobson to set up the “Nimrod,” and be
generally a thorn in the side of Isaac Taylor, of the “Lion” yard.
Although much else is lost, fugitive memories still remain of Mrs.
Jobson’s turban, hinting that she must have been a remarkable person.
Why has not some diarist of that time left us an intimate account of all
these things?
After the coaching age and Jobson were both simultaneously snuffed out,
in 1842, the “Talbot” was taken by E. Wheeler and Son, followed shortly
by one Peters, who had been a coachman on the “Nimrod.” It is to be
feared he found it anything but a lucrative speculation, for the house
was shortly closed. Some little while later, it was taken by the Post
Office. The building still exists, little altered, although the lower
part is a fancy warehouse, and the upper floors let out as offices, by
the name of “Talbot Chambers.” It is a great square unbeautiful
red-brick structure, with the sign, an effigy of that old English hound,
the Talbot, still surmounting the entrance.
The “Raven and Bell,” frequently mentioned in the rivalries of the old
coach-proprietors, is not to be confounded with the “Raven” in Castle
Street, but was situated on Wyle Cop. The “Raven,”—a favourite sign in
Shropshire and Staffordshire—and almost exclusively confined to these
two counties, derives from the old heraldic coat of the Corbets, that
ancient Shropshire family whose ancestral acres are situated at Moreton
Corbet, and is an ancient play upon the family name, by way of
_corbeau_, the French for raven. Indeed, not only the Corbets of
Moreton, but most others of the same name, bear one or more ravens as
their heraldic cognizance.
Wyle Cop is still a place of inns. There are the beautiful old
“Unicorn,” half-timbered and gabled, and that oddly conjoined “Lion and
Pheasant”; and many another to be found throughout the town.
XXVI
But if the inns be quaint, how shall justice be done to the quaintness
of the mediæval timbered houses in the High Street, or Butcher Row?
There is no town in England—no, not even Chester—that can show a greater
number, or more beautiful examples of black and white; while for queer
street names Shrewsbury certainly bears away the bell. There are Wyle
Cop, and the houses at its foot, once known as “under the Wyle”; Pride
Hill, which does not refer to the almost Spanish pride of Salopians, but
to an old mansion of the Pride family that once stood there; Shoplatch;
Murivance, on the old town walls; Mardol, or “Dairy Fold”; and Dog-pole,
originally “Duck-pool.” In midst of all these is the Market-square, with
the old red sandstone Market-house in the centre; a place notable in
these days rather for a pleasant and aristocratic quiet than for
anything connected with marketing. The old trading interest went in
1809, when the new Market buildings and Corn Exchange—a not altogether
successful combination of red and yellow brick—were opened. A curious
inscription on the front of the old building dates it back to Queen
Elizabeth’s time, and above, in a recess, stands the effigy of that
Richard, Duke of York, whose head graced one of York’s gates in 1460,
after the Battle of Wakefield. The effigy was brought from the old
gatehouse on the Welsh Bridge, demolished in 1791. Armoured from heel to
crown, it reminds one vividly of those feudal Daimios of Japan whom it
was imperative to sweep away before that country could emerge from
barbarism and savagery. And let it not be forgotten that our “chivalry”
of old was as savage and as barbarous as anything to be found in China
or any other Asiatic country.
A warrior of unflinching resolve and proud belief in self was Clive, one
of Shropshire’s greatest sons, whose bronze statue, its pedestal simply
inscribed with his name, stands in advance of the Market-house. It was
well merely to place his name there, for what do Shropshiremen need to
be told of Clive? That would be an ill day when they should forget his
youth, his manhood, his achievements, and his tragedy. To serve your
country—to give her Empire, trade, and wealth—these things do not fall
to the lot of many men, and it is well they should not, for they bring
the curses and the rabid enmity of the factious, the deprecation of the
feeble-hearted, and the vitriolic hatred of the envious and the
mean-souled; ever the loudest voiced among the body politic. Few are
those who, unmoved, could be the recipients of such base slander and
ingratitude, and Clive was not one of them. The man who gave us India
died by his own hand, but none the less done to death by the Little
Englanders of that day.
The dedications of Shrewsbury’s churches are as unusual as the names of
its streets. There are St. Chad’s, St. Alkmund’s, and St. Julian’s,
among others; but the finest church of all is St. Mary’s, whose spire,
soaring to a height of 220 feet, is oddly at variance with the tower and
the rest of the building, being of white stone, while the body of the
church is in red. St. Mary’s spire is visible from great distances. It
tempted a steeple-jack named Cadman to a fearful death in 1739. He had
been repairing the spire, and, having completed the work, was foolish
enough to essay the feat of sliding down a rope fastened to the spire at
one end, and at the other to an oak tree across the Severn. The rope
broke, and he was flung from mid-air into the street of St. Mary Fryars,
being instantly killed. A curious epitaph to him remains:—
Let this small monument record the name
Of Cadman and to future time proclaim
How by a bold attempt to fly from this high spire,
Across the Sabrine stream he did acquire
His fatal end. ’Twas not from want of skill
Or courage to perform the task he fell.
No, no; a faulty rope being drawn too tight,
Hurried his soul on high to take its flight
And bade the body here a last good-night.
St. Mary’s is largely Norman, and very, very beautiful. St. Chad’s, on
the other hand, built a hundred years ago, is Greek of sorts and
designed in a perfect circle; the model of a heathen temple, and the
worst of bad taste. But there is this satisfaction; it is not in an
obtrusive position, and unless it be diligently sought is not likely to
be found.
[Illustration: THE MARKET-PLACE, SHREWSBURY.]
The Castle, on the other hand, is the first thing seen by the railway
traveller from London, just as it was the least likely in coaching days.
When the Psalmist sings of the valleys being exalted and the mountains
laid low, he parallels the changes wrought at Shrewsbury by the railway,
for the traffic that came in by Wyle Cop has been wholly transferred to
another line of route, where the Castle is the most prominent object. If
there were ever one who, alighting at Shrewsbury station and, entering
the station-yard, failed to see the Castle, he surely would be blind to
the light of day, for the frowning battlements that even now glower down
from their craggy foothold, after eight hundred years, overhang very
dramatically the cabs and carriages, the portmanteaus and Gladstone bags
of modern life. The keep is all that is left of the original Norman
stronghold. The outworks have disappeared these hundreds of years past,
and the walls of the keep itself have been patched and re-faced.
Impressive still is that ancient fortress in sunshine, but infinitely
grand when the sun is setting, the lights of the station begin to
twinkle, and the signal-lamps to gleam green and red. Then those
ponderous turrets and ruddy walls take on a silhouetted blackness that
effectually hides the innovations and the modern touches only too
visible in the broad eye of day.
Shrewsbury School is as prominent as the Castle itself, on the way up
into the town; a school no longer since modern buildings have been
raised on the other side of the Severn. Now used as a Public Library and
Museum, and with a seated bronze statue of Darwin, its last famous
scholar, in front, it fitly enshrines within its noble Tudor walls many
records of Shrewsbury’s and Shropshire’s past.
One thing, certainly, the visitor to Shrewsbury cannot, nay, must not,
fail of doing. He must not neglect the delicacy peculiar to the town—
A Shrewsbury cake of Pailin’s best make,
as Ingoldsby has it in his “Bloudie Jacke of Shrewsberrie.” Only Pailin
no longer makes Shrewsbury cakes. He has long been gathered to his
fathers, and let us hope he is quiring with the celestial throng. But,
if Pailin be dead, the making of the especial cakes goes on unfailingly,
and the eating of them is a rite—a canonical observance almost.
Over against the shop where the original Pailin earned his undying
fame—why has Shrewsbury no statue to him?—is the courtyard that gives
access to that wonderfully beautiful timbered building, the Council
House, the spot where, in bygone days, the Council of the Marches
governed the Principality of Wales and these marchlands. “Lords’ Place”
they sometimes name this vice-regal court.