the curious staircase tower added to the west side of the original
tower is of particular interest, having been built on to the early
Saxon tower in later and unsettled times, for the purpose of putting
the church in a defensible condition against the forays of the Danish
rovers then laying waste the country. The entrance was formerly by a
door in the western face of the tower, but this semi-circular addition
abolished all access that way. The upper stages and the spire are, of
course, very much later, having in fact been built in the Decorated
style of the fourteenth century. Rude masonry and irregularly disposed
herring-bone patterns of Roman tile form the walls.
The interior, as of most other Saxon churches, is more curious than
beautiful, however archæologically rare it may be. It consists nowadays
of nave, chancel, semi-circular apse, and south chapel; but there were
formerly narrow north and south aisles, as the walled-in nave arcades
show. At what period these were destroyed does not appear. The apse
is a modern rebuilding of the original, destroyed about 1460, but the
ambulatory around it was not rebuilt. Large Gothic windows at various
periods replaced the original Saxon small round-headed windows of
the nave, but they have been abolished, and replicas of the Saxon
work placed in their stead; which, however pleasing to sticklers for
uniformity in matters architectural, was archæologically a crime
demanding the penalty of _peine forte et dure_, or something especially
excruciating. To destroy a genuine Decorated or Perpendicular window
for the purpose of inserting a modern “Saxon” one—probably framed in
with specially made “Roman” tiles—is distinctly Grimthorpian, and
not playing the game according to the rules understood by the most
enlightened. Recent excavations have brought to light the bases of
Roman columns in the churchyard and in the church itself, and in
short, ever since about a century ago, when people grow curious about
antiquities, the building has been a kind of archæological lucky-bag.
You scrape the plaster off a pier and discover a stone sculptured with
a Roman eagle; disregarding spiders and immemorial dust, you thrust
a hand into an ancient hole in the nave wall, and lo, out comes a
reliquary containing the “Adam’s apple” that once waggled in the holy
throat of Bishop Boniface. In fact, anything is possible at Brixworth:
More broken pans, more gods, more mugs,
Old snivel-bottles, jordans, and old jugs,
as Peter Pindar might say; while many intimate anatomical belongings of
the saints are doubtless even yet secreted on the premises.
[Sidenote: _WATER FLOWS UNWANTED_]
The road in the centre of Brixworth street dips down steeply in a
tree-shaded hollow, and is very narrow, with stone walls on either
side. In one of these may still be seen, recessed slightly, the spring
representing “Bartlet’s Well,” opened in 1631 by Margaret Bartlet “for
the use of travellers.” But although the spring is in going order, I
observe that the travellers who pass this way prefer the tipple kept at
the inn, hard by.
Two miles and a half ahead, and then less than a quarter of a mile to
the right hand, lies Lamport, but so hidden that none would suspect its
existence. The wayside “Swan” inn, opposite the by-road, derives its
sign from the Swan crest of the Ishams, the ancient owners of Lamport
(whose name, by the way, is pronounced I-sham, not Ish-am). Lamport
is a village of whose kind there are still, happily, many hundreds in
England, in spite of the hurry and fever of the age. It is small, it
is beautiful in a mild way, it is quiet, and no celebrated or merely
notorious person has ever done it the honour to be born within its
bounds. A little more beauty, a slight connection with history, and
it would become a place of resort. I suspect that this something less
than a quarter of a mile remove from the road must in these latter
days be a profound source of congratulation to the inhabitants, who
live, by virtue of it, “the world forgetting and by the world forgot,”
or at least by those undesirables who thunder along the main road
in motor-cars, enveloped, and enveloping others, in clouds of dust.
Such an one passed me on the road, equipped with some damnable new
contrivance in place of the usual horn: a shrieking something like a
soul in torment. As the yelling abomination died away and the dust
began to settle down, and the trees could again be seen and the birds
heard, I wondered why such things could be permitted to exist.
Lamport church stands by the wayside, and opposite is Lamport Park,
the seat of the Ishams. The Hall, though by no means remarkable for
its architecture, is curious by reason of the family mottoes and pious
sentiments carved on the exterior, by which you gather that the Ishams
have always been amiable persons, and prone to find amusement in small
things. Even their name seems ever to have afforded them a perennial
source of enjoyment. It suggested to some remote forbear the idea of
a punning Latin motto, _Ostendo non ostento_; Englished as “I show I
sham not.” This is duly set forth along the front of the Hall, together
with “In respect of things etarnal, life is vayn and mortal,” and “In
things transitory resteth no glory.”
[Illustration: LAMPORT CHURCH.]
[Sidenote: _THE ISHAMS_]
Most amiable of all this amiable race was the late Sir Charles Isham,
who did indeed give Lamport a kind of minor celebrity. I think he was
the gentlest and courtliest of creatures, who, if indeed he left the
world in no respect better than he found it, at least left it none
the worse, and, ending at a ripe old age a rather aimless life, was
regretted in perhaps a derogatory way as “a harmless old gentleman.”
Thus lived and died the tenth Baronet, defeating the superstition that
all baronets are bad.
For over forty years he busied himself in constructing a miniature
rock-garden at one side of the Hall. Amid boulders piled up to
represent a mountain-range, with gullies, rock-pools and caves, he
planted dwarf-trees and rare shrubs of the stunted kind the Japanese
know so well how to grow; and there he placed among the caves and on
the miniature cliffs, groups of little gnomes: fairy miners, with
wheelbarrows and pickaxes, with the verse:
Eight hours’ work,
Eight hours’ play,
Eight hours’ sleep,
And eight bob a day.
Day after day he would sit contemplating this life-work, with one of
his pet hawks on his wrist, and his tame owls in the holes he had
constructed for them overhead. And now the hawks and the owls are gone,
and the rock-garden is uncared for.
In Lamport church a monumental brass with long inscription to his wife
reveals the man he was:
Emily
Wife of the
tenth Baronet
commenced real life
Sept. 6th, 1898, aged 74 years,
after an union of 51 years with her
thankful husband, who through spiritual light
finds that joy is triumphant over grief.
Thoughtful towards others,
Kindness itself,
Beloved by all,
At her dear wish is added
this Message,—
“Bear ye one another’s burdens.”
[Sidenote: _EPITAPH_]
_The last words were: “I’m dying” No! my wife, This is the Portal of
the Higher Life:
I spoke no more, and neither did I weep. Next morn at nine she passed
in sweetest sleep.
Sleep on! Sleep on, my Dearest; sleep your best; After such years of
weariness now rest.
Or are you full awake? It may be so; Or in some happy dreamland? who
doth know,
That home-made elm casket deftly wrought, Betokens love: also
inspired the thought.
Although at times we might not quite agree, All knew I lived for you,
and you for me.
Oh! lovely Lamport, now she’s gone from here, I have consigned thee
to my cousin Vere.
I spake these words in truth_, I SHOW I SHAM NOT, _Isham I am, and
Isham yet I am not.
The second motto_ “IN THINGS TRANSITORY RESTETH” _(and not without
some truth)_ “NO GLORY,”
_But still, may gifts from Heaven on thee rest, And thus that house
be glorified and blest_.
_Whatever there may still remain of life, At night and morn I
contemplate my wife,
And at the time appointed may we meet, And her sweet Spirit be the
first to greet.
Reader, observe, the life inscribed above, Evinced much happiness,
more pain, most love._
CHARLES EDMUND _survived his beloved until
April 7, 1903, aged 83.
This also is his monument, he objects to more._
The living of Lamport is held jointly with that of Faxton, a good
three miles away: a place with no road to it for the best part (or?
“worst part”) of one of those three miles. Why, then, does the explorer
explore in such forbidding circumstances? Aye, why indeed? I ask myself
as, quartering a succession of phenomenally water-logged meadows in
search of spots free from the fathomless mud, I make slow and painful
progress, horribly aware that the way I have come is the only route
back. Well, there is a reason in all things; even in this. In Faxton
church there is a monument to Sir Augustine Nichols, Justice of the
Common Pleas, who formerly resided here, and was poisoned in 1616, when
on circuit at Kendal, by four women, to prevent him passing sentence of
death on one of their relatives. Another monument is in Kendal church,
where he is buried.
[Illustration: FAXTON.]
The effigy of him is kneeling at a desk, and on either side he
is supported by figures representing Justice and Fortitude, with
Temperance and Prudence above. Justice once held her appropriate
scales, but they have been broken off. The villagers, to whom classic
imagery was unknown, were firmly convinced that the scales represented
the weighing of the poison that put an end to the judge.
[Illustration: MONUMENT TO JUDGE NICHOLS.]
[Sidenote: _FAXTON_]
The little church of St. Denis, Faxton, stands on the edge of a
wide, common-like expanse showing many traces of old foundations of
buildings, and bordered by half-a-dozen cottages, most of them far gone
in decay and deserted. There is no semblance at all of any roadway into
the place. The church itself is rotting with damp and mildew, and
giant fungoid growths, unreal and fantastic-looking as the imaginings
of pantomime, fasten themselves upon its walls, and heave up the stones
of the floor. An afternoon service every Sunday more than fulfils the
needs of the few inhabitants. But the church, of the interesting period
between the Early English and Decorated styles, shows many traces of
beauty, and there are finely sculptured corbels, an ancient font, and
a sand-table—on which, in the quaint educational methods of over a
century ago, children were taught to form the letters of the alphabet
with finger-tips in the sand.
Returning to the main road from the muddy hazards and chances of
Faxton, a steep descent leads down to the railway level-crossing at
Lamport station, and thence steeply up again to the crest of Hopping
Hill, where a “Traveller’s Rest” in the form of an elaborate wooden
seat stands on the grass, inscribed, “Rest ye, wearie traveller.
Jubilee, 1897. Reginald Loder.” It was the squire of the adjoining
Maidwell Hall who placed the seat. They do not all jubilate who
rest here, for I perceive the inscription, among others, “Sat here,
pennyless, June 1st, 1906. J. West, stoney-broke. Pray for me.”
A fine elm avenue conducts into the well-cared-for village of Maidwell,
and thence out again. On the left hand is Kelmarsh with church floridly
restored and its chancel elaborately lined with beautiful (but
incongruous) marbles which the squire, one Naylor, brought home in
his yacht from old villas in Rome. At a loss what to do with them, he
eventually gave them to the church. He lies outside, in the churchyard,
under a tomb of polished granite of the gigantesque and vulgarian
orders of architecture. All other tombstones have been abolished, and
he lies in a solitude that looks truly imperial.
[Sidenote: _THE BATTLE OF NASEBY_]
Away on the left, three miles and a half distant, is the field of
Naseby, on the ridge yonder, crowned by the obelisk for remembrance.
There, on that lofty plateau, on June 13th, 1645, in shock of battle,
the cause of King Charles was finally ruined, and the pursuit that
followed the fight tailed away in slaughter towards the north-west. The
unfortunate King showed to better advantage at Naseby than at almost
any other period in his career. Clad completely in armour, he was in
the thick of the fight, and would have rallied his disheartened cavalry
for a last effort, had he not been restrained. “Face about once more:
give one charge more and recover the day,” he cried, and was placing
himself in advance, when the Earl of Carnwath laid his hand upon the
bridle of his horse, and restrained him. “Will you go upon your death
in an instant,” he said, and turned the horse’s head into the flight
that then became general. It is a fine incident, but it had been
better, after all, had the Earl let the unhappy King have his way, and
go to his death in arms for his cause.
The road, descending from Kelmarsh by Clipston railway station, passes
the unremarkable village of Oxendon, and thence comes into the growing
town of Market Harborough, where we finally leave the district of the
good Northants building-stone and come across the river Welland, into
the clays of Leicestershire, and towns and villages of red brick.
XX
Leicestershire is pre-eminently a hunting county. To name the Quorn
among hounds is to name the best known, and to mention Melton Mowbray
is to name the metropolis of fox-hunting; while the hunting-field is so
largely composed of peers that the rustics commonly address the wearer
of pink as “my lord,” leading to the well-known retort of a sporting
commoner that they “don’t know a gentleman when they see him.”
[Illustration: MARKET HARBOROUGH.]
It is the county of pork-pies, and once claimed to rear the largest
sheep and grow the heaviest fleeces. Not so much has been said of
Leicestershire as an industrial county, but its hosiery trade is the
largest in England. Despite the stockingers, the bootmakers, and
in some districts the coal-miners, Leicestershire is nevertheless
a very agricultural and rural county. “Bean-belly” Leicestershire
Drayton calls it, and there is a “Barton-in-the-Beans” near Gopsall;
but there is, on the other hand, also a “Barton-in-Fabis,” or
“Barton-in-the-Beans,” in Nottinghamshire. The corollary of being
“bean-bellied” seems to be dull-witted; but, if we are to judge from
Leicestershire folklore, the people are gifted with exceptional humour,
of the saturnine kind, as witness this reproof to the boastful:
If all the waters wer one sea,
And all the trees wer one tree,
And this here tree was to fall into that there sea,
My sakes! what a splish-splash there _would_ be!
And here is another example:
Yew thowt, did ’ee? Aiy,
’Yew thowt a lig,
Loike Hudson’s pig.
“Like Hudson’s pig?”
“Yais. ’Niver hard on ’em, ’a s’pose?”
“No.”
“Whoy, ’a thowt, th’ silly feller, as they wer a-gwine ter _kill_ ’en,
and they wuz on’y arfter putten a ring trew ’is noaze.”
[Sidenote: _JOE STOKES’s PIG_]
There is a tragical variant of this, in which “Joe Stokes’s” pig is the
unfortunate hero—“Ye’re loike Joe Stokes’s pig: ’e thowt as how ’e wer
a-gwine ter hev ’is brekfuss, but they wuz a-gwine ter mek poark on
’en.”
The days when Market Harborough was a little market-town, interested in
nothing else but agriculture and hunting, are done. It is now, indeed,
a busy little place, and, with its various industrial enterprises, not
so little as it was. Chief of these is Symington’s corset factory,
employing 580 hands; but elsewhere may be noticed manufactories of
rubber soles and heels, pea-flour, and numerous other articles of
commerce. Its remarkably broad chief street, where the cattle-markets
and the October Fair have been held for many centuries, is still,
however, on ordinary days singularly empty; and now that a Cattle
Market, costing £28,000, has been built, is less characteristic than of
old. But it is a magnificent picture, this of Harbro town, that unfolds
itself before the traveller as he comes in along the road. There,
peaking up grandly, are the exquisite tower and crocketed spire of the
ancient church, very lovely and worshipful, with the old timber-framed
Grammar School humbly beneath, founded in 1614 by Robert Smyth, an old
City of London official, its sides decorated with plaster panels and
its stout timbers adorned with pious mottoes: the open space beneath
designed for use as the Butter Market.
The church is dedicated to St. Dionysius the Areopagite. No one need be
very greatly ashamed of not knowing precisely what that was, by way of
a profession. The Oblate Fathers suggest a problem in Euclid, and to be
an Areopagite suggests a performer on the flying trapeze; but really
St. Dionysius was not so flighty a character. He was the judge of the
Areopagus in Athens, before whom St. Paul disputed on the subject of
worshipping the Unknown God, and whom he converted. Dionysius became
Bishop of Athens, and suffered martyrdom in A.D. 95.
The interior of the great building disappoints expectations aroused by
the beauty of the outward view.
[Sidenote: _ST. MARY-IN-ARDEN_]
It was not until 1614 that this became the parish church of the town.
Magnificent though it be, it was formerly only a “chapel-of-ease,”
and the mother-church was that of St. Mary-in-Arden, a mile distant.
The remains of that church may yet be seen, in its grim, crowded, and
disused churchyard, woefully overhanging the railway sidings, busy
night and day, and noisy always.
I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so,
as Tennyson says.
Here the inquisitive stranger may find the epitaph of “Susanna Wells,
Cook of the Three Swans in Market Harborough, Forty-one Years. She died
19 June 1774. Aged 59 Years.” A simple calculation proves that she
began to cook early. I had rather have partaken of the cooking of her
fifty-eighth year than of her eighteenth.
In two miles from Market Harborough, as proclaimed by the
milestones—which spell the name of the town and Leicester, “Harbro”
and “Lester”—one comes to Gallow Hill, with a fragment of old road,
rugged and sunken, on the right hand, where the highwaymen used to lurk
under the shadow of the gibbet-tree. At the cross-roads below stands
what was once an inn, now divided into squalid tenements; and on the
tall ridge to the right stand the villages of East, or Church, Langton,
Thorpe Langton, and Tur Langton, remarkable for the doings of a former
incumbent.
William Hanbury, born 1725, died 1778, rector of East Langton early in
the time of George III., was a forceful person. He became rector in
1753, his father, a wealthy man, having purchased the advowson; but
he had already, two years earlier, begun his huge planting operations
in the neighbourhood. He introduced plants and seeds from all parts
of the world, but was particularly enthusiastic in the cultivation
of fruit-trees, and the neighbourhood is still, as a result of his
labours, and the example he set, exceptional in fruit-growing. In 1758
he wrote and published “An Essay on Planting, and a Scheme for Making
it Conducive to the Glory of God and the Advantage of Society.” He was
a man of ideas that grew steadily larger and more impracticable. The
first proposal, to annually dispose of the produce of the fruit-trees
and thus to create a fund of £1,500, of which the interest was to
provide for the decoration of the church, developed into a plan for
amassing a £4,000 fund for the building of a hospital and schools,
and this in its turn became a grandiose scheme for a series of Church
Musical Festivals to be held in the surrounding districts. The income
from all these sources was to accumulate until it reached a total sum
sufficient to produce an income of £10,000 or £12,000, which was to
be expended in founding a minster, a choral establishment, a public
library, picture-galleries, a hospital, schools, a printing office,
and many other things. The minster was to be in relation to all other
cathedrals what cathedrals are to chapels. A central tower was to
rise to a height of 493 feet, and its other dimensions were to be in
proportion: the western towers themselves to be 399 feet high. No other
cathedral that ever was, or would be, should rival this. St. Paul’s?
Pooh! The most magnificent buildings yet known were to be squalid
beside its walls, floors, and columns of marble, and the porphyry and
jasper that were to decorate its choir.
[Sidenote: _A GRAND PROJECT_]
A city, so this odd projector anticipated, would spring up around
these institutions, and included in it were to be, in his own words,
“two pompous inns.” If any difficulty were experienced in the carriage
of building materials, a canal from quarries in the neighbourhood
of Stamford was to be dug to Market Harborough, and if possible the
quarries of Ketton and Weldon were to be purchased.
When he anticipated all these things would come to pass does not
appear. A capital sum of at least a quarter of a million sterling would
be required, to yield the income he considered sufficient: and you
could not, even with £12,000 per annum, make much headway with such a
cathedral, to say nothing of these expensive sideshows.
In 1770, the income of the trust was £190 17_s._; and by 1863 it had
risen to £900, when the trustees successfully applied to the Court of
Chancery to vary the trust deed, for the purpose of expending a sum
of £5,000 upon necessary repairs to the three Langton churches, and of
applying a further sum to school purposes.
The church of Church Langton is a massive Early English structure on
a large scale, containing monuments of this singular projector and
successors of his kin. It has been very thoroughly renovated from the
funds released by sanction of the Court. Hanburys still preside here.
There is a good deal of interest in the immediately surrounding
country. Away across the meadows on the other side of the road are
Foxton Locks, on the Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Union
Canal. Every visitor to Harbro hears of Foxton Locks, and is bidden
go see them; and indeed they are remarkable achievements in modern
engineering, putting those of the old canal engineers to the blush.
They are visible quite a long way off, looking like the gear at
the mouth of a colliery, and consist of an elevated engine-house
installed with powerful machinery that raises or lowers the modern
lock—practically a large tank—with barges floating in it. This replaces
the remarkable old series of ten locks that scale the hill like some
Jacob’s ladder, and are now discarded. The new lock, completed in 1898
at a cost of £37,000, was undertaken for the purpose of saving water,
wasted in large quantities in the old order of things, but a great deal
of time is also incidentally saved by the new methods.
Proceeding again along the road, the church tower of Kibworth appears
among clustered woods on a height above the railway station of that
name. The Midland Railway and other moderns call the place “Kibworth”
merely, but it is properly Kibworth Beauchamp, while adjoining is the
infinitely more handsome twin-village of Kibworth Harcourt, which,
however, has no church of its own.
[Sidenote: “_A PLAGUE O’ BOTH YOUR HOUSES_”]
A quaint memorandum in the register of Kibworth Beauchamp, under date
of 1641, seems to have been made by the parson as the readiest means
of absolving himself from blame for not properly keeping his books. It
runs:
“Know all men that the reason why little or nothing is registered from
this year 1641 until the year 1649, was the Civil Wars between Charles
and his Parliament, which put all into a confusion till then; and
neither minister nor people could quietly stay at home for one party or
the other.”
There is a suspicion, in the wording of this, that the parson was
heartily sick of both sides.
The Rev. James Beresford was presented to the living by Merton College,
and held it for very many years, dying in 1840, aged seventy-seven.
He was author of a book on the “Miseries of Human Life,” published in
1826, which, in spite of its doleful title, is not the work of one
who has surveyed existence and found all to be vanity; but is cast
in a humorous form, as humour was then understood. He possessed a
pretty wit, and a quaint sarcastic manner, showing prominently in the
story told of him and some junior fellows of Merton whom he observed
prospecting over his garden wall, in view of his possible decease, and
the living falling vacant.