take stock, not only of the parsonage, but of the present incumbent.
Most happy at all times to do anything to oblige you—except die.”
An epitaph in the churchyard to “Mr. Lewis Powel Williams, Surgeon,”
who died in 1771, aged forty, declares “He was the first that
Introduced into Practice; Inoculation without Preparation.” A similar
claim is made at Worth Matravers, in Dorset, for Benjamin Jesty in
1774, but with the careful proviso that he was the first “known” to
have practised it.
Glen Magna, three miles onward, more commonly known by the English
form, “Great Glen,” is said by the villagers (of neighbouring villages)
to contain “more dogs than honest men.” The sting of this saying is
supposed to reside in the alleged fact that Great Glen has ever been
singularly deficient in dogs. And so it remains to this day; and, so
far as the observation of the present writer goes, the deficiency
extends to houses and inhabitants as well. Great Glen, in short, is
one of those many places that are great in name and ludicrously small
in fact. The wayside church is almost all the wayfarer sees. It has
a Norman south porch with carvings of weird horses whose tails stand
erect over their backs, like Scotch pines: a kind of horse not known
outside the region of nightmare.
[Sidenote: _THE “LONDON WAYE”_]
At Oadby, in another two miles, the influence of the great and still
rapidly growing town of Leicester begins to be felt. The old church
stands in the centre of the village, and narrows the road almost into
the semblance of a lane. The east window of the north aisle, looking
upon the road, is of the Decorated period of Gothic and is enriched
with the comparatively rare “ballflower” moulding. An epitaph on three
brothers and three sisters Davenport, “who lived together in a state
of Celibacy in the same House 54 years, deservedly esteemed for their
suitable demeanour and punctual integrity,” and died in the years
1820-7, seems to show that their “race suicide” was more approved then
than it would be now apostles of increase are raising their voices.
XXI
The electric tramways run far out from Leicester, and in the town
itself form a maze of lines that only the Leicester people themselves
can readily understand. The long approach by the London road, composed
as it is of the residential quarters of the wealthier classes, is the
best of all the entrances, just as Belgrave, on the north, is the
worst; but in the olden days this was “Gallowtree Gate,” leading uphill
from the hollow in which the town stands, to the place of execution.
Here you pass the Victoria Park, and so come at length to the centre
of the busy place, at the Clock Tower. But in 1600 the “London Waye,”
as Speed on his map of that date describes it, was the Welford Road,
on the left hand, which, branching from our road at Northampton, and
avoiding Harborough, came into Leicester in a mile and a half less. It
led through the town by way of Highcross Street, North Bridge, and Frog
Island. But Ogilby, in his _Britannia_, of seventy years later, gives
the London road as now used.
The Clock Tower, the centre of modern Leicester, is what the Forum
was to ancient Rome. Everything centres around it. Dr. Johnson said
that the tide of London life ran most strongly at Charing Cross, and
even more justly it may be said that the tide of Leicester’s busy days
eddies with greatest force at the Clock Tower. This is a particularly
fine stone structure with spire, standing in the centre of the road
where the five great thoroughfares of Gallowtree Gate, Belgrave Gate,
Church Gate, Humberstone Gate, and High Street meet. It was built in
1868, as a tribute to the memory of four Leicester worthies: Simon de
Montfort, Earl of Leicester; William of Wyggeston, the founder, in the
early part of the sixteenth century, of the Wyggeston Hospital, whose
money now also supports the Wyggeston Schools; Sir Thomas White, and
Gabriel Newton, benefactors of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Roman Leicester centred around the site of the mediæval castle, some
distance away, the Clock Tower standing outside the East Gate.
[Sidenote: _RATÆ_]
The antiquity of Leicester is indeed undoubted. Not only are the
remains of the Romans numerous, and continually discovered in the
course of building operations, but it is well known to have been the
station of _Ratæ Coritanorum_, and here the Fosse Way and the so-called
“Via Devana” meet. The Jewry Wall, so named from this quarter having
been that part of the mediæval town where the Jewish community lived,
marks the western limit of _Ratæ_. It is a mass of brickwork, with a
number of arched recesses, and remains to-day the chief visible relic
of old Rome. The best-received opinions hold that this is a portion of
the Roman West Gate, with fragments of a temple to Janus.
[Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS AND THE ROMAN WALL.]
_Ratæ_, to have been so carefully and massively walled, must have
been a populous and a wealthy place, facts that seem additionally
evident in the many fine tesselated pavements discovered at various
times. There is an example on its original site here. They call it,
on a notice-board, “the most beautiful tesselated pavement in the
world,” and charge you 2_d._ to see it, but that is an _ex parte_
statement, and there is a better than the best a little way off, for
which the appropriately higher charge of 3_d._ is made. Where the
supremely bestest is to be seen, and at what cost, this chronicler
dares not presume to say. The twopenny pavement is a private show, and
the superlative example belongs, or did belong, to the Corporation.
A curious modern history belongs to it. Discovered in 1832, in
digging foundations for a house, it formed for many years the floor
of a cellar. In 1890, the house was purchased by the Corporation,
and then in 1896 came the Great Central Railway to Leicester, on its
extension to London, with its embankment and arches, and abolished many
things, among others a Quaker burial ground. The Quakers, therefore,
lie nowadays very much deeper than those who laid them there ever
contemplated; and at the same time the house with the Roman pavement
was levelled. To move the pavement would have been to injure it, and in
the end arrangements were made by which the railway company constructed
a special room, lined with glazed white bricks; and there in this
species of shrine it rests, while the trains roll overhead.
But to return to the Jewry Wall, hard by the Norman church of St.
Nicholas. It is grimy with modern filth, but reverend in its age of
some 2,000 years, and of giant strength, so that you cannot but smile
at sight of the recent flimsy pillars of brick that “support” it, and
are already themselves decrepit.
[Sidenote: _THE ROMAN MILESTONE_]
But the most interesting of all Leicester’s relics of Roman Britain is
stored in the Museum. This is the milestone discovered so long ago as
1771, on the Fosse Way, near Thurmastone, two miles from the town; on
its original site, as the inscription on it proves. It is a cylindrical
block of sandstone, rudely incised with a long, highly characteristic
statement in a shockingly abbreviated and ill-spaced form, which,
translated, runs, “During the Emperorship of the Divine, August, Most
Great and Noble Cæsar, Hadrian, son of the Divine, August, Most Great
and Noble Trajan, Conqueror of Parthia, in the Fourth Year of his
Tribunal Power: thrice Consul. To Ratæ, Two Miles.”
[Illustration: THE ROMAN MILESTONE.]
I cannot withhold my astonishment, either at the miracles of condensed
information displayed in this inscription, which outvies Pitman’s,
or any other, shorthand system; or at the diabolic cleverness of
whoever first solved the problem it must have presented. It must have
puzzled even a good many Roman travellers, and to-day looks very like
a “Bill / Stumps his mark” order of monument. The Romans evidently did
not understand the first function of a milestone: to present clear
and concise information. A modern milestone made in like manner, and
inscribed: “During the Kingship of His Most Gracious Majesty Edward the
Seventh, son of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, Conqueror of
the Boer Republics, in the seventh year of his reign, Emperor of India.
To Leicester, Two Miles”—would, it may be suspected, be the subject of
unfavourable criticism.
It is not a little wonderful that this relic of an earlier civilisation
has survived the rough usage that followed its discovery. It was
removed to a garden close at hand, and would have been converted into
a garden-roller, had it not been for the timeous intervention of Dr.
Percy. A little later it narrowly escaped a worse fate, for it was
claimed by one of the road commissioners, who would have had it broken
up for road metal, had not public interest become aroused; with the odd
result that this hoary relic was placed on a pedestal in midst of the
town, crowned with a conical-shaped stone, and surmounted by—of all
things—a lamp-post! Thus it remained until 1844, when, having been
nearly ruined by exposure to the elements, and to wanton mischief, it
was removed to its present home.
[Sidenote: _DESTRUCTION OF RATÆ_]
_Ratæ_ suffered under fire and sword when the protection of the Romans
was withdrawn, and lay, the charred funeral pyre of its inhabitants,
for long years, the Saxons, after their custom, settling outside the
ruined place, alike for sanitary and superstitious reasons. They called
their settlement Leir-ceastre, after the original British name, Caer
Leir, and thus the name of _Ratæ_ disappeared, save in historical
records; becoming the “Leicester” of our day; the “Less-ess-tare” of
French visitors, who cannot reconcile the spelling of the name with its
pronunciation of “Lester.”
The claim of Leicester having been the home of King Lear is based
merely on the phonetic likeness of his name to that of the British town.
The place had a new era of troubles when, in their turn, the
Anglo-Saxons decayed and a more virile race invaded the land. Then
Leicester fell a prey to the Danes, whose settlements may be traced at
this day in the characteristic ending of Leicestershire place-names in
the syllable “by,” peculiar to places of Danish origin: Oadby, Rearsby,
Dalby, Sileby, and many others.
The old churches of Leicester are fairly numerous, and very
interesting. St. Nicholas’ was built in Saxon and early Norman times,
chiefly from the materials of the Roman wall, by whose remains it
stands. Here Leicester is seen in its latest development, the
neighbourhood having been cut up and largely rebuilt since the advent
of the Great Central Railway. There remained until that event a curious
street at the side of St. Nicholas, known as “Holy Bones,” but in the
great clearances “Holy Bones” disappeared, and only gaunt remains of
houses and factories mark the site of it. The name arose from a great
find of bones here, supposed to be relics of sacrifices made in the
Temple of Janus. Their sanctity, seeing that they are thought to be the
bones of oxen, has been challenged.
St. Mary de Castro, whose spire is one of the most prominent landmarks
of the town, is unquestionably the finest church, but extraordinarily
dark. It is Norman, Early English, and Decorated, and has two naves.
But an architectural account of St. Mary’s would occupy many pages. I
like to think how here, in this very building, Henry the Sixth, at the
time only five years of age, but already four years a king, passed the
midnight vigil that formed part of a new knight’s probation. With him,
forty others were received into the ranks of chivalry. How many of them
survived the bloody Wars of the Roses that raged in after years around
the person of that unhappy King?
[Illustration: ST. MARGARET’s.]
[Sidenote: “_SMOKE FARTHING_”]
St. Margaret’s, down in the low-lying, soggy Church Gate, is not,
in its present form, the oldest church, having been rebuilt in the
Perpendicular period, but it is the successor and representative of the
mother-church of the town, built about A.D. 600, when Leicester was the
seat of a Saxon bishop. It stands not so far from the site of Leicester
Abbey, and the street of “Sanvey Gate,” at the corner, indeed derives
its name from “Sancta Via,” having been the way by which the mediæval
religions processions came and went. The great imposing tower, built
from the proceeds of a tax of “Smoke Farthing,” levied on the domestic
hearths of the parish, is now a very weathered and crumbling mass,
but all the more venerable-looking; and when the proposed restoration
has taken place, it is to be feared that much of the majesty of it,
will have vanished until such time as the surrounding factories have
deposited more soot. But that will take a considerable time, for
Leicester is not a sooty place.
For an example of thorough and unsparing restoration we must turn to
St. Martin’s. Strangers, gazing at the exterior and the tall broach
spire, imagine they have before them a new structure, but it is chiefly
an Early English building, and, as the interior proves, a very fine
one, and built on the site of a Roman temple to Diana. An epitaph of
strange human interest is seen by the south porch:—
“Enquiring mortal, whoe’er thou art, ponder here on an incident which
highly concerns the whole progeny of Adam. Near this place lieth the
body of John Fenton, who fell by violence May 17th, 1778, and remains
a sad example of the incompetency of judicial institutions to punish
a Murderer. He left to mourn his untimely fate a mother, a widow, and
two children. These, but these alone, are greatly injured: personal
security received a mortal wound when vengeance was averted from his
assassin by the sophistical refiners of natural justice.”
The man who slew Fenton was one François Soulés, a French officer then
prisoner-of-war at Leicester, who was at the time a guest in Fenton’s
house. The affair took place in a quarrel over a game of billiards.
Soulés was condemned to death, but the sentence was revised, and he was
in the end acquitted.
All Saints’ is chiefly interesting from the curious clock over the
south porch, originally set up about 1610, removed in 1875, and
in 1900 restored and replaced. So not all restoration is to be
reprobated. Time, _edax rerum_, is represented on it, with his scythe,
and above, in two little tabernacles, are a couple of miniature
Jacks-smite-the-Clock, in the costume of James the First’s time, who
strike the quarters.
[Sidenote: _TRINITY HOSPITAL_]
The Collegiate Church of St. Mary, in the Newarke, founded in 1331 by
Henry, Earl of Lancaster, in conjunction with his magnificent Hospital
of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity, has utterly disappeared, and
with it, by all accounts, the grandest architectural work Leicester
ever possessed. “Knights and Squires commended it as being the most
fairest they had ever seen.” I like that old phrasing: by “most
fairest” something supremely fair must surely have stood here. But the
old Knights and Squires had not, it may be supposed, seen everything,
and their testimony is not conclusive. Every one who has read ancient
accounts of fine churches knows that each one was the finest, and makes
allowances accordingly.
But it _was_ very fine. The Reformation did well in many ways, but it
did not so in the destruction of St. Mary’s, whose only fragments may
now be seen in a cellar.
Henry, Earl of Lancaster, ancestor of Henry the Fourth, founded church
and Hospital in the four acres of ground adjoining the Castle. He
surrounded them with a wall and a defensible gateway—the “Magazine
Gateway,” as it is now called. By Hospital, of course, we understand
almshouse. It was designed, oddly enough, for fifty infirm old men,
and five women as nurses. The Hospital, “restored” in 1776, was again
restored, and very largely rebuilt, in 1902; the work excellently
well done. Interesting relics of ancient days are preserved in the
hall. There stands the so-called “Duke of Lancaster’s Porridge-pot,”
a fine bell-metal cauldron of sixty-one gallons capacity, whence the
Hospitallers were helped. What a capacity for porridge! Others more or
less resembling it are found in England, notably the Nuns’ Cauldron at
Laycock Abbey, Wiltshire.
[Illustration: TRINITY HOSPITAL PORRIDGE-POT.]
In the hall is also to be seen “Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket Piece,” a
salt-box or nutmeg-grater dated 1579, inscribed “This belongeth to the
Olde Ospitall”; and with the moral maxims: “Thinke ° wel ° and ° say
° wel ° bvtrather ° do ° wel”; and “Flee ° idilness ° and ° be ° wel °
occupied.”
[Sidenote: _THE TOWN WATCH_]
In the chapel is the finely robed effigy of Mary de Bohun, mother of
Henry the Fifth. Seven morions and a number of breastplates, with a
group of halberds disposed upon the walls, once belonged to the Town
Watch, and are relics of the way in which Leicester was policed in Good
Queen Bess’s glorious days.
[Illustration: ST. MARY’s.]
The Newarke is changing, like all else. A sign of the times is the
new Technical School on the site of St. Mary’s. But that is a striking
view as you enter by Wyggeston’s Chantry House, and see the spire of
St. Mary de Castro behind one of the old Castle arches. The Castle
is a mere memory now, and where the Keep stood is at this time a
bowling-green; but the Great Hall remains, where Parliaments met in
1414, 1426, and 1450; in those days when the Legislature was a more or
less perambulating body, following the King to heel, like a dog. Faced
nowadays with brick, none would suspect the antiquity of the Great
Hall, now used as an Assize Court.
The natural pendant to the Assize Court is, of course, the Gaol; but
that is removed by the length of a long street from the place of
judgment. In it is stored the Leicester gibbet, last used in 1832,
when one Cook, a bookbinder, who carried on business in a yard off
Wellington Street, was hanged for a peculiarly revolting murder. A
Mr. Paas, of London, a manufacturer of brass ornaments used in the
bookbinding trade, had been accustomed to call upon him, and Cook,
expecting his visit, had evidently prepared to murder him for sake
of the gold he carried. The unfortunate man put up at the “Stag and
Pheasant” inn, and, saying he would soon return, made his call upon
Cook the last of the day. He was never again seen alive. Cook appears
to have killed him with the iron handle of his press, afterwards
hacking his body in pieces and burning it on an immense fire. His story
of a quarrel, and of accidentally killing Mr. Paas, was, in view of
the preparations he had made—of laying in an unusual quantity of coal,
having a hatchet re-ground, and giving his errand-boy a holiday—not
believed; and eventually he pleaded guilty and posed as a contrite
sinner. After he had been duly hanged, his body was gibbeted in Saffron
Lane, on the outskirts of the town. The spectacle seems to have been
popular, according to the following testimony:
[Sidenote: _THE GIBBET_]
“LEICESTER, _Aug._ 12.—Our town is like a fair to-day, with the people
who are come to see Cook hanging in chains. He was put up yesterday
afternoon, at four o’clock, when all the market people flocked in
thousands to see the sight, and continued going all the night. To-day
they are coming from the villages all round; some have walked as far
as fourteen miles. Last night there were ginger-bread and other stalls
at the place, but the mayor has put a stop to all that. It is not far
from our new county gaol, which perhaps you remember. His brother says
his body shall not hang long, but it would be no easy matter to remove
it. It hangs about 35 feet from the ground, and is dressed in the same
clothes as when he was hanged. We hear his bowels have been taken out,
to try the experiment of burning them. It is currently reported his
father has died to-day of a broken heart. I think it is very likely to
be true, as he was very ill last week. The Ranters have been preaching
under the gibbet this morning, before breakfast, and will again
to-night. It is thought there were 40,000 people to see him hanged, but
there will be many more to see him now hanging, if they continue to
come as they do to-day.”
Riots followed, and the body was speedily removed. Two years later, the
custom of gibbeting, or hanging in chains, was abolished by statute,
chiefly owing to the disgraceful scenes enacted here.
XXII
Richard III., “as every schoolboy knows,” marched out from Leicester
to defeat and death at Bosworth, but he did not march forth from the
Castle, even then dilapidated. He slept—or, as Shakespeare would have
it, his guilty conscience refused to let him sleep—the night before the
battle at the “Blue Boar” inn.
Two days later, his body, flung ignominiously across the back of a
horse, was brought back, and exposed publicly to view in the Hall of
the Guild of Corpus Christi, and was then buried without any ceremony
in the Greyfriars Church. There it remained for fifty years, until the
destruction of the religious houses caused the remains of all who lay
there to be cast away. Bow Bridge, crossing the river Soar near by, was
replaced by the present iron bridge in 1862, and on it may be seen the
inscription, “Near this spot lie the remains of Richard III., the last
of the Plantagenets.”
The Corporation of Leicester has an ancient and honourable history,
and has included in the many centuries of its existence a number of
public-spirited men. “Many centuries” truly it is that the Corporation
has existed, for the time is not known, since Leicester was Leicester,
when there was not a Corporation. There was, however, no Mayor,
so-styled, until 1251.
[Sidenote: _THE OLD TOWN HALL_]
The Town Hall that served the purpose from 1563 until 1876, when the
great modern building was completed, still stands, hard by St. Martin’s
Church, with which in fact it was closely associated, having been
originally the home of a religious fraternity—the Corpus Christi Guild.
The Mayor’s Parlour, built in the time of Charles the First, panelled
with bog oak, remains, as also does the public hall, with timber roof,
like a boat reversed. The building was self-contained to the minutest
particulars, for adjoining the Parlour where the Worshipful the Mayor
took his ease, was, and is, the cell where petty malefactors found
what ease they might until justice, as then understood, dealt with
them. A very full and complete account might be written of the old Town
Hall, for the records concerning it are full and precise, but they
lack confirmation of the tradition that Shakespeare himself acted with
Richard Burbage’s company of players here. Mayor, aldermen, and common
councillors were not averse from merry-making, and we have accounts
of the mafficking that took place here to celebrate the defeat of the
Armada, when the Town Waits were had into the gallery and discoursed
on pipe and tabor, and the town went wild with joy, and fell on each
other’s necks and wept, by which it seems that the glories of Mafeking
Night in the twentieth century had their counterpart in the sixteenth.
And a good thing, too; for when we cease to rejoice in victory we shall
be a pitiful folk indeed. What the pro-Spaniards thought of it all is
not recorded.
The old town library, adjoining, in what was once the Chantry House
belonging to the Guild of Corpus Christi, was founded in 1632, chiefly
from books until then belonging to St. Martin’s Church, and remains
practically a museum of ancient devotional manuscripts and early
printed works.
[Illustration: IN THE COURTYARD, THE OLD TOWN HALL.]
The modern Town Hall, eminently characteristic of the architecture that
came into so extraordinary a vogue in the ’seventies and was completed
in 1876, is of course in the style called “Queen Anne,” and largely in
red brick. So greatly has the municipal business of Leicester grown
that it is already much too small; but it is one of the most tasteful
buildings of the kind in the country, and designed more with a view
to excellence of detail than of the flamboyant eccentricity that has
later prevailed. The design of the Crown Court is especially beautiful,
in the restrained way, and even in the detail of the finely imagined
decorative iron railings of the gardens in Town Hall Square this rare
artistic quality is seen.
[Sidenote: _RADICAL LEICESTER_]