busy place. It now numbers 215,000 inhabitants, engaged chiefly in the
making of boots and shoes and hosiery. With a well-deserved Radical
reputation—Leicester ever was Radical, even before it made boots—the
Corporation now owns the Water, Gas, Electricity, and Tramways
undertakings and makes them all pay a profit in relief of rates.
Indeed, they do things on a business footing. In the public libraries
of other towns where the betting news in the newspapers is discouraged,
it is simply blacked out, but here it is neatly pasted over with local
advertisements, and from them the Library garners in a modest income of
between £20 and £30.
In every way this is very different from what John Evelyn, writing in
1654, calls “the old and ragged Citty of Leicester.” In his time it was
“large and pleasantly seated, but despicably built, the chimney-flues
like so many smiths’ forges.” But it is within the last decade that
Leicester has suddenly rebuilt itself. It had grown enormously, but the
ancient central streets were until then obviously ancient. Now they are
Twentieth Century streets, in all—in the way of gigantic and highly
ornate frontages with show-shops—that the expression indicates.
The growth of industrialism has wrought this marvellous change.
History—a fine stirring history—the town has, but towns cannot live
on the memory of times past. For the first small beginnings of modern
Leicester you must trace back to 1680, when one Alsop began—not
brewing—but stocking-weaving, in a small way. He prospered, and his
success attracted others, and thus the “ragged old Citty” that Evelyn
saw was first set upon its march to modern greatness. But I do not see,
anywhere, a statue to that original stockinger. In a century from that
time the trade of town and shire in hose was the largest in the world.
The total population of Leicester was then only 14,000, and of these
6,000 were stocking-weavers.
[Sidenote: “_JEMIMAS_”]
In recent times Leicester had a reputation for cheap cotton hose and
“side-springs.” All the “Jemimas” in the kingdom came from Leicester,
and the prototypes of Arthur Sketchley’s porky “Mrs. Brown at the
Seaside,” and at half a hundred other places, and the fat old women
pictured in the comic prints of 1860-1870, with their legs encased
in white cotton stockings bulging over their “side-spring” boots,
were fully furnished, as to coverings of legs and feet, from here.
“Jemimas”—that is to say, “side-spring” boots—are no longer worn, but
elastic webbing for other purposes continues to be a staple product.
Leicester became a boot and shoe manufacturing town in 1859. The
trade began in a small way, but now employs close upon 40,000 people.
Boots and shoes for women and children, and canvas shoes, are the
kinds specially made. Fancy hosiery also is an important trade, and
when jerseys were the fashion, about 1879, Leicester did very well.
The blouse has probably come to stay, and Leicester rejoices in the
prospect, for it has busy factories engaged in the production of
them. In addition to these, and a host of minor industries, the stout
tapestry fabrics used in upholstery, and particularly in the cushions
of railway carriages, are made almost exclusively here.
And lastly, it was at Leicester in 1841 that the idea of railway
excursions first occurred to Thomas Cook; and from Leicester to
Loughborough, a distance of 10-3/4 miles, the first excursion train and
the first Cook’s tourists set out, on July 15, 1841. The double journey
cost a shilling and 670 excursionists took tickets.
[Sidenote: _CARDINAL WOLSEY_]
The site of the great Abbey of Leicester, the place where Cardinal
Wolsey died in 1530, on his way from York to London, where he would
undoubtedly have been executed had he survived the journey, lies beside
the river Soar—own brother to the Saar in Alsace, and the Suir in
Ireland—which skirts the western and north-western sides of the town,
and has always rendered it subject to floods.
You come to the site of Leicester Abbey by way of many hosiery
factories, whence emerge the warm oily smells of wools and worsteds
and the click-clack of machinery; and thence by Frog Island. The Abbey
of St. Mary de Pratis, _i.e._ “St. Mary of the Meadows,” stood, as its
name indicates, by the water-meadows of this sluggish river. The site,
with merely the old surrounding precinct wall, is alone left, and even
the first secular mansion built there stands a roofless ruin.
Wolsey was under arrest, and worn with illness and misfortune, when he
came here. In the words of Shakespeare:
At last with easy roads he came to Leicester,
Lodged in the abbey; where the reverend abbot,
With all his convent, honourably received him;
To whom he gave these words—“O Father Abbot,
An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;
Give him a little earth, for charity.”
He died the third day of his arrival, in the sixtieth year of his
age. On the second day, observing his custodian, the Lieutenant of
the Tower, in the room, he said, “Master Kyngston, I pray you have me
commended to His Majesty. Had I but served God as I have served him,
He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is my just
reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but
only my duty to my prince.”
And thus died the proud Cardinal, before whom all in the land, except
his Sovereign, had earlier abased themselves. They buried him in the
Lady Chapel, but in another seven years the Abbey itself was dissolved,
its lands seized, and the buildings themselves destroyed; and no man
knows what became of the body of Wolsey. Like that of Richard the
Third, it was obscurely dispersed with others, and hence these two
great historic characters have no known resting-place and no monument.
The site was granted to a Mr. Cavendish, and on it in another thirty
years was built the mansion whose ruins are now to be seen.
This way ran the old original road out of Leicester to the north,
instead of the existing road through Belgrave. The change, like that
in the southern approach to the town, was due to the dread with which
wayfarers in the early years of the seventeenth century regarded the
place, sore stricken with the plague. They sought the byways and
unfrequented paths outside the walls, and were careful not to enter
the town itself. Traffic has ever been conservative, and when all fear
of infection had at last died out, the new routes thus struck out were
retained.
XXIII
Climbing steeply up out of the seething hollow where Leicester’s
busy population strives, the road in a mile and a half comes to the
hundredth mile from London. It is quiet and solitary, the village of
Wanlip, near by, not revealing its existence. But the neighbourhood
of Rothley—_i.e._ Roth-ley, the red field—on the left hand is
presently seen by the disgusting deshabille of the allotments. However
economically and socially desirable they may be, allotment gardens have
ever a squalid note. Rothley is growing vast and growing ugly, with
cheap, flimsy buildings and a hard-working population of stockingers
and quarrymen; and the march of the little hutches of provincial
suburbia is advancing on Rothley Temple, that historic house in its
beautiful park of stately trees where Thomas Babington Macaulay was
born, October 25th, 1800, “in a room panelled from floor to ceiling,
like every corner of the ancient mansion, with oak almost black with
age.” It had been in the time of Queen Elizabeth the home of that
Anthony Babington who in 1586 was executed for a wild and foolish plot
to murder the Queen and to release the Queen of Scots: a conspiracy
that not only failed, but sealed the fate also of the Scottish queen.
The name “Temple” indicates that this was formerly the site of a
Preceptory of the Knights Templars, and adjoining the house is still a
chapel including some remains of the Templars’ church and an effigy of
some unknown Crusader.
[Sidenote: _MACAULAY_]
When raised to the Peerage in 1857 as Baron Macaulay, the historian
sentimentally added “of Rothley,” although, to be sure, he owned no
property here. In 1859 he was dead. The place is thus doubly associated
with the man who made history a romance, beside whose enthralling pages
the novels of the day when his History of England was new were flat and
stale. Latter-day destructive critics have fallen foul of his style
and reduced what they term “Macaulayese” to a formula in which the use
of antithesis takes a prominent and mechanical part. Macaulay’s style,
however, remains the most brilliant exemplar of the oratorico-narrative
method, and is not likely to suffer greatly at the hands of the
unsympathetic.
Still, there is an extravagant note in the epitaph over his grave in
Westminster Abbey: “His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth
for evermore.” Such language would be almost extravagant if employed
upon Shakespeare himself, and is fitting only for a Nelson or a
Wellington.
The river Soar, lending its name to a number of neighbouring villages,
is responsible for that of Mountsorrel, a lovely name; but the district
is full of the most impressive place-names. What a fine mouthful is
“Ratcliffe-on-the-Wreake.” It must be a satisfaction to date one’s
correspondence from a place like that. “Thrumpton,” too: is that not
fine? Walton-on-the-Wolds has its merits, while there is an air of
distinction about Groby, recognised centuries ago, when Lord Grey was
“Lord Grey of Groby.” But “Barrow-on-Soar” is not nice.
The great rock of Mountsorrel, a bold craggy height of syenite, or
exceptionally hard granite, largely quarried for millstones and
road-metal, gives its name to the village nestling beneath the crag. A
castle once frowned upon the crest of it, but has long been a thing of
the past. Even in Camden’s day it was but a heap of rubbish. In remote
times a stronghold of the Earls of Leicester, and afterwards of Saher
de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, its history is obscure, but it seems
early to have been abandoned by those dignified nobles and occupied
by bands of outlaws who levied toll upon wayfarers, and behaved so
outrageously that at last the countryside was roused. “In the year
1217,” according to Camden, “the inhabitants of these parts pulled it
down to the ground, as a nest of the devil, and a den of thieves and
robbers.”
[Illustration: MOUNTSORREL.]
[Sidenote: _MOUNTSORRELL_]
An ancient legend told how the devil, on his way to Leicester, essayed
the journey in three leaps. At Mountsorrel he mounted his sorrel
horse, and made one leap to Wanlip: not an altogether insignificant
performance, for the distance is three miles. Thence he sprang a mile
further, to Birstall, where horse and rider were both burst with the
force of their descent; but with his remaining strength he sprang
another mile, to Belgrave, where, a mile short of Leicester, he was
buried: and that is how Belgrave got its name. So now we know.
Let no one, charmed with the name of Mountsorrel, come to the place
with high expectations of finding a picturesqueness to match. The
romantic scenery of rugged rock looking down upon the pleasant valley
of the Soar has been since 1845 the scene of quarry operations, and
atrocious raw scars seam the mount on all sides; and beneath it, and
for close upon a mile along the road, runs an abject townlet of the
out-at-elbows, down-at-heel variety, with rows upon rows of mean
cottages where many of the seven hundred quarrymen and their families
dwell. That is modern Mountsorrel. Enfolded in midst of all these
later developments, you still see vestiges of the Mountsorrel of from
a hundred to three hundred years ago, when it was a village dependent
for its existence solely upon the road. Still stands the “Black Swan”;
although, to be sure, it now does little else but stand, being empty
and forlorn. Even yet, relics of a happier day, the emblematic bunches
of grapes hang from its eighteenth-century red-brick frontage, telling
of the generous wine once dispensed within. The “White Swan,” itself
a house contemporary with its black brother, is more fortunate, and
appears still to thrive.
Mountsorrel is precisely as described above, but it is a charming
subject for a sketch. Standing on the cobblestoned footwalk by the
“White Swan,” you look across to the granite crag, to a group of old
houses, and to the singular, temple-like market-cross that replaces the
beautifully shafted Gothic cross removed in 1793. Sir John Danvers of
Swithland, a neighbouring squire, afterwards Lord Lanesborough, coveted
the cross for his park and offered to erect the existing building in
exchange for it; and, the people of Mountsorrel agreeing, the thing was
done.
Quorndon succeeds to Mountsorrel, at the interval of a mile and a half.
Nowadays, and for many a year past, it has been docked of half its
name, and is now “Quorn”; the seal having been set upon the practice by
the style adopted for the Great Central Railway’s station, “Quorn and
Woodhouse.” And thus are place-names debased. If the name of Quorndon
were translated from the ancient Saxon whence it is derived, this
would then be called Mill Hill, the “Quorn” coming from “quern,” in
the Middle Ages a hand-mill, but originally a mill of any kind. The
original Quorndon must therefore have been a mill on the adjoining
uplands.
[Illustration: CHURCH AND CAVERN, WOODHOUSE EAVES.]
Woodhouse itself lies away back in Charnwood Forest, with the parish
of Woodhouse Eaves adjoining; the “Eaves” in the name referring to its
ancient situation on the edge, or “eaves,” of the Forest; although
there have been those who derived it from the remarkable cavern, over
whose roof the modern church is built.
[Sidenote: _QUORNDON_]
The village of Quorndon, once and for long years the home of the famous
Quorn Hunt, has since 1905 lost that distinction. The old kennels were
then relinquished, and new built two miles away, at Barrow-on-Soar,
a busy place of lime-works, with a church remarkable for a number
of eccentric epitaphs on the Cave family, of which here below is an
example:
Herein this Grave there lyes a Cave,
We call a Cave a Grave—
If Cave be Grave, and Grave be Cave,
Then, reader! judge, I crave,
Whether doth Cave here lye in Grave,
Or Grave here lye in Cave?
If Grave in Cave here buried lye,
Then ‘Grave where is thy victorie?’
Go, reader, and report, here lyes a Cave
Who conquers Death and buries his own Grave.
One is curious to know what kind of men they were who wrote this
sort of thing. Nothing seems to have been sacred to these funeral
funny fellows and mortuary wags, who would start a conceit on false
premisses, pursue it to its own death, and then worry it into rags.
[Illustration: THE CHASE AND THE ROAD.
[_After H. Alken._
]
It was about 1750 that Hugo Meynell, the “Father of Fox-hunting,”
purchased Quorn Hall and established the hounds, and he hunted and
he halloed for forty-eight years over a huge stretch of country from
Market Harborough to the Trent—more than thirty miles across—so that
there was scarce a bullfinch whose rails his horses’ hoofs had not
scraped in all this hunting territory. He knew the muddy bottom of
many a ditch and had been soused in every stream before his hunting
days were done and his son succeeded him as Master for a brief two
years. Meynell not only established the Hunt, but made it pre-eminent,
and Quorn was then—what with the lavish hospitality he dispensed at
the Hall, and with the many hunting men who took up their quarters
here—what Melton Mowbray is now, the metropolis of hunting. The
village—or little town that it was for gaiety—was in fact too lively
and too expensive for some, and it was this too great success that led
to Melton arising in its stead: an old-time sportsman discovering
the then unknown sleepy old market-town and establishing himself
there, for quiet and economy. Hunting men who have ridden to hounds in
Leicestershire any time during the last sixty years or more will smile
at the association of Melton with cheapness. Our exploratory sportsman
of long ago had, however, made a great discovery. He found that
Quorndon being in the centre of the Quorn Hunt, you must hunt, unless
you be exceptionally energetic, almost exclusively with that pack;
whereas from Melton, that town standing in the marches of other hunts,
you might be loyal to your old love and yet take the field, day in and
day out, with the Belvoir and the Cottesmore as well. And thus the fame
and fortune of Melton grew.
[Sidenote: _THE QUORN HUNT_]
This is no place to tell of the glories of the Quorn Hunt under
Assheton-Smith, or Osbaldiston—“The Squire,” as every one loved to call
him; or the further splendours under Sir Richard Sutton, who, when
asked why he hunted seven days a week, replied, “Because I can’t hunt
eight.” The annals of the Hunt are extensive and the gossip endless,
ranging through the whole gamut of sentiment: rising to Homeric
laughter and sinking to the depths of mysticism, as when the older
villagers tell you of the story, elderly when even they were young,
of how Dick Burton, the huntsman, died and was buried in Quorndon
churchyard, and how the hounds killed a fox on his grave at the close
of the next hunting day.
The interior of Quorndon church is beautiful and exquisitely kept,
particularly the Farnham Chapel, the property of the ancient Farnham
family, seated at Quorndon for many centuries past, and still here.
The chapel, only to be entered by favour, is filled with the elaborate
monuments of bygone Farnhams, of which the most notable is that to John
Farnham, Gentleman Pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, who died in 1587. He
lies in life-sized effigy beside Dorothy his wife, and is habited in
armour, with a representation by his side of the axe carried by the
honourable corps of which he was a member, whose duties were to form
a bodyguard to the Sovereign on public occasions. “Pensioner” appears
to be a misleading term, the membership being honorary and entailing
expense, rather than bringing payment.
[Illustration: FROM THE MONUMENT TO JOHN FARNHAM.]
John Farnham appears to have been also a kind of captain of
free-lances, warring in the pay of foreign princes on the Continent. An
alabaster bas-relief on the wall of the chapel (like the tomb itself,
recently restored) shows him leading his men on to the siege of a
castle. A quaint epitaph in verse tells us something of what he was:
John Farnham here within this tombe enterred doth remaine,
whose life resigned up to God, the heavens his soul containe;
and if you do desire to knowe his well deserved praise,
go aske in court what life he ledd, and how he spent his days,
where princes great he truly served with whõ he stood in grace,
for good conceit and pleasaunt wit favour’d in every place.
Beloved of the noblest sorte, well liked of the rest,
unto his friend a faithfull friend, and fellowe to the best,
In warres he spent his youth, for youth the best expense of dais,
and did transfer from field to Court his just rewarde of praise.
Descended of an antient house, with honour ledd his life
only with one daughter blest, and with a vertuous wife.
God gave him here on earth to live twise fortie years and odd,
with life well spent he liveth now for aye with God.
XXIV
[Sidenote: “_GREAT PAUL_”]
Loughborough, standing among ecclesiologists for bells, succeeds to
Quorndon. The bell-founding firm of John Taylor & Sons, established
here in 1840, is the birthplace of many of these instruments of the
barbarous practice of bell-ringing that has survived into an otherwise
civilised age, and here in 1881 was cast the monster bell of St.
Paul’s Cathedral, “Great Paul,” whose hoarse growl—like a bell with
bronchitis—is heard daily at one o’clock in the City of London. It is
the largest bell in England, weighing 17-1/2 tons, and one of the most
useless, being practically little else than the City man’s luncheon
bell. “Great Paul,” being too big for the railway bridges, was brought
to London by road.
But there are other industries beside bell-founding at Loughborough.
The ancient trade of bobbin-net making is still carried on, together
with the hosiery and weaving and stocking-knitting that so thoroughly
pervade Leicestershire and a good deal of Notts; and there are
dye-works and engineering-shops too, a whole basketful of unromantic
but useful and mutually dependent trades: the extensive coal-trade
of the town ministering to the engineering and other power-using
factories, and the big breweries subsisting upon the magnificent
thirsts produced by coal-grit and the heat of furnaces. It will
be guessed from the foregoing that Lovely Loughborough is not a
phrase by which the place can rightly be known. Only the narrow main
street, where the old “Bull’s Head” inn still exhibits a gallows
sign stretching from side to side overhead, is at all removed from
commonplace, and the broad market-place is lined with modern buildings
in which many of the great number of Loughborough’s flashily rebuilt
inns that call themselves “hotels,” and are really nothing but drinking
shops, are situated.
[Sidenote: _LOUGHBOROUGH_]
One commonly finds that Loughborough enjoys—or perhaps that is not
quite the right word; let us say endures—some of the coldest weather
that the Meteorological Office reports in the winter. When a cold snap
makes the whole country shiver, it will generally be found that, of all
places in England, Loughborough is the coldest. But _per contra_, the
townsfolk say that it is also extremely hot in summer, and the parish
register records in the summer of 1808 an exceptional _heat_:
“Wednesday, _July_ 13th; the heat was so intense that in consequence
thereof many People died, especially they that were at work in the
fields, also a great number of Horses, particularly coach-horses,
drawing stage-coaches. The thermometer as high as 92.”
The great, empty-looking parish church, an example of the depths of
commonplace to which the Perpendicular style can descend, has nothing
of interest, partly, no doubt, because Sir Gilbert Scott was had in
during 1863-4 to “restore” it, at a cost of £9,000, and partly because
it is designed in a monotonous repetition of window for window, and
moulding for moulding, from end to end. It is, in short, tedious and
tiresome to a degree, and contains a very nasty effigy of “Joana
Wallis,” dated 1675.
A depressing influence seems to prevade the district between
Loughborough and the Trent. The scenery is of no striking quality and
the villages seem to have experienced their best days. Hathern is an
uninteresting village of framework knitters, and Kegworth—in Domesday
Book “Cogesworde”—that comes next after it, makes hosiery, brews beer,
manufactures plaster, and carries on a variety of useful industries,
but looks as grim as a person responsible for thousands who has but a
penny in his pocket. It is a gaunt townlet, with large and equally
gaunt church of the Decorated period, standing in a commanding position
in the centre of the unlovely place. Both alike look ragged and
poverty-stricken, and although a large sum has been spent on restoring
the building, it still looks as though no care had been taken of it for
centuries. A bell still rings curfew at 8 p.m. in the winter months.
The Vestry was formerly the residence of a “domus inclusus,” or hermit.
Tom Moore, that merry Irishman, found it possible to write poetry at
Kegworth, but he performed some marvellous things. Tommy dearly loved
a lord, and was here in 1811 for the express purpose of being near his
friend, Lord Moira, whose park at Donington is near by. When my lord
went to India, the poet removed to Mayfield, and thence to Sloperton
Cottage, near Devizes, to be near Lord Lansdowne.
Three miles away to the right of the road and across the Soar, into
Nottinghamshire, is Gotham, a place so famed in legend that the impulse
to visit it is irresistible. The way lies by Kingston-on-Soar, where
there is a beautiful little church with wonderfully elaborate monument
to the Babington family, bearing their punning rebus of the “Babe in
Tun.”