have been travelling since we left Scarborough, comes to an end, in a
sense, at Helmsley; for here it splits up into two roads, each of which
we must follow for a time. Helmsley itself has its attractions. Among
them are an open market square and an ancient cross, pretty houses and
an inn covered with flowers, a tiny stream running through the town
from end to end, and a castle-keep upon the hill. This is that castle
which was "once proud Buckingham's delight," and now stands within
the park whose name is borrowed from Duncombe the banker. Helmsley
has passed through many hands, of which some helped in the making of
history, and some were not over clean. The first name we hear of in
connection with the place is no less a one than William the Conqueror,
for he, having given Helmsley to one of his followers, chose it on
one occasion for his own resting-place, after a heavy march and much
hard work of the destructive kind he affected. His host, Earl Morton,
lost these lands in the losing cause of Robert Curthose, and they fell
to the famous Walter of Espec, one of the leaders in that strange
semi-religious victory, the Battle of the Standard, whose heroes were
summoned by an archbishop, absolved upon the field by a bishop, and
actually overshadowed through the fight by the consecrated Host and the
banners of three saints. Just such a mixture as this, of religion and
bloodshed, was Walter himself, with his splendid presence, his gigantic
height, his bright eyes and noble forehead, his voice "like the sound
of a trumpet," his life as a warrior, and his death as a monk. Walter's
sister Adeline married Peter de Ros, and it was their great-grandson,
Robert de Ros, who built this much dilapidated tower of Helmsley
Castle. After long centuries of ownership by unimportant Williams and
Roberts and Georges the place came into the fair hands of Katherine,
the daughter of the Earl of Rutland, and the wholly undeserved wife of
the first Duke of Buckingham. Lady Katherine Manners was not, as is
sometimes said, the granddaughter of Sir Philip Sidney, for it was her
Uncle Roger, not her father, who married Sidney's daughter. The Duchess
of Buckingham inherited all the wealth of her father's house, for her
two little half-brothers died "by wicked practice and sorcery": so
Helmsley came to Steenie, whose angel-face brought him so much beside
his nickname. All his honours and his riches were won, says Clarendon,
"upon no other advantage or recommendation than of the beauty and
gracefulness and becomingness of his person." Yet something more truly
lovable than this, we may be sure, was needed to win his Kate and her
broad lands; and indeed the romance that gives this castle of Helmsley
its chief interest remained romantic to the end, even though the
duchess lived to write: "I pray God never woman may love a man as I
have done you."
James I.'s slave-dog, as he called himself, was too busy in court and
camp to visit Helmsley much, if ever, but it must have been a fine
sight when it was his. The keep, not then a crumbling fragment, rose
high above walls and many towers. Here are still the two moats that
surrounded them, and the two gateways that once made a double defence.
How strong the defences were we may gather from the trouble they gave
to Sir Thomas Fairfax when he besieged the castle in the time of
the second Duke of Buckingham, and won it at last, not only for the
Parliament, but for himself. His grateful country gave him the lands
of Helmsley, but at the same time took the precaution of reducing the
castle to ruins, so that this shattered keep and gatehouse should never
again defend royalist or rebel. The Buckinghams were ever humorists,
and the second duke, pondering how he might regain some of his lost
possessions, bethought him of marrying Mary Fairfax. After he had been
embroiled in many plots and suffered many imprisonments he settled down
here within sight of the tower that his father-in-law had reduced to so
sad a state.
[Illustration: DOUBLE ENTRANCE TO HELMSLEY CASTLE.]
There, beyond the lawn-tennis court, is the house he lived in. Some
of it seems to be older than his day, but he probably was obliged to
repair it rather thoroughly after the siege. We may climb those steps,
if we will, and enter.
These are haunted rooms. They are not haunted by a very worthy ghost, I
fear--not even by Steenie of the dainty leg and the lovely complexion,
the gallant adventurer whom many loved much and whom we all love a
little--but only by his handsome, vicious son, the son who was born to
the sound of all the joy-bells of Westminster, and died in the humble
little bed at Kirbymoorside. These rooms were once proud Buckingham's
delight; now they tear at one's heart. It is a thing to be glad of,
no doubt, that Lord Mayor Duncombe found Buckingham's home too small
to hold his vaulting ambitions and so built the palace in the park,
leaving us this pitiful relic of departed glory. Yet one marvels that
any man should have allowed so much beauty to go to wrack. These great
oak panels with their rare design, this splendid moulded ceiling
wrought so elaborately with Tudor roses, that frieze of shields and
fleurs-de-lys, of mermaids and winged dragons, once made an appropriate
setting for the man whom a contemporary called the "finest gentleman
of person and wit" he ever saw. Now, in their decayed grandeur, they
are appropriate still; a dramatic--almost a melodramatic--symbol of his
fate. Half the panelling is gone; shred by shred the plaster of the
ceiling is falling on the uneven floor; bare laths and gaping holes
disfigure the Tudor roses over our heads; of the mermaids and winged
dragons only a few are left. Lumber is piled upon the floor where
"all mankind's epitome" was wont to walk; cobwebs and dust deface the
windows. Such is the symbol of proud Buckingham, than whom "no man was
ever handsomer," yet who was, in the last year of his life, "worn to a
thread"; and up there in the park is the symbol of the city knight who
bought his property with money not always well-gained, and flourished
like a green bay-tree. We see the unromantic, prosperous house of the
thrifty Duncombe as we drive away to Rievaulx.
Motorists will find it their best plan to visit the terrace of Rievaulx
before seeing the abbey itself. The way lies through a gate on the
left at the top of an extremely steep hill; a winding lane leads among
trees to a second gate, and here the car may safely be left. A few
steps bring us to the famous terrace cut on the hillside by a Duncombe
of the eighteenth century. For half a mile the wide and level turf is
stretched between the woods that overshadow it on the left, and the
woods that fall steeply away from it on the right to the foot of the
hill. Beyond the valley another wooded hill rises; to the south are
moors. If we stand at the brink of the terrace and look down through a
gap in the trees we see, far below us, the pointed arches of Rievaulx
Abbey.
At each end of the terrace is a classical temple. At the north end,
where we are standing, is the one described in the local guide-book as
"a beautiful temple with an Ionic portico." At first sight it gives one
a shock. Eighteenth-century buildings so often do give one a shock.
If, however, we forget for a few minutes that Rievaulx Abbey lies down
there in the valley, if we forget Walter of Espec and his monks, and
remember only the days when this temple was built, the Ionic portico
has its uses. It gives us a vision of the age of powder and hoops, of
the fair ladies who rustled here on the soft turf when George was king.
The closely cropped sward was suited to the dainty feet, the scenery
not so "savage" as to wound the dainty susceptibilities. Indeed, in any
century, this scene could only heal.
There is a path that winds down the hill to the abbey, and if our
car is independent of us this is the best way to go. But if she is
unattended and cannot meet us in the valley we must drive down the
steep hill to the village. The surface of this hill is composed of
ruts and loose stones, but the beauty of the woods is compensation for
nearly anything.
[Illustration: RIEVAULX ABBEY FROM THE TERRACE.]
If Fountains Abbey speaks of power, Rievaulx breathes peace. Taking
everything into consideration, I think its beauty has only one rival
in England. The valley of the Rye is far lovelier than Studley Park;
the building itself is far lovelier than Bolton. Only Tintern can
rival it; not even Tintern can eclipse it. For at Tintern the feeling
of Cistercian seclusion can only be acquired through the imagination:
a high-road is close at hand; a brisk trade in picture postcards and
Goss china is carried on at the abbey door; to be alone is almost
impossible. But here at Rievaulx we may chance to stand in perfect
solitude, perfect stillness, under the mighty archway that soars in
dignified simplicity so far above our heads, and separates us as
though by invisible gates from the world. No imagination is needed
here to conjure up the aloofness of the white monks--the actual fact
is here. Through the empty windows--once filled, in defiance of the
early Cistercian ideals, with some of the first efforts of English
glass-stainers--we see the wild hillside rising from the very walls,
and above it the rampart of trees; the grass under our feet grows like
the grass of the field; the world makes no sign, and on each side of
us the slender arches point to heaven. There is something here that is
more than beauty; the very air seems charged with the prayers of holy
men long dead. The weather-worn slab of the high altar is unfortunately
enclosed by a railing, which is doubtless needed, in this Christian
country, to save it from desecration. Not near this stone, as one might
expect, but in the ruined chapter-house, lies the dust of the monk who
came here in his old age to hide his "broad but well-featured face"
under the shadow of a cowl, and to subdue his trumpet-like voice to the
singing of psalms--the monk who had founded this abbey in the days when
he was a famous soldier--Walter of Espec.
[Illustration: RIEVAULX ABBEY.]
Walter founded three monasteries: one at Kirkham, which we shall
presently see; one here; one at Wardon in Bedfordshire. Incorporated
with Leland's Itinerary is a document which tells us how Walter's only
son fell from his horse and broke his neck upon a stone cross, and how
in consequence Walter founded the monasteries of Kirkham and Rievaulx
with some of the wealth for which he had now no heir. Dugdale, the
seventeenth-century antiquarian, believed the tale, and told it for
truth in his "Monasticon." Yet now we are bidden to reject the story of
the younger Walter's sad end; nay, even to doubt that he ever lived!
He is not mentioned, say those who know, in the foundation-charter of
the abbey; there is nowhere in any document a statement that Walter of
Espec ever had a son. However, till we find a definite statement that
he had none, we shall probably continue to accept or reject the story
according to temperament.
There are still some fragments of the actual church that was built by
the eager hands of the monks from Clairvaux, the monks sent by St.
Bernard himself to live their austere lives in this valley; but, of
course, this rich triforium, these corbels of elaborate carving, these
lancets and moulded arches and clustered columns were never seen by
Norman Walter. Nor, indeed, would they have met with approval from the
saintly abbot of Clairvaux, whose aspirations, like those of all the
early Cistercians, tended to severe simplicity in architecture as in
life. The vanished nave, it is thought, was part of the Norman work of
Bernard's missionary monks, but this glorious chancel and the refectory
with the strange doorway belong entirely to the thirteenth century.
Beautiful as are the details it is by the great chancel-arch that we
shall always remember Rievaulx. It is the reposefulness of its simple
grandeur that strikes the keynote of peace. Its quiet, stately lines
rest the eye, and the memory of it rests the heart whenever we think of
this fair daughter of Citeaux and mother of Melrose.
[Illustration: CHANCEL ARCH, RIEVAULX ABBEY.]
Long ago there was a second Cistercian abbey on the banks of Rye. The
bells of Old Byland and the bells of Rievaulx clashed with one another,
which for some reason shocked the Byland monks. Those who live in
towns to-day, and Sunday by Sunday hear the bells of seven or eight
churches ringing simultaneously in varying keys, will sympathise with
them; but there seems to have been some idea in their minds beyond
the obvious one, an idea strong enough to make them migrate first to
Stocking and then to the spot where we may see the ruins of their
abbey. Those who can spare the time will find that the beautiful west
front of the second Byland repays them well for driving the few miles
between the two ruins. The community that finally settled on this spot
had been through a great deal. When they came here it was more than
fifty years since the thirteen monks necessary to found a new house had
left Furness to wander in their ox-waggon from place to place--from
Furness to Cumberland, from Cumberland to Thirsk, from Thirsk to
Byland-on-the-Moor, from Byland-on-the-Moor to Stocking, and from
Stocking to their final home at last. None of the original thirteen
can have seen the trefoiled door and gigantic wheel-window of the west
front; for this, the most striking part of the existing ruin, was
probably the finishing touch to a very splendid church.
Those who reach Byland may perhaps like to drive about a mile and a
half beyond it, to see the interesting church at Coxwold, and the house
where Laurence Sterne lived for some time and wrote the greater part of
"Tristram Shandy," alternated with many sermons. From Coxwold a series
of byways will take them to the high-road at Brandsby.
Those, however, who are unable to go beyond Rievaulx, must return to
Helmsley. They may follow the Rye for a little while, and then, turning
to the left with a last and lovely view of the abbey, may mount the
hill through the woods, the fairy-haunted woods of Rievaulx, where
the stems are not wrapped about with a confusion of undergrowth, but
rise unhampered from a carpet of ferns and creepers. This climb among
the dusky trees is very short, but adds to one's sense of Rievaulx's
remoteness. The shadowy stillness of these woods is like a veil dropped
between the valley and the world.
After driving through Helmsley we cross the Rye, and presently pass the
upper entrance of Duncombe Park, the "Nelson Gate," erected as we see
"to the memory of Lord Viscount Nelson, and the unparallelled gallant
achievements of the British Navy." Between Helmsley and Sheriff Hutton,
whither we are bound, lies some very pretty country of a pastoral kind,
and a series of picturesque villages, several of which deserve more
attention than we are likely to give them.
Here, for instance, is Oswaldkirk, which might well tempt us to pause.
It is scattered along the side of a hill, with its little houses
half smothered in trees. The tiny church is open, and in it are some
fragments of Saxon and Norman work, and a Jacobean pulpit which once
held the famous John Tillotson, who began life in a tailor's shop and
ended it as Archbishop of Canterbury. His success was chiefly due, I
believe, to his eloquence, so we may regard this spot as the cradle
of his fortunes, since the sermon he preached here was his first. And
here in Oswaldkirk was born another man of mark, the antiquarian to
whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the ruined monasteries, Roger
Dodsworth. He collaborated with Dugdale in the "Monasticon," which was
not published till after his death. The younger man inherited the fruit
of his researches, and has more or less eclipsed his name.
A little more than a mile beyond Oswaldkirk is Gilling, one of the
prettiest villages in the county. Its wide street is bordered by
bright gardens; a tiny stream runs through it under a row of miniature
bridges; on the left is a church with some interesting tombs; and
on the right, entirely hidden by the trees, is the castle of the
Fairfaxes. Only those who have secured special permission are admitted
to see this castle and its splendid Elizabethan Hall, of which the
fame has reached many who were never in it. It is, according to all
accounts, a marvel of rich ornament, of oaken panels and delicate
inlay, of carved mouldings and stained glass and armorial shields.
A road with a perfect surface carries us out of the village to the
top of a hill--where one patch of heather by the wayside reminds us
that we are on Grimston Moor--and on through Brandsby to Stillington.
The church we leave behind us as we turn sharply to the left has no
special interest beyond the fact that Laurence Sterne preached many of
his sermons in it, while he was living at Sutton-in-the-Forest and at
Coxwold. Here in Stillington we leave the fine high-road for a very
poor one--one that is a mere lane in fact--which leads us past the
strange little church of Marton-on-the-Forest, with its crow-stepped
gables and tower, to the village of Sheriff Hutton.
"What is this forest call'd?" we may be inclined to ask with Archbishop
Scrope in "Henry IV." "'Tis Gaultree Forest, an't shall please your
grace." Even in Leland's time there was very little wood in the
neighbourhood of Sheriff Hutton, and now the Forest of Galtres, so
"impenetrable and swampy" when the Romans set to work to drain it, has
practically vanished. A good proportion of it, I think, must always
have been forest only in the technical sense, for we hear of it in
the reign of Elizabeth as the scene of a yearly horse-race, wherein
the prize for the winning horse was a little golden bell. Moreover,
there is a tradition that wanderers in the Forest of Galtres, which
reached to the outskirts of York, were guided by a light hung in the
lantern tower of All Saints Church. Unless a great part of the country
were open--"low medows and morisch ground"--this light would not have
greatly aided the belated traveller. Be that as it may, the country
is now so open that as we draw near Sheriff Hutton we may see with a
thrill, if we look very intently along the far horizon, the faint,
elusive gleaming of York Minster.
The castle of Sheriff Hutton is more impressive at a distance than
close at hand. It is visible miles away across the flat country, and
the jagged outlines of its cluster of towers stand up so imposingly
against the sky that one is led to expect something rather vast and
effective. But these gaunt remnants are all there is to see. They
stand in a farmyard and are surrounded with haystacks. Once upon a
time this castle was fine enough. It had eight or nine great towers,
"and the stately staire up to the haul" was very magnificent, and so
was "the haul it self, and al the residew of the house." It owed its
splendour to the splendid Nevilles, to the great Warwick among others,
who seems always to have lived in a state of kingly magnificence, as
befitted one who made kings. When he died it passed, with his other
castles, to his son-in-law Richard III., who used it as a prison for
such claimants of the throne as he did not trouble to murder. There
was humour in this plan of sending the two young cousins to keep each
other company--Edward IV.'s daughter, Elizabeth of York, and the
youthful Warwick, son of that Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a
butt of Malmsey. They were not here very long, for hardly had their
Uncle Richard's ill-gotten crown fallen under the hawthorn on Bosworth
Field, before the new king's emissary was riding in all haste to
Sheriff Hutton. There was a crowd that day about this gate that still
bears the arms of the Nevilles and of England, for from all the country
round the people gathered to do honour to their future queen; and as
she was led out from her prison to share Henry's throne, the gentry of
the neighbourhood, an eager bodyguard, pressed forward to escort her
to London. Poor cousin Warwick went to London too, with a bodyguard of
a sterner sort; for since his claims could not, like Elizabeth's, be
merged in those of the new king, he was destined for the Tower and the
block.
There is no record, apparently, of how this stately castle was
transformed in the course of one century from a "Princely Logginges" to
a mere shell. The usual death sentence of castles, "dismantled by order
of the Parliament," was never pronounced in this case, for the mischief
was done before Charles I. was king. In Henry VIII.'s reign this was
for a time the home of that Duke of Norfolk who was the uncle of two
queens, and lived to see them both upon the scaffold. He was a witness
at Anne Boleyn's wedding and a judge at her trial, and was himself
only saved from the block by Henry's death. His son Surrey, the sweet
singer, has walked here too, where now the hay is stacked.
[Illustration: SHERIFF HUTTON CASTLE.]
Richard III. was here at least once, in the year before his death. He
and his sad wife--sad all her life, but now heart-broken--came here
to bury their little son. At the end of the sloping village street
is the old church where they laid him; and there we may still see,
not the place of his burial, for that is unknown, but the little
alabaster figure that once lay upon his tomb. It has the air of being
a good portrait. The features are still faintly visible; the pathetic
down-drawn mouth suggests that Anne Neville's son was not much happier
than herself. Circling the boyish head is a heavy crown, the only crown
it ever wore. The reason that the Prince of Wales was buried here
does not appear. Some suggest that his mother, who was with Richard
at Nottingham, could not bear to return to Middleham, and so met
the funeral procession here; but there is at least one historian[6]
who describes her despair when she saw her dead son in his own home.
Elizabeth of York was probably at Sheriff Hutton when her little cousin
Edward was brought here to his grave. She must have remembered another
Edward, nearer and dearer to her, whose grave, not yet discovered, had
been so lately made at the foot of the dark staircase in the Tower of
London.
This ancient church has some fine brasses in it. One of them is hidden
beneath a trap-door in the floor; another bears the figures of two
babies in swaddling clothes. The church's patron saint is St. Helena,
the mother of Constantine, and the discoverer, through a vision, of
the Holy Cross. The historians give us a good deal of choice in the
matter of this lady's origin. Some declare that she was the daughter of
a British king, a woman of surprising beauty and intelligence; but it
seems to be more likely that her father was an innkeeper.
Sheriff Hutton is only about ten miles away from York, but if possible
we should add a few miles to the distance by making a _détour_ to
Kirkham Priory. All that there is to be seen there is comprised in one
picture, so to speak, a picture of an old gateway and the base of a
cross; but it is a picture that one remembers.
To reach it we pass through country that is sometimes moderately
pretty, sometimes dull. There is a little church at Foston that
is pleasant to the eye, with a red-tiled roof, and a miniature
bell-tower, and a pathway where the yew-trees nearly meet. But we
are now on the borderland between the beautiful part of Yorkshire
and the uninteresting south-eastern plain. After we leave Kirkham we
shall see little more of the beauties of nature. We shall see some
beautiful architecture, and various things that are more appealing to
the imagination than to the eye. And here, too, as is so often the case
where the scenery is tame, the roads are sufficient in themselves for
the pleasure of the day's journey.
About a mile beyond Foston we turn on to the high-road from
Scarborough to York; but after a few moments leave it again for a
road on the right, by which we slowly descend into the valley of the
Derwent. The hillside is thickly wooded, and as we pass beyond the
overarching trees we see Kirkham lying below us: the little village,
and the wooded hill beyond it, and the beautiful gateway that is so
entirely unlike all others, and, fringed with rushes, the wide, smooth
river--the Derwent, which we last saw at Ayton, shadowed by the birches
of the Forge Valley and overlooked by the ruins of Margaret Bromflete's
castle.
This was the first of the monasteries founded by Walter of Espec. In
front of the gateway is the base of an old cross, of which the top step
is carved with an almost illegible design. Local tradition, in its
courageous way, declares that there is incorporated with these steps a
fragment of the "little stone cross" that caused the death of Walter
of Espec's son. The truth of this tale seems to depend a good deal on
whether Walter ever had a son.
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF KIRKHAM PRIORY.]
It is this gateway that we have come to see. The fragment of wall in
which it is framed was probably built in the twelfth century, but all
this wealth of ornament and heraldry belongs to a much later date.
The quiet valley and the stream would suggest to one that this, like
Walter's Rievaulx, was a Cistercian house; but there was never a
Cistercian community that would have countenanced all this display
of tracery and crockets and statuary, and all these worldly coats of
arms. They were Augustinian Canons who made their gate so fine, and
carved upon it these ten shields of men with sounding names--Clare and
Vaux, Scrope, Ros, Plantagenet--and set these saints in their niches,
and above them the seal of the priory; and who passed to their meals
in the refectory under all the varied mouldings of this magnificent
Norman door south of the cloister-garth; and who chanted their Credo
with their eyes fixed on that lovely lancet window, once part of the
east-end of their church.
And now we are at last bound for York. We cross the Derwent and climb
the hill again to the high-road, and there before us, very far away,
lies our goal. Faintly shining, York Minster shows like a pale opal
hanging above the horizon.
The very thought of York and all that it stands for makes the heart
beat faster. Let us open the throttle then, and speed to it as quickly
as we may; for the road lies broad and level between the fields, and
nearly as straight as an arrow's path, and never, if we love our engine
and our England as we should, shall we forget this flight of ours to
the city of all our kings.
YORK AND THE SOUTH
SUMMARY OF TOUR IN THE SOUTH
DISTANCES.
York
Pontefract 24 miles
Beverley, _viâ_ Selby 45 "
Hull 9 "
--
Total 78 miles
ROADS.
Usually good and level.
IV
YORK AND THE SOUTH