old women: their blue eyes are bright and laughing, long after the sea
wind and sun have tanned and shrivelled their skins and bleached their
hair. Blue eyes and yellow hair are the predominant type; but there
are some faces with dark hazel eyes of rare beauty and very dark
hair,--still more beautiful,--which, spite of its darkness, shows
glints of red in the sun. The dark blue of their gowns and cloaks is
the best color-frame and setting their faces could have; the bunched
fulness of the petticoat is saved from looking clumsy by being so
short, and the cloaks are in themselves graceful garments. The walking
in a bent posture, with such heavy loads on the back, has given to all
the women an abnormal breadth of hip, which would be hideous in any
other dress than their own. This is so noticeable that I thought
perhaps they wore under their skirts, to set them out, a roll, such as
is worn by some of the Bavarian peasants. But when I asked one of the
women, she replied,--
"Na, na, jist the flannel; a' tuckit."
"Tucked all the way up to the belt?" said I.
"Na, na," laughing as if that were a folly never conceived of,--"na,
na." And in a twinkling she whipped her petticoat high up, to show me
the under petticoat, of the same heavy blue cloth, tucked only a few
inches deep. Her massive hips alone were responsible for the strange
contour of her figure.
The last person to leave the wharf was a young man with a creel of
fish on his back. My friend the sailor glanced at him with contempt.
"There's the only man in all Scotland that 'ud be seen carryin' a
creel o' fish on his back like a woman," said he. "He's na pride aboot
him."
"But why shouldn't men carry creels?" I asked. "I'm sure it is very
hard work for women."
The sailor eyed me for a moment perplexedly, and then as if it were
waste of words to undertake to explain self-evident propositions,
resumed,--
"He worked at it when he was a boy, with his mother; an' now he's no
pride left. There's the whole village been at him to get a barrow; but
he'll not do't. He's na pride aboot him."
What an interesting addition it would be to the statistics of foods
eaten by different peoples to collect the statistics of the different
foods with which pride's hunger is satisfied in different countries!
Its stomach has as many and opposite standards as the human digestive
apparatus. It is, like everything else, all and only a question of
climate. Not a nabob anywhere who gets more daily satisfaction out of
despising his neighbors than the Newhaven fishermen do out of their
conscious superiority to this poor soul, who lugs his fish in a basket
on his back like a woman, and has "na pride aboot him."
If I had had time and opportunity to probe one layer farther down in
Newhaven society, no doubt I should have come upon something which
even this pariah, the fish-carrying man, would scorn to be seen doing.
After the last toiling fishwife had disappeared in the distance, and
the wharf and the village had quieted down into sombre stillness, I
drove to "The Peacock," and ate bread and milk in a room which, if it
were not the very one in which Christie and her lover supped, at least
looked out on the same sea they looked upon. And a very gray, ugly sea
it was, too; just such an one as used to stir Christie's soul with a
heat of desire to spin out into it, and show the boys she was without
fear. On the stony beach below the inn a woman was spreading linen to
dry. Her motions as she raised and bent, and raised and bent, over her
task were graceful beyond measure. Scuds of rain-drops swept by now
and then; and she would stop her work, and straightening herself into
a splendid pose, with one hand on her hip, throw back her head, and
sweep the whole sky with her look, uncertain whether to keep on with
her labor or not; then bend again, and make greater haste than before.
As I drove out of the village I found a knot of the women gossiping at
a corner. They had gathered around a young wife, who had evidently
brought out her baby for the village to admire. It was dressed in very
"braw attire" for Newhaven,--snowy white, and embroidery, and blue
ribbons. It was but four weeks old, and its tiny red face was nearly
covered up by the fine clothes. I said to a white-haired woman in the
group,--
"Do you recollect when it was all open down to the sea here,--before
this second line of newer cottages was built?"
She shook her head and replied, "I'm na so auld 's I luik; my hair it
wentit white--" After a second's pause, and turning her eyes out to
sea as she spoke, she added, "A''t once it wentit white."
A silence fell on the group, and looks were exchanged between the
women. I drove away hastily, feeling as one does who has unawares
stepped irreverently on a grave. Many grief-stricken queens have trod
the Scottish shores; the centuries still keep their memory green, and
their names haunt one's thoughts in every spot they knew. But more
vivid to my memory than all these returns and returns the thought of
the obscure fisherwoman whose hair, from a grief of which the world
never heard, "a' 't once wentit white."
CHESTER STREETS.
If it be true, as some poets think, that every spot on earth is full
of poetry, then it is certainly also true that each place has its own
distinctive measure; an indigenous metre, so to speak, in which, and
in which only, its poetry will be truly set or sung.
The more one reflects on this, in connection with the spots and places
he has known best in the world, the truer it seems. Memories and
impressions group themselves in subtle co-ordinations to prove it.
There are surely woods which are like stately sonnets, and others of
which the truth would best be told in tender lyrics; brooks which are
jocund songs, and mountains which are Odes to Immortality. Of cities
and towns it is perhaps even truer than of woods and mountains;
certainly, no less true. For instance, it would be a bold poet who
should attempt to set pictures of Rome in any strain less solemn than
the epic; and is it too strong a thing to say that only a foolish one
would think of framing a Venice glimpse or memory in anything save
dreamy songs, with dreamiest refrains? Endless vistas of reverie open
to the imagination once entered on the road of this sort of
fancy,--reveries which play strange pranks with both time and place,
endow the dreamer with a sort of _post facto_ second sight, and leave
him, when suddenly roused, as lost as if he had been asleep for a
century. For sensations of this kind Chester is a "hede and chefe
cyte." Simply to walk its streets is to step to time and tune of
ballads; the very air about one's ears goes lilting with them; the
walls ring; the gates echo; choruses rollic round corners,--ballads,
always ballads, or, if not a ballad, a play, none the less lively,--a
play with pageants and delightful racket.
Such are the measure and metre to-day of "The Cyte of Legyons, that is
Chestre in the marches of Englonde, towards Wales, betwegne two armes
of the see, that bee named Dee and Mersee. Thys cyte in tyme of
Britons was hede and chefe cyte of Venedocia, that is North Wales.
Thys cyte in Brytyshe speech bete Carthleon, Chestre in Englyshe, and
Cyte of Legyons also. For there laye a wynter, the legyons that Julius
Cæsar sent to wyne Irlonde. And after, Claudius Cæsar sent legyons out
of the cyte for to wynn the Islands that bee called Orcades. Thys cyte
hath plenty of cyne land, of corn, of flesh, and specyally of samon.
Thys cyte receyveth grate marchandyse and sendeth out also.
Northumbres destroyed this cyte but Elfleda Lady of Mercia bylded it
again and made it mouch more."
This is what was written of Chester, more than six hundred years ago,
by one Ranulph Higden, a Chester Abbey monk,--him who wrote those old
miracle plays, except for which we very like had never had such a
thing as a play at all, and William Shakspeare had turned out no
better than many another Stratford man.
All good Americans who reach England go to Chester. They go to see the
cathedral, and to buy old Queen Anne furniture. The cathedral is very
good in its way, the way of all cathedrals, and the old Queen Anne
furniture is now quite well made; but it is a marvel that either
cathedral or shop can long hold a person away from Chester streets.
One cannot go amiss in them; at each step he is, as it were,
button-holed by a gable, an arch, a pavement, a door-sill, a sign, or
a gate with a story to tell. A story, indeed? A hundred, or more; and
if anybody doubts them, or has by reason of old age, or
over-occupation with other matters, got them confused in his mind, all
he has to do is to step into a public library, which is kept in a very
private way, in a by-street, by two aged Cestrian citizens and a
parish boy. Here, if he can convince these venerable Cestrians of his
respectability, he may go a-junketing by himself in that delicious
feast of an old book, the "Vale-Royale" of England, published in
London in 1656, and written, I believe, a half-century or so earlier.
Never was any bit of country more praised than this beautiful Chester
County, "pleasant and abounding in plenteousness of all things
needful and necessary for man's use, insomuch that it merited and had
the name of the Vale-Royale of England."
The old writer continues:--
"The ayr is very wholesome, insomuch that the people of the
Country are seldome infected with Diseases or Sicknesses;
neither do they use the help of the Physicians nothing so much
as in other countries. For when any of them are sick they make
him a Posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will
not amend him, then God be merciful to him!"
And of the river Dee,--
"To which water no man can express how much this ancient city
hath been beholden; nay, I suppose if I should call it the
Mother, the Nurse, the Maintainer, the Advancer and Preserver
thereof, I should not greatly erre."
And again, of the shifting "sands o' Dee," this ancient and devout
man, taking quite another view than that of the thoughtless or pensive
lyrists, later, says,--
"The changing and shifting of the water gave some occasion to
the Britons in that Infancy of the Christian Religion to
attribute some divine honor and estimation to the said water:
though I cannot believe that to be any cause of the name of
it."
His pious deduction from the exceeding beauty of the situation of the
city is that it is "worthy, according to the Eye, to be called a city
guarded with Watch of Holy and Religious men, and through the Mercy of
our Saviour always fenced and fortified with the merciful assistance
of the Almighty." To keep it thus guarded, the monks of Vale-Royale
did their best. Witness the terms in which their grant was couched:--
"All the mannours, churches, lands and tenements aforesaid, in
free pure and perpetual alms forever; with Homages, Rents,
Demesnes, Villenages, Services of Free Holders and Bond, with
Villains and their Families, Advowsons, Wards, Reliefs,
Escheates, Woods, Plains, Meadows, Pastures, Wayes, Pathes,
Heaths, Turfs, Forests, Waters, Ponds, Parks, Fishing, Mills in
Granges, Cottages within Borough and without, and in all other
places with all Easments, Liberties, Franchises and Free
Customs any way belonging to the aforesaid Mannours, Churches,
lands and tenements."
Plainly, if the devil or any of his followers were caught in the
Vale-Royale, they could be legally ejected as trespassers.
He was not, however, without an eye to worldly state, this devout
writer, for he speaks with evident pride of the fine show kept up by
the mayor of Chester:--
"The Estate that the Mayor of Chester keepeth is great. For he
hath both Sword Bearer and Mace Bearer Sergeants, with their
silver maces, in as good and decent order as in any other city
in England. His housekeeping accordingly; but not so chargeable
as in all other cities, because all thing are better cheap
there.... He remaineth, most part of the day at a place called
the Pendice which is a brave place builded for the purpose at
the high Crosse under St. Peters Church, and in the middest of
the city, of such a sort that a man may stand therein and see
into the markets or four principal streets of the city."
Nevertheless, there was once a mayor of Chester who did not see all he
ought to have seen in the principal streets of the city; for his own
daughter, out playing ball "with other maids, in the summer time, in
Pepur Street," stole away from her companions, and ran off with her
sweetheart, through one of the city gates, at the foot of that street,
which gate the enraged mayor ordered closed up forever, as if that
would do any good; and some sharp-tongued and sensible Cestrian
immediately phrased the illogical action in a proverb: "When the
daughter is stolen, shut the Pepur gate." This saying is to be heard
in Chester to this day, and is no doubt lineal ancestor of our own
broader apothegm, "When the mare's stolen, lock the stable."
There are many lively stories about mayors of Chester. There was a
mayor in 1617 who made a very learned speech to King James, when he
rode in through East Gate, with all the train soldiers of the city
standing in order, "each company with their ensigns in seemly sort,"
the array stretching up both sides of East Gate Street. This mayor's
name was Charles Fitton. He delivered his speech to the king;
presented to him a "standing cup with a cover double gilt, and therein
a hundred jacobins of gold;" likewise delivered to him the city's
sword, and afterward bore it before him, in the procession. But when
King James proposed, in return for all these civilities, to make a
knight of him, Charles Fitton sturdily refused; which was a thing so
strange for its day and generation that one is instantly possessed by
a fire of curiosity to know what Charles Fitton's reasons could have
been for such contempt of a knight's title. No doubt there is a story
hanging thereby,--something to do with a lady-love, not unlikely; and
a fine ballad it would make, if one but knew it. The records, however,
state only the bare fact.
Then there was, a hundred years later than this, a man who got to be
mayor of Chester by a very strange chance. He was a ribbon-weaver, in
a small way, kept a shop in Shoemaker's Row, and lived in a little
house backing on the Falcon Inn. All of a sudden he blossomed out into
a rich silk-mercer; bought a fine estate just outside the city, built
a grand house, and generally assumed the airs and manners of a
dignitary. As is the way of the world now, so then: people soon took
him at his surface showing, forgot all about the mystery of his sudden
wealth, and presently made him mayor of Chester. Afterward it came
out, though never in such fashion that anything was done about it, how
the mayor got his money. Just before the mysterious rise in his
fortunes, a great London banking-house had been robbed of a large sum
of money by one of its clerks, who ran away, came to Chester, and went
into hiding at the Falcon Inn. He was tracked and overtaken late one
night. Hearing his pursuers on the stairs, he sprang from his bed and
threw the treasure bags out of the window, plump into the
ribbon-weaver's back-yard; where the disappointed constables naturally
never thought of looking, and went back to London much chagrined,
carrying only the man, and no money. None of the money having been
found on the robber, he escaped conviction, but subsequently, for
another offence, was tried, convicted, and executed. I take it for
granted that it must have been he who told in his last hours what he
did with the money bags: for certainly no one else knew,--that is, no
one else except Mr. Samuel Jarvis, the ribbon-weaver, who, much
astonished, had picked them up before daylight, the morning after they
had been thrown into his back-yard. It is certain that he kept his
mouth shut, and proceeded to turn the money to the best possible
account in the shortest possible time. But an evil fate seemed to
attach to the dishonestly gotten riches; Jarvis dying without issue,
his estate all went to a man named Doe, "a gardener, at Greg's Pit,"
whose sons and grandsons spent the last penny of it in riotous living.
So there is now "nothing to show for" that money, for the stealing of
which one man was tried for his life, and another man made mayor of
Chester; which would all come in capitally in a ballad, if a
ballad-monger chose.
Of the famous Chester Rows, nobody has ever yet contrived to give a
description intelligible to one who had not seen them. The more
familiarly they are known, the more fantastic and bewildering they
seem, and the less one is sure how to speak of them. Whether it is
that the sidewalk goes upstairs, or the front second-story bedroom
comes down into the street; whether the street itself be in the
basement or the cellar, or the sidewalk be on the roofs of the
houses;--where any one of them all begins or leaves off, it would be a
courageous narrator that tried to explain. They appear to have been as
much of a puzzle two hundred years ago as to-day; for the devout old
chronicler of the Vale-Royale, essaying to describe them, wrote the
following paragraph, which, delicious as it is to those who know
Chester, I think must be a stumbling-block and foolishness to those
who do not. He says there is "a singular property of praise to this
city, whereof I know not the like of any other: there be towards the
street fair rooms, both for shops and dwelling-houses, to which there
is rather a descent than an equal height with the floor or pavement of
the street. Yet the principal dwelling-houses and shops for the
chiefest Trades are mounted a story higher, and before the Doors and
Entries a continued Row, on either side the street, for people to pass
to and fro all along the said houses, out of all annoyance of Rain, or
other foul weather, with stairs fairly built, and neatly maintained to
step down out of those Rowes into the open streets: almost at every
second house: and the said Rowes built over the head with such of the
Chambers and Rooms for the most part as are the best rooms in every
one of the said houses.
"It approves itself to be of most excellent use, both for dry and easy
passage of all sorts of people upon their necessary occasions, as
also for the sending away, of all or the most Passengers on foot from
the passage of the street, amongst laden and empty Carts, loaden and
travelling Horses, lumbering Coaches, Beer Carts, Beasts, Sheep,
Swine, and all annoyances, which what a confused trouble it makes in
other cities, especially where great stirring is, there's none that
can be ignorant."
He also suggests another advantage of this arrangement, which seems by
no means unlikely to have been part of its original reason for being;
namely, that "when the enemy entered they might avoid the danger of
the Horsemen, and might annoy the Enemies as they passed through the
Streets." Probably in this writer's day the marvel of the construction
of the Rows was even greater than it is now; in many instances the
first story was excavated out of solid rock, so you began by going
downstairs at the outset. These first stories of the ancient Cestrians
are beneath the cellars of the Rows to-day; and every now and then, in
deepening a vault or cellar-way, workmen come on old Roman altars,
built there by the "Legyons" of Julius, or Claudius Cæsar, dedicated
to "Nymphs and Fountains," or other genii of the day; baths, too, with
their pillars and perforated tiles still in place, as they were in the
days when cleanly and luxurious Roman soldiers took Turkish baths
there, after hot victories. Knowing about these lower strata adds a
weird charm to the fascination of strolling along in the balconies
above, looking in, now at a jeweller's window, now at a smart
haberdashery shop, now at some neat housekeeper's bedroom window, now
into a mysterious chink-like passage-way winding off into the heart of
the building; and then, perhaps, presto! descending a staircase a few
feet, to another tier of similar shop-windows, domiciles, garret
alleys, and dormer-window bazars; and the next thing, plump down
again, ten feet or so more, into the very street itself. Indeed are
they, as the "Vale-Royale" says, "a singular property of praise to
this city, whereof I know not the like of any other."
One manifest use and enjoyment of this medley of in and out, up and
down, above and below, balconies, basements, attics, dormer windows,
gables, and casements, the old chronicler failed to mention, but there
can never have been a day or a generation which has not discovered
it, and that is the convenient overlooking of all that goes on in the
street below. What rare and comfortable nooks for the spying on
processions, and all manner of shows and spectacles! To sit snug in
one's best chamber, ten feet above the street, ten feet out into it,
with windows looking up and down the highway,--what vantage it must
have been in the days when the Miracle Plays went wheeling along from
street to street, played on double scaffolded carts; the players
attiring themselves on the lower scaffold, while the play was
progressing on the upper! They began to do this in Chester in the year
of our Lord 1268. There were generally in use at one time twenty-four
of the wheeled stages; as soon as one play was over, its stage was
wheeled along to the next street, and another took its place. The
plays were called Mysteries, and were devised for the giving of
instruction in the Old and New Testament, which had been so long
sealed books to the people. Luther gave them his sanction, saying,
"Such spectacles often do more good and produce more impression than
sermons."
The old chronicles are full of quaint and interesting entries in
regard to these plays. The different trades and guilds of the city
represented different acts in the holy dramas:--
The Barkers and Tanners, _The Fall of Lucifer_.
Drapers and Hosiers, _The Creation of the World_.
Drawers of Dee and Water Leaders, _Noe and his Shippe_.
Barbers, Wax Chandlers, and Leeches, _Abraham and Isaac_.
Cappers, Wire Drawers, and Pinners, _Balak and Balaam with Moses_.
Wrights, Slaters, Tylers, Daubers, and Thatchers, _The Nativity_.
In 1574 these plays were played for the last time. There had been
several attempts before to suppress them. One Chester mayor, Henry
Hardware by name, being a "godly and zealous man, caused the gyauntes
in the mid-somer show to be broken up, not to go; and the devil in his
feathers he put awaye, and the caps, and the canes, and dragon and the
naked boys."
But it was reserved for another mayor, Sir John Savage, Knight, to
have the honor of finally putting an end to the pageants. "Sir John
Savage, knight, being Mayor of Chester, which was the laste time they
were played, and we praise God, and praye that we see not the like
profanation of holy Scriptures, but O, the mercie of God for the time
of our ignorance!" says an old history, written in 1595.
At intervals between these pious suppressions, carnal and
pleasure-loving persons made great efforts to restore the plays; and
there are some very curious accounts of expenditures made in Chester,
under mayors less godly than Hardware and Savage, for the
rehabilitation of some of the old properties of the sacred pageants:--
"For finding all the materials with the workmanship of the four
great giants, all to be made new, as neere as may be, lyke as
they were before, at five pounds a giant, the least that can
be, and four men to carry them at two shillings and sixpence
each."
These redoubtable giants, which could not be made at less than five
pounds apiece, were constructed out of "hoops, deal boards, nails,
pasteboard, scale-board, paper of various sorts, buckram size cloth,
old sheets for their bodies, sleeves and shirts, tinsille, tinfoil,
gold and silver leaf, colors of different kinds, and glue in
abundance." Last, not least, came the item, "For arsknick to put into
the paste to save the giants from being eaten by the rats, one
shilling and fourpence."
It is at first laughable to think of a set of city fathers summing up
such accounts as these for a paper baby show, but upon second thought
the question occurs whether city funds are any better administered in
these days. The paper giants, feathered devils, and dragons were
cheaper than champagne suppers and stationery now-a-days in "hede and
chefe" cities.