enough, and it has little history, but it came very near being the
scene of a bloodstained struggle between Catholics and Presbyterians in
the Old Pretender’s rising of 1715. Nearly the whole of the Catholic
gentry of Lancashire had turned out to aid the Pretender’s forces,
and the rebellion was almost on the point of changing from a dynastic
conflict and a clash between Whig and Tory ideals into the very much
more serious matter of a religious war. The rising of the Tories and
the Catholics stirred to furious antagonism the Whigs and the Low
Churchmen, but most of them blew off their rage in violent language.
Not so the valiant Boanerges of the dissenting chapel of Chowbent, near
Bolton, who not only breathed fire and slaughter, but took the lead
of eighty among his congregation, whom he marched off to the front;
the front being the passage of the Ribble, over against Preston. There
the embattled minister—this valiant Parson Woods, “General Woods”
as they called him—posted his men to withstand the crossing of the
river, and was said to have drawn his sword and sworn he would run
through the body the first man who showed signs of timidity. Having
arrived there, armed only with what Baines, the Lancashire historian,
calls “implements of husbandry”—what a beautiful phrase, covering the
ungainliness of the poor crooked scythe and spade!—in front of a strong
force of rebels, armed with implements of war, they doubtless were
timid; but the bold advance of General Wills saved the situation, and
Parson Woods had no excuse to embrue his hands in gore. But King George
the First, recognising his earnestness, sent a gratuity of £100, which
Woods promptly divided among his men; they in their turn handing it
over towards rebuilding their chapel.
For the rest, there remains but to remark upon this singular epitaph,
dated 1685, in Walton-le-Dale church, before we have over the bridge
into Preston:
“Here lyeth the body of a pure virgin, espoused to the man Xt Jesus,
Mrs. Cordelia Hoghton, whose honorable descent you know. Know now her
ascent.”
XIII
Crossing the Ribble and looking backwards, the view along the dale to
where Walton stands is charming; but with the extraordinary expansion
of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry, and the building here of
many new mills, it seems like to be an expiring charm of scenery.
Already the mills have come across from the north to the south bank of
the river.
Preston has always been known as “proud.” The old rhyme ran:
Proud Preston,
Poor people,
High church,
Low steeple.
But the rhyme long since went out of date. One would hesitate to
declare that Preston is in any sense poor, while certainly the reproach
of its church having a low steeple has been removed these many years
past; for the spire of St. Werburgh is a particularly fine and lofty
one, rising to a height of 303 feet. If it be necessary to find an
origin for that supposed pride of Proud Preston, I should look for it
in the fact that the town has always been the capital of the Duchy
of Lancaster, and not in the story of its ladies once considering
themselves too superior to mate with the commercial men of the
neighbourhood.
“Proud Preston” occupies a proud position, on lofty ground overlooking
the Ribble and its extensive flats. Its name, “Priest’s Town,” derives
from the site having been the property of a Benedictine priory once
situated here, but before the time of the priory, it was named
“Amounderness,” from the ridge, or ness, then, even more than now, a
striking object across the levels. Penwortham, on the opposite side
of the river, was in that early period the chief place, for there
stood the great castle of the Earls of Chester, giving security to
peaceable folk against the incursions of the Scots; but when the county
of Lancaster was made a Duchy, and the defence centred at Lancaster,
Penwortham decayed and Preston grew populous. The unwisdom of this move
across the river to a site without strong defences was immediately made
apparent, for no sooner had Preston grown into an important town than
the Scots, under Robert Bruce, came and burnt nearly the whole of it.
[Sidenote: _PROUD PRESTON_]
Charters to the number of fifteen, ranging from the time of Henry
the First to that of Charles the Second, have been conferred upon
Preston; mostly in recognition of its importance as capital of the
Duchy of Lancaster; and desirable privileges, such as the right of gaol
and gibbet, tumbril and pillory, were added, so that Preston might
deal, quite independently of Lancaster, with cases arising here, that
demanded those engines of justice.
Still, it was ever a prosperous and busy town, as the antiquity of its
guilds proves; and suffered considerable loss in the Parliamentary
war, when it was the scene of two struggles between Royalists and
Roundheads. The first was in 1643, when the townsfolk were divided in
opinion, and fighting took place in the streets: the second in 1649,
when a Royalist army, commanded by Sir Marmaduke Langdale and the
Duke of Hamilton, was driven from Clitheroe to Ribbleton Moor, on the
outskirts of the town, by Cromwell, with a numerically inferior force.
The next taste of warlike times was in 1715, which was like to be a
very serious time for Preston; for in the Jacobite rebellion that made
this year memorable, the townsfolk figured more than a thought too
prominently as well-wishers to the cause. English rebels, as well as
Scotch, made this incursion from Scotland something new in the moving
annals of such things. In olden times the Scots had come from the north
as enemies; now the Old Pretender, “James the Seventh of Scotland and
Third of England,” was proclaimed at the market-cross with every mark
of approval, and the hospitality of the townsfolk and the smiles of the
young ladies were extended to those who, it was thought, were presently
to upset “the Elector” in London.
[Sidenote: _THE REBELLION OF 1715_]
This kindly reception wrought disaster to the rebels. They had
reached Preston on November 9th, but, instead of marching onward and
fighting, idled away the precious days in feasting and flirting: and,
as it proved, these hospitable burgesses and pretty girls formed what
military strategists might call a “containing force” really helpful
to the Royal armies hurrying up to meet the rebels, who were caught
in Preston town, as neatly as possible. The invaders had numbered two
thousand, but it is typical of the mismanagement of this ill-fated
rebellion that ever since October 6th, when the Northumbrian Jacobites
had assembled at Rothbury, their counsels had been divided. Later, when
they had joined forces with a body of Scottish rebels, and had marched
along the Borders, and so down into Lancashire, there was little
authority and no discipline. The Scots wanted to fight in Scotland,
and the English, for their part, declined to conduct the revolt there.
So, grumbling and dissatisfied, they came south, under the leadership
of Forster of Etherston, elected “General,” but a person of no native
capacity or acquired military knowledge, and simply one of the famous,
long-descended Northumbrian Forsters; famed less on account of their
merits than that they had existed in Northumberland so long, and owned
so many of its acres.
Disheartened by the feebleness of the invasion, five hundred of the
insurgents left, and marched away home again. The remaining fifteen
hundred were reinforced at Preston by the Roman Catholic gentry of
Lancashire, their servants and tenantry, to the number of twelve
hundred, but they appear to have been an embarrassment rather than of
use.
Towards Preston, by way of Manchester and Wigan, came General Wills,
on behalf of King George. His force numbered only a thousand men, and
had the invaders been commanded by a soldier, or even by a civilian
of ordinary courage and determination, it is possible the rebellion,
of 1715 might have been successful. But Forster was a pitiful fellow.
He did not even place Preston in a proper state of defence. It was
not a walled town, and barricades were hastily run up on Wills’s
approach being made known; but no advantage was taken of the excellent
defensible position in advance of the town, where the road ran in a
hollow way, and where the bridge across the river in itself could have
been successfully held by few.
[Sidenote: _ESCAPE OF FORSTER_]
Forster, on hearing of Wills’s march, did certainly a more
extraordinary thing than ever any other military commander is reported
to have done on the approach of the enemy: he went to bed! I believe
we could have respected him more had he run away. How it was that the
other leaders, the Earls of Derwentwater and Kenmure, merely roused
him from his couch, and did not take stronger measures, is a mystery.
Better, perhaps, had they done so; for although the barricaded town
repulsed the attack made by Wills on the 12th, and indeed inflicted
severe loss upon him, Forster agreed to surrender unconditionally, and
delivering Lord Derwentwater and Colonel Macintosh as hostages, did
actually deliver up the town on the 15th. Meanwhile, the Lancashire
Roman Catholics had run away, and none saw the going of them.
Fighting at Sheriffmuir and elsewhere in Scotland followed before the
rebellion was crushed, but the surrender at Preston marked the end
of this incursion upon English soil. Fourteen hundred prisoners were
taken, many of considerable standing. Some among them being half-pay
officers, were treated as deserters, and were summarily shot: hundreds
were consigned to Chester Castle and afterwards sold into slavery
overseas; but those who had been the moving spirits were taken to
London. Among them were the egregious Forster, Lords Derwentwater,
Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carnwath, Widdrington, Wintoun, and Nairn. They
reached London on December 9th; riding horseback from Highgate with
their arms tied behind their backs, to the sound of the drum: a mock
“public entry,” to satirise the hopes they had expressed, in a happier
hour, of a triumphal procession into London.
On the whole, the Government acted with leniency. Derwentwater and
Kenmure were executed, twenty-two rebels were hanged in Lancashire,
and four in London; but Lord Nithsdale, exchanging clothes with his
wife, fled from the Tower, and others were permitted to escape, or were
pardoned after an interval.
Forster escaped from Newgate by an ingenious ruse, only possible
in days when prisons were conducted very much like hotels. He had
inveigled Pitts, the Governor, into his room and the two sat drinking
wine there while Forster’s servant locked the head-gaoler’s attendant
in the cellar. Forster then left the room, ostensibly for a moment,
but did not return, and the Governor, alarmed, arose to find himself
locked in. Already, while he was vainly shouting and thumping upon the
thick oak door, Forster and his trusty servant had enlarged themselves
from gaol, and were making for Rochford on the Essex coast, whence they
embarked for France.
Forster took no further part in public affairs, but travelled to Italy,
and died at Rome in 1738. Had he shown generalship at Preston equal to
this of his flight, all might have gone well with the Pretender.
The rebellion of 1745 came nearer success than this of thirty years
earlier, but we do not find Preston harbouring and encouraging the
rebels of that time, to anything like the same extent. The gaiety of
Preston was not, this time, for them. But what, after all, did that
gaiety amount to? A great deal, perhaps, judged by the standard of the
wild Highlanders, come but lately from their solitary glens; but very
little, it would seem, reckoned from an English standpoint, if the
business then done by the sole wine-merchant of the town may serve for
comparison. It would appear that the merchant who supplied Manchester
lived at Preston, as the resort of the gentry, and was rarely asked to
supply more than a gallon of wine at a time: and that a time which did
not commonly stint itself in drink.
It was a very small place in those days, and numbered little more than
6,000 inhabitants; but when the factory system was introduced into
the cotton manufacture, it grew rapidly, and is now a great town of
more than 113,000 people. Nothing else so vividly shows us how far
removed we are from those days, in circumstances and spirit, than the
simple juxtaposition of those eloquent figures, which speak far more
eloquently than the most impassioned descriptive writing.
[Illustration: PRESTON: TOWN HALL, HARRIS PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND SESSIONS
HOUSE]
[Sidenote: _PRESTON TOWN HALL_]
There remains a certain stateliness in the streets and houses
of Preston: an aristocratic “county town” environment that not
all the expansion of industrialism has been able to engulf: an
eighteenth-century appearance that calmly declines to be hustled out of
existence. The refinements of life, in so far as they are reflected by
many dainty tea-shops and restaurants, are not lacking at Preston; but
let the stranger come into the town on a Saturday night, and he will
see another phase of existence, for then the place is typical of all
Lancashire towns on that supreme marketing occasion. The streets are
thronged with the people of Preston and all the villages round about:
it is a marketing and pleasuring saturnalia, wherein the brilliantly
lighted shops, the barrows, and the shows compete for the custom of
thousands of good-humoured mill-hands whose weekly wages are burning
holes in their pockets.
Preston Town Hall was long pre-eminent among the town halls of
Lancashire, and a source of peculiar pride to the townsfolk, but others
have since eclipsed it. Designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, it looks like
an instalment of St. Pancras station, in London, also designed by him,
unaccountably mislaid in the provinces. Manchester, the biggest town,
holding, _bien entendu_, all the tricks, has rightly gone Nap on town
halls, and has won the game. Even in Preston its pre-eminence has since
been challenged, for in the self-same square there stands the immense
building of the Harris Institute and Public Library, designed in the
Ionic order of architecture: a very severe Greek contrast with the gay
Early English of the Town Hall. But there are even later competitors,
the Sessions House and the Post Office, to challenge attention.
Of these two, the first is in the present fashionable Eclectic
Renaissance, while the Post Office is the product of the Office of
Works, and of no style at all. The great square in which these various
buildings stand is, therefore, nowadays very much an exhibition of
architectural methods, incongruous and mutually destructive.
[Illustration: “TEETOTAL”]
Outside Preston, probably not one person in a thousand knows how the
word “teetotal” sprang into popular use. It is said to have been, to
all intents and purposes, deliberately invented by “Dicky Turner,” a
reformed drunkard, who, speaking at a meeting held in September, 1833,
at the Old Cockpit, declaimed vehemently against the arguments of the
moderate drinkers, and insisted upon total abstinence. “I’ll have nowt
to dee wi’ this moderation botheration pledge,” he said: “I’ll be reet
down out—an’—out tee—tee—total for ever and ever.”
“Well done,” shouted the meeting, and the word was adopted, with
enthusiasm.
[Sidenote: “_TEETOTAL_”]
It bore no reference to tea, as often supposed, nor was it the result
of a stuttering attempt at the word “total”; for Turner was not a
stutterer, but was well known as a coiner of words, at any emergency;
to say nothing of being a perpetrator of what in an Irishman would be
called “bulls”: of which the following is a supreme example. Speaking
in furtherance of the temperance movement, he said, “We will go with
our axes on our shoulders and plough up the great deep, and then the
ship of temperance shall sail gallantly over the land.”
A stone in St. Peter’s churchyard, to his memory and to that of
fellow-workers in their cause, is inscribed
Beneath
this stone are
deposited the Remains of
RICHARD TURNER,
_author of the word_ TEETOTAL,
as applied to abstinence from
all intoxicating LIQUORS,
who departed this life on the
27th day of October, 1846,
Aged 56 years.
Here—where _did_ you get that hat?—you see the fearsome spectacle
(according to modern ideas) that Dicky Turner presented.
It will be observed that in this claim to the origin of “teetotal”
there is a qualification not generally admitted. This reservation is
generally overlooked, but is important. He was indeed only author of
the word in its application to total abstinence, for it was at that
time well known in Ireland, and is to be found in the writings of De
Quincey and Maginn. But every tale is good until the next is told,
and in another version “teetotal” is said to have originated in a
general signing of a pledge of moderate drinking: those who signed and
were prepared for total abstention adding a T, for “total,” to their
signatures.
To conclude with Preston, it was here that the inspiration was given to
Focardi, then an unknown and needy sculptor, for his group, long since
famous, “You Dirty Boy!”
Lodging in a humble purlieu of the town, he witnessed the scene of the
old woman scrubbing the writhing urchin and rubbing the soap into him,
and realising the humorous possibilities of such a group, secured the
two as models and at once set to work. He could not have foreseen the
price of £500 at which the statuary was purchased, nor the world-wide
advertising celebrity it was given, in pictures and in replica
terra-cotta statuettes, by the proprietors of Pears’ soap.
XIV
[Sidenote: _GARSTANG_]
The twenty-two miles between Preston and Lancaster are more remarkable
for the excellence of the road than for the interest of the way. When
you have achieved the pull-up past Gallows Hill—or what was once known
by that name—where numbers of the rebels of 1715 expiated their error
of judgment, and have come to where the tramways cease, the road
becomes undulating, and is neighboured, first on one side and then on
the other, by the railway and the Lancaster Canal. At Hollowforth what
looks like an ancient gateway was built in 1853 from the stones of an
old obelisk formerly standing in Preston market-place. The little river
Wyre is twice crossed, at Brock’s Bridge and Garstang. At Myerscough,
where the pull-up was formerly very trying for horses, the inscription
may be read:
To relieve the sufferings
Of animals labouring in our service
The steep ascent of this hill
Was lowered
At the expense of Mary and Margaret Cross
of Myerscough,
A.D. 1869.
This deed of mercy appeals to every
Passer-by, that he too show Mercy to
The creatures God has put under his hand
[Illustration: GARSTANG.]
Garstang, that stands rather finely on the road, with its old “Royal
Oak” inn and ancient market-cross, hinting, not remotely to those who
care for these things, of better days, was in fact once a market-town.
But Garstang has outlived its ancient importance. Time was when it
owned a Mayor and Corporation, who proudly dated back to 1314. Even
in 1680 it was sufficiently important to win a renewal of its ancient
charter of incorporation, but it has long lost any relics of its old
state. The interfering besoms of the Local Government Board swept away
the Mayor and his subordinates in 1883, and presented Garstang instead
with a nice new Town Trust. It all sounds very improving and wonderful,
but the plain man suspects only the difference between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee in all this; with, of course, the inevitable legal charges
for making the wonderful change.
In the days when Garstang did a large cattle trade, that singular
seventeenth-century character, Richard Braithwaite, who styled himself
“Drunken Barnaby,” came staggering through, with his usual skinful, on
his way from Lancaster.
Thence to Garstang, pray you hark it,
Ent’ring there a great beast market;
As I jogged along the street
’Twas my fortune for to meet
A young heifer, who before her
Took me up, and threw me o’er her.
There are two jokes belonging to Garstang. One is the parish church,
situated a mile and a half away, in a lonely situation, and the other
is the railway that here crosses the road. To-day, those of the
inhabitants upon whose hands time hangs heavily haunt the street with
fell intent to inflict the Great Railway Joke upon the unsuspecting
stranger who, maybe, halts to examine the cross. They fix him, as did
the Ancient Mariner the Wedding Guest, with their glittering, or
rheumy, eye, as the case may be, and with hoarse voice and pointing
finger ask him if he sees that railway. Assured that he does, comes
then the answer, with weird chuckles: “the longest railway in England,
the ‘Garstang and Not End.’” Now the “Garstang and Knott End Railway”
is probably the very shortest, being not quite seven miles in length:
hence this stupendous funniment. Where it does end, however, is at
Pilling. Some day, when the long-projected five-miles’ extension to
Fleetwood, and a junction with the railway there, is accomplished, the
joke will be extinct and the humour of Garstang dowsed in blackest
night.
[Sidenote: “_BAY HORSE_”]
Beyond Garstang, the Bleasdale Fells appear, away to the right. The old
importance of the road, before the railway that now runs so swift and
frequent a service, is seen in the various inns on the way. There are
the “New Holly,” “Middle Holly,” and “Old Holly,” or “Hamilton Arms,”
inns. The “New Holly,” at Forton, replaces an older house of the same
name, still standing, at Hollins Hill, on the left, on the old road
that went out of use in 1825. Even the wayside “Bay Horse” railway
station takes its name from an inn that was once a change-house for the
coaches. In 1825 the “Bay Horse” inn was closed, and re-opened in 1892.
Galgate and Scotforth demand no notice, except that the former is
thought to have obtained its name from “Gael-gaet,” a passage for the
Gaels, or Scots, and that the name of Scotforth carries a similar
meaning. For we are come now within hail of the land that was in the
old times always seething in Border raids: the district that Lancaster
Castle, at the easy passage of the Lune, was built to defend.
XV
Lancaster is a fine name, if it is but pronounced as it should be; but
the traveller who may chance to be something of a connoisseur in fine
old place-names is a little shocked to find the town locally known as
“Lankystir” and the county as “Lankyshire.” The old stirring history of
the place wilts and droops in that horrible pronunciation.
There is, after all, a very great deal in a name. A “Lancashire man”
has a commercial sound: you detect the chink of coin in it, and it has,
in truth, a modern appropriateness, for Lancashire is nowadays nothing
if not commercial. Call him, however, a “Lancastrian,” and he becomes
at once to the imagination an embattled warrior worthy of figuring,
with all the circumstances of chivalry, in the Wars of the Roses.
[Illustration: LANCASTER.]
[Sidenote: _THE NORMAN WAY_]
There are still some few traces of the Roman antiquity of Lancaster,
in the castle—the castle on the river Lune, that gave the place its
name—but it is in Norman and mediæval circumstances that it chiefly
figures. The castle, the very beginning and origin of Lancaster, stands
on a bold hill rising above the Lune in so convenient a situation for
defence that Nature might almost have thoughtfully provided it for
the purpose, and represents the stronghold built by Roger of Poictou,
who held all Lancashire from William the Conqueror. Exactly how much
of the once formidable Roman castrum he found here cannot be known,
for the Normans were more intent upon conquering and securing their
military successes with fortresses, than upon preserving antiquities.
The cult of the antique was, in fact, not yet born; and when, about
1094, the great Roger began to build the grim keep that still remains
the chief feature of Lancaster Castle, he spared nothing in the way
of Roman altars and sculptured relics that might in any way serve
his turn. To him and his builders they were relics of old, forgotten
things, already dead and damned with Paganism and the Roman rule, some,
six hundred years: as remote a period, for example, as from our day
backwards to that of Edward the Second, which seems to ourselves no
inconsiderable space of time.