lovely. As we run down through glades and woods to this sheltered,
still retreat, this green bower of sweeping boughs, it is easy to
understand how deeply restful it must have seemed to St. Hilda
of Whitby and to the monks of a later day. Hilda founded the tiny
community here, and made it a cell of her own great abbey, hoping,
perhaps, to come here herself sometimes when she was tired of living
in the teeth of the wind. The little grey church, wrapped and hidden
in the trees, is partly Norman, partly Early English, but has various
relics in it belonging to the Saxon life of Hilda's nunnery: a broken
cross or pillar inscribed with runes, and a Saxon stone built into a
Norman arch. A tablet on the wall tells how "the Lady Hilda of royal
descent did for the sake of security and retirement establish a nunnery
or cell for 8 nuns at Hackness." The fortunes of the place rose and
fell with those of its parent abbey, for when Whitby was destroyed
by the Danes in the ninth century, Hackness, too, was utterly wiped
out. Then came the Norman revival. But "thieves and robbers coming
out of the forests and dens where they lurked, carried away all the
monks' substance, and laid that holy place--Whitby Abbey--desolate. In
like manner pirates, void of all compassion, landing there, came and
plundered the monastery." So the monks' benefactor, William de Percy,
gave them this retreat, already sacred to the memory of their great
predecessor, where, like her, they might find security and retirement.
Even to-day those priceless boons are to be found at Hackness. Even
on an August afternoon, when the Forge Valley may almost be described
as crowded, there are security and retirement in the green nest at
Hackness.
Two miles of moderately pretty country lie between these two places.
We see the thick woods before us like a wall across the landscape, and
the archway of trees that spans the road is the gate into the Forge
Valley. This little glen is too famous for its own good; but not a
word of its fame is undeserved. In the early morning it must be quite
perfect in its own gentle way, with its little river winding under
the trees beside the road, and the grassy banks, and the cool woods
rising on each side, and the paths that leave the wayside and disappear
alluringly into the shadows. But in the afternoon of a summer's day,
when the grass is strewn with bowler hats, and every birch-tree is the
background of a family group, flight is best. The flight is quite a
short one, for the valley is on a miniature scale.
At its mouth, in a field beside the Derwent, is the ruin that was once
Ayton Castle, a shattered tower that seems to have had many owners in
turn, Attons and St. Johns and Euers and Cliffords, and was no doubt
very useful in defending the narrow defile through which we have just
driven. It came to the Cliffords with Margaret Bromflete, who was
descended from one of the Attons, and was the wife of Clifford the
Butcher. This was the Lady Clifford who saved her son's life by sending
him away into hiding when the cause of the Red Rose seemed altogether
lost: so this fragment of masonry is probably one of the many castles
that were restored to the Shepherd Lord when Henry VII. became king.
It is a place after the Shepherd's own heart, for in his day no doubt
the valley of the Forge was as peaceful as Hackness. Indeed, only a
hundred years ago, a writer described the neighbourhood of Ayton as
"grotesquely rural."
The beauty of the scenery ends rather suddenly as we drive through the
two Aytons, East and West, and go on our way to Pickering. However, the
road is level and has an excellent surface, and if the landscape is a
little dull the villages are pretty. We pass through a series of them,
all more or less alike and all built mainly of grey stone, for we are
near the moors. On the outskirts of Brompton is Gallows Hill, whence,
from her brother's farm, "the phantom of delight," Mary Hutchinson,
came out one autumn morning to marry Wordsworth in the church whose
spire rises on our left. With the bridegroom was Dorothy, a little
sad-hearted we may guess; and with the "perfect woman" was her sister
Joanna, that "wild-hearted" girl who found her brother-in-law's "dear
friendships with the streams and groves" so comical that her laughter
on the subject once raised echoes from all the hills of Grasmere. The
church in which this wedding took place is interesting for its own
sake, and contains, I have read, a memorial to a sixteenth-century
soldier, "who in wars to his greit charges sarved oin kyng and tow
quenes with du obediens and died without recumpens." I did not
see this, but quote it for the sake of those who collect curious
epitaphs.[5]
Beyond Brompton the road skirts Ebberston and Allerston, and passes
through Thornton-le-Dale, where a stream of some size runs by the
wayside from end to end of the village, and an old cross stands among
flowers. This village has a name for beauty, and like some other
beauties takes a little too much pains to keep that reputation. It is
certainly a pretty village, but it has rather a self-conscious air.
Pickering is about two miles away.
Pickering is not particularly beautiful, but its ruined castle, and
above all its wonderful church, should certainly be seen, for one
rarely finds a church whose relics represent so many dates. The font
is Saxon, the pulpit Chippendale, and between these two extremes of
craftsmanship--the roughly hewn stone and the delicately chiselled
wood--are the fourteenth-century tombs and the fifteenth-century
frescoes, and the Elizabethan chest. When Leland was here he saw and
noted this figure of Sir William Bruce, and the "cantuarie bering his
name," and that other effigy, of alabaster, with the "garland about
his helmet," which represents Sir David Roucliffe and no Bruce, though
Leland calls him one. Of these strange frescoes above our heads, which
make the special fame of Pickering Church, there is no word in Leland's
record. Possibly these pictured saints and virtues--St. Christopher
and St. George and the Corporal Acts of Mercy--were so often to be
seen in churches of his day that they did not call for comment, or it
may be that they were already hidden under the thick coat of plaster
that covered them for hundreds of years. They were discovered in the
middle of the nineteenth century, and promptly whitewashed without fear
or favour. The most elaborate of the pictures is the Feast of Herod,
which shows that king dressed in mediæval garments suggestive of Mrs.
Markham's History, while John the Baptist is being horribly beheaded
in the corner.
The remains of the castle are above the town; but the names of
Rosamund's tower and the Devil's are more romantic than their
appearance, and the inevitable lawn-tennis court can be more easily
forgiven here than in the baileys of more beautiful ruins. This castle
belonged to the house of Lancaster, and therefore in his day to that
Lancaster, "the Actor," whom Piers Gavestone in his last moments
besought for mercy, the Lancaster who so shortly afterwards was crying
"Have mercy on me, King of Heaven!" when his turn came to be beheaded.
It belonged, too, to the "time-honoured Lancaster" whose son imprisoned
Richard II. for a little while within these very walls. All the
prisons, it seems, to which Henry IV. committed Richard--Knaresborough,
Pickering, Pontefract--were his own Lancastrian castles, and at Henry's
accession, of course, became crown property. This one, which held for
the King in the Civil War, still belongs to the Duchy of Lancaster.
Not many miles from Pickering, at the very brink of the moors, is a
village whose name is familiar to lovers of old buildings and students
of church history, and whose charms of seclusion and quietness are
so endearing that even the unlearned are likely to think of it again
and again with affection. I do not think "excursions" ever go to
Lastingham. There is nothing there to attract those who visit a sacred
ruin to play games in its aisles, or to sit on the high altar till it
becomes necessary to enclose it with a railing, or to photograph their
_fiancées_ under its arches. These are only drawn by a famous name. The
fame of Lastingham is hidden in a few ancient books, and in the works
of archæologists, and in the memories of those who have sought peace
and found it there. To reach it we must turn to the right a couple of
miles beyond Pickering, and drive by winding ways and on rather an
indifferent surface to the foot of the moors.
It is at Cropton that the moors first come into sight. The scenery has
been uninteresting since we left the Forge Valley, and it is with all
the more delight that we suddenly, at a turn of the road, find the
landscape filled with colour and warmth and beauty, with hills green in
the foreground and gloriously crimson against the sky. The road curves
and twists and curves again, as though hunting for Lastingham among the
little valleys. It seems to be altogether lost, and then suddenly we
find it.
About twelve hundred and fifty years ago, when its history began, it
was not so easily found. Ethelwald, king of the Deiri, wished to have
a monastery in his own Northumbrian country--some peaceful spot to
which, when he had a mind, he might retire for prayer and quietness
during his life, and in which he might be buried when he died. So he
summoned to him that "holy, wise, and good man," Cedd, Bishop of the
East Angles and brother of St. Chad, and offered him a piece of land.
Cedd "chose himself a place among craggy and distant mountains which
looked like lurking-places for robbers ... to the end that the fruits
of good works should spring up where before beasts were wont to dwell,
or men to live after the manner of beasts." Such is Bede's rather
overdrawn description of this green hollow among the rounded hills; yet
some say that Bede visited the place himself. Having chosen the spot
it was necessary "to cleanse the place for the monastery from former
crimes," so Cedd and his brother Cynebil kept between them a forty
days' fast upon that little knoll where the church stands, uplifted
above the village. There the monastery rose, and thither the bishop
often came to see that all was well. Once he came at a time "when there
was a mortality there," and, catching the epidemic, he died. And so it
happens that the dust of this Saxon saint lies beneath the crypt of
Lastingham Church.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF LASTINGHAM.]
Cedd's brother, the famous Chad, to whom so many churches are
dedicated, succeeded him as abbot, and was often here. In connection
with him Bede tells a poetical story of a monk of Lastingham. Oswini
was a practical man, and felt himself unfitted for the contemplative
life, yet greatly longed to renounce the world. So "quitting all he
had"--he had been a Queen's Prime Minister--he came to St. Chad here
on this little hill, and, pointing to the hatchet and axe that he had
brought in his hand, put himself and them at the service of the monks.
So while the others prayed Brother Oswini worked. And it was he, the
humble worker with his hands, and not the monks upon their knees in
the church, who heard the voices of the heavenly choir. He was "doing
such things as were necessary" in the house when, "on a sudden," as he
afterwards said, "he heard the voice of persons singing most sweetly
and rejoicing, and appearing to descend from heaven." This sound
of singing surged round the oratory where Chad was at prayer, then
returned to heaven, "the way it came, with inexpressible sweetness."
None heard it but the saint and the man of labour. Chad knew the
meaning of it. "They were angelic spirits," he said, "who came to call
me to my heavenly reward, which I have always longed after." Seven days
later, says the historian, the bishop died.
This gate and path will lead us to the knoll where all these things
happened, except the actual death of Chad. Here Brother Oswini worked
and heard the angels sing: here Cedd fasted and died. Here in this
little crypt, which we reach through the strange walled opening in the
nave, his dust lies on the right of the altar. Some say that these
Saxon stones with the fishes and dragons carved upon them have been
here ever since the days of Cedd; but the sturdy piers and vaulted
ceiling of the miniature chapel are, of course, Norman. They, and the
apse above them, were probably the work of those monks of Whitby who
founded the Abbey of St. Mary at York, and seem to have paused here for
ten years on their way thither.
The street by which we entered Lastingham winds down the slope to the
foot of the hollow; on the right of it is the restored Well of St.
Cedd in its stone basin. The heather of the huge Cleveland moors is
hardly more than a stone's-throw distant; and high upon the hill that
overlooks the site of the Saxon monastery is a cross, not ancient, but
very striking in this place. The tiny inn is close under the church.
It is extremely small, and of the homeliest kind; but I think that
any one who is not daunted by the simple life--the _very_ simple life,
be it plainly understood--will carry away pleasant memories of the
quietness and cleanliness and kindliness within its doors. It has,
unfortunately, not even a shed wherein to shelter a car, but only a
grass plot where a car may spend a fine night.
We climb out of Lastingham by a road that passes close to the cross.
This cross was set up in commemoration of Queen Victoria's accession,
but there must surely have been another thought in the minds of those
who placed it so symbolically in this particular spot. Let us pause for
a moment and look down. The village lies below us in its little hollow,
with the church of the early saints raised in its midst; and just above
us, conspicuous on its height and clearly outlined against the sky,
stands the cross. It seems to guard the boundary between the poetry of
Lastingham and the prose of the ordinary world, for the beauty that
makes such a perfect setting for the place ends suddenly on the brow of
the hill, and we speed away among commonplace fields and hedges to join
the high-road by way of Appleton-le-Moor.
[Illustration: LASTINGHAM CROSS.]
At Keldholme, though the priory is marked on the map as though still in
existence, only some stones built into a wall are left to show where de
Stutteville's nunnery stood. As for the de Stutteville's own castle,
which once rose proudly on the hill to our right, the stones of it form
the walls of the neighbouring prison, and the site of it is a pasturage
for the neighbouring cows.
The prison in question--a dark, repellent spot in a pretty street--is
in the market-place of Kirbymoorside. Nearly facing it is the "Black
Swan," whose pretty red-tiled porch bears the date 1632; but it was
the "King's Head," further up the street, to which Pope alluded when
he said, neither truthfully nor politely, that the second Duke of
Buckingham died at Kirbymoorside "in the worst inn's worst room."
This trim, modern-looking house with the sober front of grey, so
unsuggestive of the rakish duke, has never formed a part of the inn,
and it was in its best room that Buckingham, on his deathbed, declared
he had always had the greatest veneration for religion and reason. We
may not cross the threshold of the room into which the dying man was
carried--and, indeed, even penitent upon his deathbed, George Villiers
the second was hardly an object for pilgrimages!--but here is its
little window overlooking the street, the middle window of the three
that are next the inn. Many writers, following Macaulay and Pope,
assume that Buckingham died in this house because he had squandered
his fortune so thoroughly that he could not secure a more comfortable
place to die in. But some tell a more likely, if less edifying, tale.
The duke was injured or taken ill, they say, while hunting near this
town, and as his own castle of Helmsley was several miles away he was
carried hither, to the house of one of his tenants. It seems certain
that the estate of Helmsley was still his at his death, since his
executors received nearly ninety thousand pounds for it from Charles
Duncombe, banker and goldsmith. A man who had once possessed all
that the Buckinghams had taken from their kings might be said to
have squandered his fortune without being actually in want of a roof
to die under. He had at one time a very fine roof of his own here
at Kirbymoorside, but this may have been one of the many things he
had lost, or possibly the Civil War had left it in a state even less
luxurious than this little grey house. By following a stony lane we may
see, in a farmyard above the town, the few fragments of masonry that
are the last remains of the castle of the Nevilles and the Buckinghams.
Queen Elizabeth took it from the Nevilles, and her successor gave it
to the man of whom he said: "You may be sure that I love the Earl of
Buckingham more than any one else."
The second duke, who died so humbly, was buried with his betters--among
whom, I think, we may include his father--in Westminster Abbey. His
body was embalmed, and the oft-quoted line in the register of burials
at Kirbymoorside refers only to the viscera: "1687 April 17th. Gorges
vilaus Lord dooke of bookingam."
About a mile beyond Kirbymoorside there is a little valley, not far
from the high-road, of which perhaps the greater number of us have
never heard. The appeal of Kirkdale, like that of Lastingham, is not to
the many, and for that very reason it is irresistible to some; not only
to the man of science and the historian, but to all those who can best
hear the voices of the dead in places where there are no voices of the
living. There is silence in Kirkdale.
A steep hill with a preposterous surface leads down to Hodge Beck; to
the wooden footbridge among the trees, and the quarry where the hyænas
used to live, and the splash that we must cross. Those limestone rocks
to the right are famous in the world of science, for that dark cave
whose entrance we may see was discovered, about a hundred years ago,
to be strewn with the bones of strange beasts. It was a veritable
treasury for geologists, for the hyænas who lived and died here in
such quantities not only bequeathed their own bones to us, but also
many bones of the uncouth creatures they were in the habit of eating,
creatures most happily no longer with us. There were once tigers and
elephants, it appears, in quiet Kirkdale.
[Illustration: HODGE BECK.]
We climb out of the beck and turn to the right. The narrow glen is
thickly wooded, after the manner of Yorkshire dales both large and
small, and in a clump of firs stands the Minster of St. Gregory. This
is a fine name for so small a building; but it was called a minster
nearly nine hundred years ago, and we need not deny it the distinction
in its venerable age. It is not for its beauty that we come to see it,
though it is picturesque enough in its setting of trees; but chiefly it
is for the sake of one stone in its wall, and of the names inscribed
upon it--names familiar yet remote, the names of Edward the King and
Tosti the Earl. Here they are, carved in the lifetime of those who
bore them. It is plain that this great stone was not always, as it is
now, under a porch; for it was once a sundial, and here it is always
in the shadow. The words upon it are deeply and clearly graven, easily
distinguished, and, except for a few words, easily understood. This is
the whole inscription, carved in two columns, with one line below the
dial:--
"Orm Gamal Suna Bohte STS Gregorius Minster Wonne Hit Wes AEl Tobrocan
& Tofalan & He Hit Let Macan Newan From Grunde XPE & STS Gregorius In
Eadward Dagum CNG & In Tosti Dagum Eorl, & Hawarth Me Wrohte & Brand,
PRS."
(_Orm Gamal's son, bought St. Gregory's Minster when it was all
tobroken and tofallen, and he it let be made new from ground to Christ
and St. Gregory, in Edward's days, the King, and in Tosti's days, the
Earl, & Howarth me wrought, and Brand, Priests._)
The sundial has its own legend:--
"This is Daeges Solmerca Aet Ilcum Tide.'
(_This is Day's sunmarker at every time._")
This church, then, was made new from the ground in the middle of the
eleventh century; for it was in 1056 that Tosti, the son of the famous
Godwin, obtained the earldom of Northumbria; and it was in 1065 that he
"impelled the Northumbrians to rebel, by the asperity of his manners,"
and so lost his earldom. In using these words William of Malmesbury
is really most moderate, for Tosti seems to have been a terrible
swashbuckler. He murdered, among many others, the son of the very man
who rebuilt this church and set up this inscription: "All the sons
of the traitor Godwin," says an old chronicler, "were men of such
wickedness that if they saw any beautiful town belonging to any one
they caused the lord of it to be slain by night, and his offspring to
be destroyed, that they might obtain his property." On one occasion
Tosti seized his brother Harold by the hair in the king's presence,
while he was actually drinking his Majesty's health; whereupon Harold
lifted Tosti "up on high, and dashed him down on the floor." Such was
the asperity of their manners.
Edward the King is, of course, the Confessor, the "harmless king."
Within the church there are two carved stones round which much
discussion circles. Until lately they were in the outer wall, where
they naturally suffered much from the climate. One of them--the
one that has a cross engraved upon it--once bore the words "Cyning
Æthilwald," or "King Ethelwald," in runic letters. Upon the slender
foundation of this somewhat vague inscription it has been argued
that this is the coffin lid of King Ethelwald: therefore Ethelwald
was buried at Kirkdale: therefore Cedd's monastery, where Ethelwald
wished to be buried, was at Kirkdale and not at Lastingham. This last
conclusion is then turned into a premise, with a view to suggesting
that the beautiful stone with the Celtic design upon it may be the
coffin lid of Cedd himself. Yet Bede says that Cedd was buried at
"Lestingau."
The door of St. Gregory's Minster is locked. We may see the "sunmarker"
and its clear lettering without entering the building, and also a slab
of stone with an interlaced Celtic pattern which is let into the outer
wall; but to see the reputed coffin lids of Ethelwald and Cedd--which
are beautiful specimens of Celtic work, whatever their story--we
must drive to Nawton village, a mile away, and fetch the key from
the Vicarage. This seems hard; and if hard for motorists, a hundred
times harder for bicyclists and others. The Yorkshire churches are in
the main very kind to the public. Many of them are left open, with a
suggestive money-box close to the door, and often with a guide-book
that may be borrowed. By this method the church probably gains rather
than loses, since it is pleasanter to give half a crown to an old
building that deserves it than to give sixpence to an old man who has
learnt a few facts by rote, and learnt them wrongly. If it is possible,
however, to forgive a church for being closed we must forgive this
church of Kirkdale. It has again and again been defaced and desecrated
by those curious folk who love their own insignificant initials more
than any fairer sight. It is certain that those who care so little for
a building as to treat it thus will not journey very far to fetch the
key.
[Illustration: KIRKDALE.]