for a while in Chester; but at last the people contrived an ingenious
resuscitation of the old amusements under new names, and with new
themes, to which nobody could object. They dramatized old stories,
legends, histories of kings, and the like. The story of Æneas and
Queen Dido was one of the first played. No doubt all the "gyauntes"
and hobble-de-horses which had not been eaten up by rats and moths
came in as effectively in the second dispensation as in the first. The
only one of the later plays of which an account has been preserved was
played in 1608, in honor of the oldest son of James I., by the sheriff
of Chester, who himself wrote a flaming account of it. He says:--
"Zeal produced it, love devized it, boyes performed it, men
beheld it, and none but fools dispraised it.... The chiefest
part of this people-pleasing spectacle consisted in three Bees,
that is, Boyes, Beastes, and Bels."
Allegory, mythology, music, fireworks, and ground and lofty tumbling
were jumbled together in a fine way, in the sheriff's show. Envy was
on horseback with a wreath of snakes around her head; Plenty, Peace,
Fame, and Joy were personated; Mercury came down from heaven with
wings, in a cloud; a "wheele of fire burning very cunningly, with
other fireworks, mounted the Crosse by the assistance of ropes, in the
midst of heavenly melody;" and, to top off with, a grotesque figure
climbed up to the top of the "Crosse," and stood on his head, with his
feet in the air, "very dangerously and wonderfully to the view of the
beholders, and casting fireworks very delightfull." Truly, the
sheriff's language seems hardly too strong, when he says that none but
fools dispraised his spectacle.
These secular shows never attained the popularity of the old Mystery
Plays. That mysterious halo of attraction which always invests the
forbidden undoubtedly heightened the reputed charm of the
never-more-to-be-seen sacred pageants, and led people to continually
depreciate the value of all entertainments offered as substitutes for
them. Probably in the midst of the heavenly melodies and "fireworks
very delightfull," at the sheriff's grand show, old men went about
shaking their heads regretfully, and saying, "Ah, but you should have
seen the gyaunts we used to have forty years ago, and the way they
played the Fall of Lucifer in 1574; there's never been anything like
it since;" and immediately all the young people who had never seen a
Miracle Play began to be full of dissatisfied wonder as to what they
were like.
But what the shows and pageants lacked in the early days of the
seventeenth century, grand processions went a long way towards making
up. It is evident that Chester people never missed an occasion for
turning out in fine array; and there being always somebody who took
the trouble to write a full account of the parade, we of to-day know
almost as much about it as if we had been on the spot. The old
chronicles in the Chester public library are running over with quaint
and gay stories of such doings as the following:
"Came to Chester, being Saturday, the Duchess of Tremoyle, from
France, mother-in-law to the Lord Strange: and all the Gentry
of Cheshier, Flintshier, and Denbighshier went to meet her at
Hoole's Heath, with the Earl of Derby; being at least six
hundred horse. All the Gentle Men of the artelery yard lately
erected in Chester, met her in Cow Lane, in very stately
manner, all with greate white and blew fethers, and went before
her chariot, in march, to the Bishop's Pallas, and making a
yard, let her thro the middest, and then gave her three volleys
of shot, and so returned to their yard.... So many knights,
esquires, and Gentle Men never were in Chester, no, not to meet
King James when he went to Chester."
This Cow Lane is now called Frodsham Street; and on one of its corners
is the building in which William Penn, in his day, preached more than
once, setting forth doctrines which the Duchess of Tremoyle would have
much disrelished in her day, as would also the "artelery Gentle Men"
with their "greate white and blew fethers." King James himself is said
to have once dropped in at this Quaker meeting-house when Penn was
preaching, and to have sat, attentive, through the entire discourse.
And so we come down through the centuries, from the pasteboard
"gyaunt" and glued dragon, winged Mercury with fire-wheel, Duchess of
Tremoyle with her plumed horsemen, to the grim but gentle Quaker,
holding feathers pernicious, plays deadly, and permitting to the
people nothing but plain yea and nay. Of all this, and worlds more
like it, and gayer and wilder,--sadder, too,--is the Chester air so
brimful that, as I said in the beginning, it seems perpetually to go
lilting about one's ears.
Leaving the library, with its quaint and fascinating old records, and
turning aside at intervals from the more ancient landmarks of the
streets to observe the ways and conditions of the Cestrians now, the
traveller is no less repaid. Every rod of the sidewalk is a study for
its present as well as for its past. The venders are a guild by
themselves, as much to-day as they were in the sixteenth century. They
build up their stuffs, their old chairs, chests, brooms, crockery and
tinware, in stacks of confusion, in shelf-like balconies, on beams
hanging overhead and in corners and nooks underfoot, all along the
most ancient of the Rows. It is a piece of good luck to walk past half
a dozen doors there without jostling something on the right or left,
and bringing down a clattering pile on one's heels. From shadowy
recesses, men and women eager for trade dart out, eying the stranger
sharply. They are connoisseurs in customers, if in nothing else, the
Cestrian dealers of to-day. They know at a glance who will give ten
shillings and sixpence for a cream jug without any nose, and with a
big crack in one side, on the bare chance of its being old Welsh.
There is much excuse for their spreading out their goods over the
highway, as they do, for the shops themselves are closets,--six by
eight, eight by ten; ten by twelve is a spacious mart, in comparison
with the average. Deprived of the outside nooks between the pillars of
the arcade, the dealers would be sorely put to it for room. It is
becoming, however, a disputed question whether the renting of these
shops includes any right to the covered ways in front of them; and
there is great anxiety among the inhabitants of the more dilapidated
portions of the Rows in consequence.
"There's a deespute with the corporation, mem, as to whether we hown
the stalls or not," said an energetic furniture-wife (if fish-wife,
why not furniture-wife?) to me one day, as I was laughingly steering a
cautious passage among her shaky pyramids of fourth or twentieth hand
furniture. "It's lasted a while now, an' they've not forced us to give
'em hup as yet; but I'm afeard they may bring it about," she added,
with the dogged humility of her class. "They've everything their own
way,--the corporation."
It is worth while to take a turn down some of the crevice-like alleys
in these Rows, and see where the people live; see also where the
nobility gets part of its wherewithal to eat, drink, and be clothed.
Often there is to be seen at the far end of these crevices a point of
sunlight; like the gleaming point of light seen ahead, in going
through a rayless tunnel. This betokens a tiny court-yard in the rear.
These court-yards are always well worth seeing. They are paved,
sometimes with tiles evidently hundreds of years old. The different
properties of the dozens of families living in tenements opening on
the court are arranged around its sides, apparently each family
keeping scrupulously to its own little hand's-breadth of room;
frequently a tiny flower-bed, or a single plant in a pot, gives a
gleam of cheer to the place. In such a court-yard as this, I found,
one morning, a yellow-haired, blue-eyed little maid, scrubbing away
for dear life, with a broom and soap-suds, on the old tiles. She was
not over nine years old; her bare legs and feet were pink and chubby,
and she had a smile like a sunbeam.
"I saw the sun shining in here so brightly that I walked up the alley
to see how it got in," I said to her.
"Yes, mem," she said, with a courtesy. "It do shine in here
beautiful." And she looked up at the sky, smiling.
"Have you lived here long?" I asked.
"About nine months, mem. I'm only in service, mem," she continued with
a deprecating courtesy, modestly anxious to disclaim the honor of
having any proprietary right in the place.
"We've five rooms, mem," she went on. "It's a very nice lodging, if
you'd like to see it." And she threw open a door into an infinitesimal
parlor, out of which opened a still smaller dining-room, lighted only
by a window in the parlor door. There were two bedrooms above, reached
by a nearly upright stairway, not over two feet wide. The fifth room
was a "beautiful washroom," which the little maiden exhibited with
even more pride than she had shown the parlor. "It's three families
has it together, mem," she explained. "It's a great thing to get a
washroom. And we've a coal-hole, too, mem," she said eagerly; "you
passed it, coming up." And she stepped a few paces down the alley, and
threw open a door into a rayless place possibly five by seven feet in
size. "It used to be a bedroom, mem, to the opposite house; but it's
empty now, so we gets it for coal." I could not take my eyes from the
child's face, as she prattled and pattered along. She looked like an
angel. Her face shone with loyalty, pride, and happiness. I envied the
poverty-stricken dwellers in this court their barefooted handmaiden,
and would have taken her then and there, if I could, into my own
service for her lifetime. As we stood talking, another door opened,
and a grizzled old head popped out.
"Good-morning, mem," said the child cheerily, making the same
respectful courtesy she had made to me. "I'm just showin' the lady
what nice lodgin's we've 'ere in the court."
"Humph," said the old woman gruffly, as she tottered out, leaving her
door wide open; "they're nothin' to boast of."
Her own lodging certainly was not. It was literally little more than a
chamber in the wall: it had no window, except one small square pane
above the door. You could hardly stand upright in it, and not much
more than turn around. The walls were hung full: household utensils,
clothes, even her two or three books, were hung up by strings; there
being only room for one tiny table, besides the stove. In one corner
stood a step-ladder, which led up through a hole in the ceiling to the
cranny overhead in which she slept. This was all the old woman had.
She lived here alone, and she paid to the Duke of Westminster two
shillings and sixpence a week for the rent of the place. "It's dear at
the rent," she said; "but it's a respectable place, an' I think a deal
o' that." And she sighed.
The name of the Duke of Westminster and the value of that two and
sixpence to his grace meant more to me that morning than it would have
done twenty-four hours earlier; for on the previous afternoon we had
visited his palace, the famous Eaton Hall. We had walked there for
weary hours over marble floors, under frescoed domes, through long
lines of statues, of pictures, of stained-glass windows, hangings,
carvings, and rare relics and trophies innumerable. We had seen the
duchess's window balcony, one waving mass of yellow musk. "Her
ladyship is very fond of musk. It is always to be kept flowering at
her window," we were told.
We had walked also through a glass corridor three hundred and
seventy-five yards long, draped with white clematis and heliotrope on
one side, and on the other banked high with geraniums, carnations,
and all manner of flowers. Opening at intervals in these banks of
flowers were doors into other conservatories: one was filled chiefly
with rare orchids, like an enchanted aviary of hummingbirds, arrested
on the wing; gold and white, purple and white, brown and gold, green,
snowy white, orange; some of them as large as a fleur-de-lis. Another
house was filled with ferns and palms, green, luxuriant, like a bit of
tropical forest brought across seas for his grace's pleasure. The most
superb sight of all was the lotus house. Cleopatra herself might have
flushed with pleasure at beholding it. A deep tank, sixty feet long,
and twenty wide, filled with white and blue and pink blossoms,
floating, swaying, lolling on the dark water; while, seemingly to
uphold the glass roof canopying this lotus-decked sea, rose slender
columns, wreathed with thunbergia vines in full bloom, yellow, orange,
and white; the glass walls of the building were set thick and high
with maiden-hair and other rare ferns, interspersed at irregular
intervals with solid masses of purple or white flowers. The spell of
the place, of its warm, languid air, was beyond words: it was
bewildering.
All this being vivid in my mind, I started at hearing his grace's name
from the old woman's lips.
"So these houses belong to the Duke of Westminster, do they?" I
replied.
"Yes, 'ee's the 'ole o' 't," she answered; "an' a power o' money it
brings 'im in, considerin' its size. 'Ee 's big rents in this town.
Mebbe ye've bin out t' 'is 'all? It's a gran' sight, I'm told. I've
never seen it."
I was minded then to tell about the duke's flowers. It would have been
only a bit of a fairy story to the little maid, a bright spot in her
still bright horizons; but I forebore, for the sake of the old woman's
soul, already enough wrung and embittered by the long strain of her
hard lot, and its contrast with that of her betters, without having
that contrast enforced by a vivid picture of the duke's hothouses. My
own memory of them was darkened forever,--unreasonably so, perhaps;
but the antithesis came too suddenly and soon for me ever to separate
the pictures.
The archæologist in Chester will frequently be lured from its streets
to its still more famous walls. This side Rome there is no such piece
of Roman masonry work, to be seen. Here, indeed, is the air full of
ballad measures, to which one must step, if he go his way thinking at
all. The four great gates, north, south, east, and west,--three kept
by earls, and only one owned by the citizens; the lesser posterns,
with commoner names, born of their different sorts of traffic, or the
fords to which they led; the towers and turrets, fought over, lost and
won, and won and lost, trod by centuries of brave fighters whose names
live forever; bridgeways and arches in their own successions, of as
noble lineage as any lineages of men,--of such are the walls of
Chester. They surround the old city; are nearly two miles in length,
and were originally of the width prescribed in the ancient Roman
manual of Vitruvius, "that two armed men may pass each other without
impediment." There are many places, now, however, which would by no
means come up to that standard; Nature having usurped much space with
her various growths, and time having been chipping away at them as
well. In fact, on some portions of the wall, there is only a narrow
grassy footpath, such as might wind around in a village churchyard. To
come up by hoary stone stairs, out of the bustling street, atop of the
wall, and out on such a bit of footpath as this, with an outlook over
the Rood Eye meadow and off toward the region of the old Welsh
castles, is a fine early-morning treat in Chester. Some of the towers
are now sunk to the ignoble uses of heterogeneous museums. Old women
have the keys, and for a fee admit curious people to the ancient
chambers and keeps, where, after having the satisfaction of standing
where kings have stood, and looking off over fields where kings'
battles were fought, they can gaze at glass cases full of curiosities
and relics of one sort and another, sometimes of an incredible
worthlessness. In the tower known as King Charles's Tower, from the
fact of Charles I. having stood there, on the 27th of September, 1645,
overlooking the to him luckless battle of Rowton Moor, is the most
miscellaneous collection of odds and ends ever offered to public gaze.
A very old woman keeps the key of this tower, and is herself by no
means the least of the curiosities in it. She was born in Chester, and
recollects well when all the space outside the old walls, which is now
occupied by the modern city, was chiefly woods; she used to go, in
her childhood, to play and to gather flowers in them. The fact that
King Charles once looked through the window of this turret has grown,
by a sort of geometrical ratio relative to the number of years she has
been reiterating the statement, into a colossally disproportionate
place in her mind.
"The king, mem, stood just where you're standin' now," she says over
and over and over, in a mechanical manner, as long as you remain in
the tower. I wondered if she said it all night, in her sleep; and if,
if one were to spend a whole day in the tower, she would never stop
saying it. She was an enthusiastic show-woman of her little store;
undismayed by any amount of indifference on the part of her listeners.
"'Ere 's a face you know, mem, I dare say," producing from one corner
of the glass case a cheap newspaper picture, much soiled, of General
Grant. "'Ee was in this tower last summer, and 'ee was much
hinterested."
Next to General Grant's portrait came "a ring snake from Kentucky."
"It's my brother, mem, brought that over: twenty years ago, 'ee was in
Hamerica. You must undustand the puttin' of 'em hup better than we do,
mem, for 'ere's these salamanders was only put hup two years ago, an'
they've quite gone a'ready, in that time."
She had a statuette of King Charles, Cromwell's chaplain's broth bowl,
a bit of a bedquilt of Queen Anne's, a black snake from Australia, a
fine-tooth comb from Africa, a tattered fifty-cent piece of American
paper currency, and a string of shell money from the South Sea
Islands, all arranged in close proximity. Taking up the bit of
American currency, she held it out toward us, saying inquiringly,
"Hextinct now, mem, I believe?" I think she can hardly have recovered
even yet from the bewilderment into which she was thrown by our
convulsive laughter and ejaculated reply, "Oh, no! Would that it
were!"
In a clear day can be seen from this tower, a dozen or so miles to the
south, the ruins of a castle built by Earl Randel Blundeville. He was
the Earl Randel of whom Roger Lacy, constable of Cheshire in 1204,
made a famous rescue, once on a time. The earl, it seems, was in a
desperate strait, besieged in one of his castles by the Welsh; perhaps
in this very castle. Roger Lacy, hearing of the earl's situation,
forthwith made a muster of all the tramps, beggars, and rapscallions
he could find,--"a tumultuous rout," says the chronicle, "of loose,
disorderly, and dissolute persons, players, minstrels, shoemakers and
the like,--and marched speedily towards the enemy." The Welsh, seeing
so great a multitude coming, raised their siege and fled; and the
earl, thus delivered, showed his gratitude to Constable Roger by
conferring upon him perpetual authority over the loose, idle persons
in Cheshire; making the office hereditary in the Lacy family. A
thankless dignity, one would suppose, at best; by no means a sinecure,
at any time, and during the season of the Midsummer Fairs a terrible
responsibility: it being the law of the land that during those fairs
the city of Chester was for the space of one month a free city of
refuge for all criminals, of whatsoever degree; in token of which a
glove was hung out at St. Peter's Church, on the first day of the
fairs.
There is another good tale of Roger Lacy's prowess. He seems to have
been a roving fighter, for he once held a castle in Normandy, for King
John, against the French, "with such gallantry that after all his
victuals were spent, having been besieged almost a year, and many
assaults of the enemy made, but still repulsed by him, he mounts his
horse, and issues out of the castle with his troop into the middest of
his enemies, chusing rather to die like a soldier, than to starve to
death. He slew many of the enemy, but was at last with much difficulty
taken prisoner; so he and his soldiers were brought prisoners to the
King of France, where, by the command of the king, Roger Lacy was to
be held no strict prisoner, for his great honesty and trust in keeping
the Castle so gallantly.... King John's letter to Roger Lacy
concerning the keeping of the said castle, you may see among the
Norman writings put out by Andrew du Chesne, and printed at Paris in
1619." Of all of which, if no ballad have ever been written, it is
certain that songs must have been sung by minstrels at the time; and
the name of the brave Roger's lady-love was well suited to minstrelsy,
she being one Maud de Clare. Plain Roger Lacy and Maud de Clare! The
dullest fancy takes a leap at the sound of the two names.
In the same old chronicle which gives these and many other narratives
of Roger Lacy is the history of a singular, half-witted being, who
was known in Vale-Royale, in the fifteenth century, as Nixon the
Prophet. How much that the old records claim for him, in the way of
minute and minutely fulfilled prophecies, is to be set down to the
score of ignorant superstition, it is hard now to say; but there must
have been some foundation in fact for the narrative. Robert Nixon was
the son of a farmer in Cheshire County, and was born in the year 1467.
His stupidity and ignorance were said to be "invincible." No efforts
could make him understand anything save the care of cattle, and even
in this he showed at times a brutish and idiotic cruelty. He had a
very rough, coarse voice, but said little, sometimes passing whole
months without opening his lips to speak. He began very early to
foretell events, and with an apparently preternatural accuracy. When
he was a lad, he was seen, one day, to abuse an ox belonging to his
brother. To a person threatening to inform his brother of this act,
Robert replied that three days later his brother would not own the ox.
Sure enough, on the next day a life inheritance came into the estate
on which his brother was a tenant, and that very ox was taken for the
"heriot bond to the new owner." One of the abbey monks having
displeased him, he exclaimed,--
"When you the harrow come on high,
Soon a raven's nest will be."
The couplet was thought at the time to be simple nonsense; but as it
turned out, the last abbot of that monastery was named Harrow, and
when the king suppressed the monastery he gave the domain to Sir
Thomas Holcroft, whose crest was a raven.
It was also one of Nixon's predictions that the two abbeys of
Vale-Royale and Norton should meet on Orton bridge and the thorn
growing in the abbey yard should be its door.
When the abbeys were pulled down, in the time of the Reformation,
stones taken from each of them were used in rebuilding that bridge;
and the thorn-tree was cut down, and placed as a barrier across the
entrance to the abbey court, to keep the sheep from entering there.
The most remarkable of Nixon's predictions or revelations was at the
time of the battle on Bosworth Field between Richard III. and Henry
VII. On that day, as he was driving a pair of oxen, he stopped
suddenly, and with his whip pointing now one way, now another, cried
aloud, "Now, Richard," "Now, Harry!" At last he said, "Now, Harry, get
over that ditch, and you gain the day!" The ploughmen with him were
greatly amazed, and related to many persons what had passed. When a
courier came through the country announcing the result of the battle,
he verified every word Nixon had said.
This courier, when he returned to court, recounted Nixon's
predictions; and King Henry was so impressed by them that he at once
sent orders to have him brought to the palace.
Before this messenger arrived, Nixon ran about like a madman, weeping
and crying that the king was about sending for him, and that he must
go to court to be starved to death.
In a few days the royal messenger appeared. Nixon was turning the spit
in his brother's kitchen. Just before the messenger came in sight, he
shrieked out, "He is on the road! He is coming for me! I shall be
starved!"