CANTERBURY
There stands a city, neither large nor small,
Its air and situation sweet and pretty.
It matters very little, if at all,
Whether its denizens are dull or witty;
Whether the ladies there are short or tall,
Brunettes or blondes; only, there stands a city!
Perhaps 'tis also requisite to minute,
That there's a Castle and a Cobbler in it.
Thus wrote Ingoldsby of his native city of Canterbury, in "The Ghost,"
and "sweet and pretty" its air and situation remain, sixty years
since those lines were penned. For the changes that have altered so
many other cities and towns have brought little disturbance here. No
manufactures have come to abolish the prettiness of the situation; the
air--the atmospheric air--is sweet and fragrant as of yore, and that
other air--the demeanour and deportment--of Canterbury is still, as
ever, gravely cheerful, as surely befits the capital city of a Primate
whose Church is still a going concern.
Ingoldsby was exactly right in his epithetical summing-up, for
prettiness and not grandeur is the characteristic of the gentle valley
of the Stour, wherein Canterbury is set. Approach it from whatever
quarter you will, and you will find prettiness only in the situation.
Even when viewed from the commanding heights of Harbledown and St.
Thomas's Hill, the only grandeur is that of the Cathedral, and that
is extrinsic, a something imported into the picture. Nay, even the
uprising bulk of that cathedral church gains in effect from being thus
set down in midst of a valley that is almost with equal justness called
a plain, and whose features may, without offence, or the suspicion of
any thought derogatory from their beauty, be termed so featureless.
Unquestionably the best direction whence to enter this ancient capital
of the Kentish folk--this Kaintware-bury of the Saxons, the Durovernum
of the Romans--is from Harbledown, whence the pilgrims from London,
or from the north and west of England, entered. Only thus does the
stranger receive a really accurate impression. With emotions doubtless
less violent than those of the mediæval pilgrims to the shrine of the
blessed martyr, St. Thomas, but still strongly aroused, he sees the
west front of the Cathedral, its two western "towers," and the great
central "Bell-Harry" tower displayed boldly before him, in the level,
and may even identify the more prominent of the public buildings.
Descending from this hill, he passes through the ancient suburb of
Saint Dunstan, and enters the city beneath the frowning portals of the
West Gate.
If, on the other hand, the modern pilgrim arrives per Chatham and
Dover Railway, he will be dumped down in quite a different direction,
on the south side of the city, near Wincheap Street, in which
thoroughfare he will be able, without any delay, to discover his
first Ingoldsby landmark in Canterbury, in the shape of the "Harris's
Almshouses," founded in 1729 by that ancestral Harris whose daughter
his great-grandfather had married. They are five quite humble little
red-brick houses, with a garden at the back, endowed for the support of
two poor parishioners of St. Mary Magdalene, two of Thanington, and one
of St. Mildred's. The value is the modest one of about £9 a year. An
unassuming tablet on the central house of the row tells this story:
Mr. Thomas Harris
of this City
Founder of these Five
Alms-Houses
hath endowed them with
Marly Farm in Kent
for the Maintenance of five
Poor Familys for ever.
Ingoldsby--the Reverend Richard Harris Barham--became a governor of
this charity on his attaining his majority, as already alluded to in
the sketch of his birth and career.
The district of Wincheap only becomes tolerable after leaving the
railway behind. This outlying part, without the city walls, was of old
that place of degradation where the scourgings and stripes, the whips
and scorpions of mediæval punishments, were inflicted; where offending
books--ay, and the horror of it, the Protestant martyrs--were burnt of
yore. In this "Potter's Field" that is not now more than a struggling
little suburb where all the littlenesses of life are prominent, and few
of its beauties are to be seen, there has of late been erected a great
granite memorial pillar, surmounted by the "Canterbury Cross," on the
site of the stake at which forty-one victims of the Marian persecution
perished. Shackle and stake, faggot and gyve, rivet and torch, how busy
they were! It is a beautiful sentiment that rears this monument on the
spot where they suffered who testified for Jesus; but it should stand,
plain for all men to see, in the Cathedral Close itself.
Our course from this point into the city leads up to the Castle,
mentioned in the Legends, and especially in that early one, "The
Ghost," in whose stanzas are found many exquisitely apposite local
Canterbury touches. That Castle is, in its secular way, as interesting
as the Cathedral in its ecclesiastical:
The Castle was a huge and antique mound,
Proof against all the artillery of the quiver,
Ere those abominable guns were found,
To send cold lead through gallant warrior's liver.
It stands upon a gently-rising ground,
Sloping down gradually to the river,
Resembling (to compare great things with smaller)
A well-scoop'd, mouldy Stilton cheese--but taller.
The Keep, I find, 's been sadly alter'd lately,
And, 'stead of mail-clad knights, of honour jealous,
In martial panoply so grand and stately,
Its walls are fill'd with money-making fellows,
And stuff'd, unless I'm misinformed greatly,
With leaden pipes, and coke, and coals, and bellows,
In short, so great a change has come to pass,
'Tis now a manufactory of Gas.
[Illustration: CANTERBURY CASTLE.]
It is immediately fronting the street that this keep of old romantic
Norman times is found, with the smoke and noxious fumes, the chimneys
and retorts, of the City of Canterbury Gas-light and Coke Company,
very insistent to eyes and nose, in the rear; and, if you look down
a by-street--"Gas Street" is the vulgar name of it--and peer into the
empty roofless shell of that keep, you will discover it to be still a
coal-bunker, and that those who, in the rhyme of Ingoldsby, manufacture
"garss," are not more gentle with historic ruins than they were in
1825, when it was first put to this use. These shattered walls that,
quarried by time and the hands of spoilers, do indeed, as Ingoldsby
suggests, resemble one of those great, well-scooped cheeses found
in the coffee-rooms of old-fashioned hotels, were built by two very
great castle-builders; by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, and William de
Corbeil, Archbishop of Canterbury. What Gundulf began for his master
and over-lord William the Conqueror, William de Corbeil completed
for Henry I. Among all the great castle keeps of England it ranked
third in size, and in that respect was inferior only to those of
Colchester and Norwich. It looks a very poor third indeed nowadays, and
so battered and reduced that a hundred keeps are more upstanding and
impressive. Alas! for that poor castle, its career was never an heroic
one. It surrendered tamely to Louis, the Dauphin of France, in 1216,
and for long years afterwards was a prison for Jews on occasions when
persecutions of the Chosen People broke out. From that use it declined
to the lower level of a debtor's prison.
Not far distant from it are the Dane John gardens, a public park of
by no means recent origin. It has been for more than a hundred years
what it is now, and is perhaps one of the very best wooded and most
picturesque urban parks in existence. Antiquaries have long since
ceased to trouble about the odd name, which appears to have originally
come from an estate here, belonging to the Castle, and variously named
the "Castle" or "Donjon" Manor. The huge prehistoric mound within its
area was remodelled, heaped seventeen feet higher, crowned with a
monument that halts between Gothic and Classic, and ringed round with
a spiral walk about 1790. The very long and very complacent statement
on that monument, telling how, when, and by whom all these things were
done, is itself a monument of self-satisfaction.
The city walls, with their towers at regular intervals, even yet in
very good preservation, bound the Dane John grounds in one direction.
Still goes a broad walk on the summit of those walls, and the pilgrim
might imagine himself a sentry guarding the mediæval city, were it not
that dense and sordid suburbs spread beyond, on whose blank walls soap
and cheap tea advertisements alternate with others crying the virtues
of infants' foods and the latest quack nostrums.
[Illustration: THE DANE JOHN, CANTERBURY.]
Canterbury is Canterbury yet, and Becket is still its prophet, but
some things be changed. Electric lighting--of a marvellously poor
illuminating quality it is true, and vastly inferior to the gas they
brew at the Castle, but yet electric lighting of sorts--somewhat
remodernises its streets; but it is still true, as at any time since
Popery came down crash, that you cannot obtain lodging without money,
or miracles, whether or no. Becket, however, still pervades the place.
His arms--the three black Cornish choughs, red-beaked and clawed, on
a blue field--have been adopted by the city, and every shop patronised
by visitors sells china or trinkets painted or engraved with them.
Pictures of the transept where he fell on that day of long ago; yea,
even photographs of the skull and bones discovered some years since,
and thought to be his, are at every turn. Becket is not forgot, and
a certain portly Tudor shade--the wraith of one who ordained all
worship and reverence of him to cease and every vestige of his shrine
and relics to be destroyed--must surely be furiously and impotently
angered. Little need, however, for that kingly shade to be thus
perturbed; this modern and local cult of Saint Thomas is only business
at Canterbury--and very good business, too.
Still goes the tourist-pilgrim along the way to the Cathedral trod by
the sinners of mediæval times, to purge them of their sins and start
afresh. Where they turned off to the left from the main street, down
Mercery Lane, the present-day visitors still turn, and the Christchurch
Gate, at the end of the narrow lane, opens as of old into the Cathedral
precincts. It is a wonderful gatehouse, this of Christchurch, built
by Prior Goldstone nigh upon four hundred years ago, and elaborately
carved with Tudor roses, portcullises, and things now so blunted by
time that it is difficult to distinguish them. Time has dissolved much
of the worthy Prior's noble structure, like so much sugar.
It was here, in this open space in front of the Gate, that the quaint
Butter Market stood until quite recently. Tardily eager to honour
one of her sons, Canterbury was so ill-advised as to sweep away the
curious Butter Market to make room for the new memorial to Christopher
Marlowe, the great dramatist of Shakespearean times, whose birthplace
still stands in St. George's Street. It is a cynical freak of time that
honour should be done to Marlowe at such a spot, for the Church in his
lifetime held him to be "a wretch," a "filthy play-maker," an "atheist
and a sottish swine," and it was thought that the unknown person who
slew him in his thirtieth year was someone who thus revenged his
insults to religion.
The Marlowe Memorial deserves attention. It is in the form of a
nude bronze figure representing the Muse of Poetry, placed on a
stone pedestal, and in the act of playing upon a lyre; but it is an
exceedingly plump and eminently erotic, rather than intellectual,
figure thus made to stand for the Muse--a Doll Tearsheet, with a
coarse, sensual face, most inappropriately shaded by a wreath of poetic
bays. The last touch of vulgarity is that especially municipal idea
of giving the whole thing a smart finish by surrounding it with four
ornate street-lamps.
[Illustration: THE DARK ENTRY.]
Burgate Street, branching off from this point to the right, is the
street where Barham was born; but our present business is to the Close,
and round the south side of the Cathedral to the east end, where the
Norman infirmary ruins stand. Turning here to the left, a narrow,
stone-paved passage, in between high, ancient walls, leads crookedly
through the romantic remains of the domestic buildings of the old
monastery to the cloisters and the north side of the Cathedral. It
is a twilight place, even now, in the brightest days of summer, and
was once, before portions of it were unroofed, much darker. That was
the time when it obtained its existing name of the "Dark Entry." If
the pages of the _Ingoldsby Legends_ are opened, and the legend of
"Nell Cook" is read, much will be found on the subject of this gloomy
passage. That legend is the "King's Scholar's Story": the terror of
a schoolboy of King Henry VIII.'s school, on the north side of the
precincts, at the prospect of being sent back by the haunted entry
after dark, on a Friday, when the ghost of Nell Cook was supposed to
have its weekly outing. Well might anyone believing in ghosts and omens
especially desire not to meet that spirit, for such an encounter was
supposed to presage the death of the person within the year:
[Illustration: THE DARK ENTRY, CANTERBURY.]
"Now nay, dear Uncle Ingoldsby, now send me not I pray,
Back by that Entry dark, for that you know's the nearest way;
I dread that Entry dark with Jane alone at such an hour,
It fears me quite--it's Friday night!--and then Nell Cook hath pow'r."
"And who, silly child, is Nell Cook?" asks Uncle Ingoldsby; and the
King's Scholar answers:
"It was in bluff King Harry's days, while yet he went to shrift,
And long before he stamped and swore, and cut the Pope adrift;
There lived a portly Canon then, a sage and learned clerk;
He had, I trow, a goodly house, fast by that Entry dark.
"The Canon was a portly man--of Latin and of Greek,
And learned lore, he had good store,--yet health was on his cheek.
The Priory fare was scant and spare, the bread was made of rye,
The beer was weak, yet he was sleek--he had a merry eye.
"For though within the Priory the fare was scant and thin,
The Canon's house it stood without;--he kept good cheer within;
Unto the best he prest each guest, with free and jovial look,
And Ellen Bean ruled his _cuisine_.--He called her 'Nelly Cook.'"
It is not a very proper story that the King's Scholar unfolds; of how a
"niece" of the Canon comes to stay with him, and arouses the jealousy
of the good-looking cook, whose affections that "merry eye" of the
Canon had captured. Nell Cook thereupon successfully poisons the Canon
and the strange lady with "some nasty doctor's stuff," with which she
flavours a pie destined for the Canonical table, and the two are found
as the Scholar tells:
"The Canon's head lies on the bed,--his niece lies on the floor!
They are as dead as any nail that is in any door!"
Nell Cook, for her crime, says Tom Ingoldsby, adapting to his literary
uses the legend long current in Canterbury, was buried alive beneath
one of the great paving-stones of the "Dark Entry"; when, local history
does not inform us:
But one thing's clear--that's all the year, on every Friday night,
Throughout that Entry dark doth roam Nell Cook's unquiet sprite.
And whoever meets Nell Cook is bound to die some untimeous death within
the year! Certainly, the Dark Entry is not a place greatly frequented
after nightfall, even nowadays--but that is perhaps less by reason of
superstitious fears than because it leads to nowhere in particular.