the “moors” met with on the Great North Road, enclosure and cultivation
have entirely changed its character, and the “moor” is just a stretch of
fields undistinguishable from the surrounding country. It leads
presently to the little town of Tuxford-in-the-Clay, approached up a
steep rise passing under the bridge of the Lincolnshire and East Coast
Railway, and in view of Tuxford’s Great Northern Station, away on the
right, perched on a windy and uncomfortable-looking ridge. A red rash of
recent brick cottages has broken out at the foot of the rise, but Tuxford
itself, on the crest of the hill, seems unchanged since coaching days,
except that the traffic which then enlivened it has gone. It is a gaunt,
lifeless place, in spite of its three railway stations, and stands where
the roads cross on the height, and the church, the “Newcastle Arms,”
another inn which arrogates the title of “The Hotel,” and the private
houses and shops of the decayed town face a wide open street, and all
shiver in company. But Tuxford has seen gorgeous sights in its time.
Witness the gay and lengthy cavalcade that “lay” here in the July of
1503, when the Princess Margaret was on her way to her marriage with the
king of Scotland. The princess stayed at the “Crown,” demolished in 1587
by one of the storms which hill-top Tuxford knows so well, and leaving us
the poorer by one ancient hostelry. Not that it would have survived to
this day had there been no storm, for the town itself was destroyed by
fire at a much later date, in 1702.
The “Newcastle Arms” is one of those old houses built for the reception
of many and wealthy travellers in the Augustan age of the road, and is by
consequence many sizes too large for present needs, so that a portion of
the house is set apart for offices quite unconnected with hotel business.
Even the roomy old church away on the other side of the broad road seems
on too large a scale for Tuxford, as it is, and the stone effigies of the
Longvilliers and the mouldy hatchments of later families hanging on the
walls of its bare chapels tell a tale of vanished greatness. There is a
curious and clumsy carving in this church, representing the martyrdom of
St. Lawrence. The Saint is shown on his gridiron (which resembles
nothing so much as a ladder) and wears a pleased expression, as though he
rather liked the process of being grilled, while one tormentor is turning
him and another blowing up the fire with a pair of bellows.
After the church, the old red-brick grammar-school, founded by “Carolo
Read” in 1669, is the most interesting building in Tuxford. “What God
hath built, let no man destroy,” says the inscription over the entrance,
placed there, no doubt, by the donor with a vivid recollection of the
destruction wrought in the Civil War of some twenty years before.
The road leaves Tuxford steeply downhill and facing another hill.
Descending this, the villages of East and West Markham are just visible,
right and left; West Markham with a hideous church like a Greek temple,
its green copper dome conspicuous for a long distance. At the foot of
Cleveland Hill, as it is called, is, or was, Markham Moor, for it was
enclosed in 1810, with the great “Markham Moor Inn,” now looking very
forlorn and lonely, standing at the fall of the roads, where the turnpike
gate used to be, and where the Worksop road goes off to the left, and a
battered pillar of grey stone with a now illegible inscription stands.
This may or may not be the “Rebel Stone,” spoken of in old county
histories as standing by the wayside, bearing the inscription, “Here
lieth the Body of a Rebel, 1746.”
Beyond this, again, is Gamston, a still decaying village, its red-brick
houses ruined or empty, the wayside forge closed and the handsome old
church on a hillock but sparsely attended; the whole a picture of the
failure and neglect which descended upon the roadside villages fifty
years ago. Many have found other vocations, but Gamston is not of them.
For some one hundred and fifty years the Great North Road has gone
through Tuxford to East Retford and Barnby Moor; but this is not the
original road. That has to be sought, half-deserted, away to the left.
There is much romance on that old way, which is one of several derelict
branching roads just here. The time seems to be approaching when this
original road will be restored, to effect a relief to the heavy traffic
through Retford.
We may branch off for the exploration of the old road either at Markham
Moor or at Gamston. Either turning will bring us in two and a half miles
to Jockey House, now a farmhouse, but once an inn at what were
cross-roads. Two of these roads are grass tracks, but the old Great
North Road on to Rushy Inn and Barnby Moor is quite good, although very
little used.
A substantial stone pillar stands at the corner of the cross-roads
opposite the Jockey House, inscribed:—
From
London 142
Miles
and a half
Coach Road
Work/op Mannor
Hou/e
7 Miles 3 qrs
176 —
The Keys
in the Jockey
House.
The “keys in the Jockey House” means that here was a turnpike-gate with
no turnpike keeper. The taking of toll seems to have been conducted from
the inn.
In the churchyard of Elkisley, a mile or so distant, there is a tombstone
which refers to a tragedy in the Jockey House two hundred years ago. It
reads:—
“Here lieth the body of
JOHN BARAGH,
gentleman, who was murdered by
Midford Hendry, officer of the Guards,
on the 24th day of June, 1721.
Age 29 years.”
Hendry, it seems, was in command of a company of Guards travelling south
on the Great North Road. They had halted for refreshment at Jockey
House, and Hendry got into a violent political discussion in the inn with
Baragh, who was sitting there, a complete stranger to him. In the course
of their high words, Hendry drew his sword and stabbed Baragh to the
heart.
[Picture: Jockey House]
XXXI
RETFORD, on the main road, is over three miles distant from Gamston, past
the more cheerful-looking little hamlet of Eaton, and the outlying
settlement by the “White House Inn,” at the beginning of the long
approach to the town.
Retford is a town of varied industries, situated on either bank of the
river Idle, and by it divided into East and West Retford. Engineering
works, brick and tile making, and agricultural pursuits combine to render
it prosperous, if not progressive, for when Retford built its elaborate
Town Hall in 1867 it probably exhausted itself with the effort. In this
Square, on a plinth, stands the “Bread Stone,” or “Broad Stone,” a
seventeenth century Plague Stone with a hollow at that time filled with
vinegar and water for the immersion of coins passing in the market
against infection. The town centres in its Market Square, in which the
old Town Hall stood. When that building was pulled down a great amount
of additional room was obtained at the cost of a certain picturesqueness,
to which quality the town can now scarcely lay claim. The “White Hart,”
standing at this corner of the Market Square, is the only relic of old
coaching days. Its modernised frontage does not give the house credit
for the respectable age which it really owns, and it is only when we
explore the stableyard, a picturesque and narrow passage, extending from
the Market Square to Bridgegate, that we see the old-time importance of
the “White Hart.” It is perhaps unique in one respect. Nowadays, the
old innkeepers are, of course, all dead. In some instances their
families carried on the business for a while, but soon afterwards all
these old coaching-houses passed into other hands. Even the Percival
family, innkeepers and coach-masters for some generations at Wansford and
at Greetham, no longer have the “Haycock” or the “Greetham Inn,” but the
“White Hart” is still in the Dennett family, and has been since 1818,
when William Dennett took it over. He reigned here until 1848, and was
succeeded by his son, Joseph Dennett, who, dying in 1890, was in his turn
followed by Arthur Dennett, the present landlord. An old
coaching-house—the coaching-house of Retford—it occupied a particularly
favourable position on the main and cross-country coach-routes: those of
Worksop and Chesterfield on the one hand, and Gainsborough, Market Rasen,
and Boston on the other. Besides being in receipt of the local coaching
business between Stamford and Doncaster, Joseph Dennett horsed a stage of
the Doncaster and Stamford Amity Coach and the Stamford and Retford
Auxiliary Mail, among others.
[Picture: An Old Postboy: John Blagg]
Although overshadowed by the neighbouring “Bell” on Barnby Moor, kept by
the mighty George Clark, this house did a good posting business. For one
thing, the story of the “White Hart” as a posting-house does not go back
so far as that of the “Bell,” for when Clark came to Barnby Moor he found
a fine business already developed, but the rise of the “White Hart” into
prominence dates only from the coming of the Dennetts. Twelve
post-horses and three boys formed its ordinary posting establishment, and
among them the name of John Blagg is prominent. He left the “Bell” at an
early period and entered the service of the “White Hart” in 1834,
remaining for forty-five years, and dying, at the age of seventy-five, in
October 1880. The old posting-books of the house still show one of his
feats of endurance, the riding post from Retford to York and back in one
day, a distance of a hundred and ten miles. When posting became a thing
of the past, John Blagg was still in request, and his well-remembered
figure, clad in the traditional postboy costume of white breeches, blue
jacket, and white beaver hat, was seen almost to the last at weddings and
other celebrations when riding postillion was considered indispensable.
Here he is, portrayed from the life, a characteristic figure of a
vanished era.
There are still some relics of that time at the “White Hart”: the old
locker belonging to the Boston coach, in which the guard used to secure
the valuables intrusted to him; and in the sunny old booking-office
looking out upon the Market Square there are even now some old
posting-saddles and postboys’ whips.
XXXII
LEAVING Retford by Bridgegate, the road rises at once to the long
five-miles’ stretch of Barnby Moor, home of howling winds and whirling
snow-wreaths in winter, and equally unprotected from the fierce glare of
the midsummer sun. At the further end of this trying place, just past a
huddled group of cottages at the bend of the road, stands the famous old
“Blue Bell” inn. But no one was ever heard to talk of this old coaching
hostelry as the “Blue Bell.” The “Bell,” Barnby Moor, was the title by
which it was always known.
For the beginning of the well-earned fame of the “Bell” we must go back a
long way. Not, indeed, to ancient times, for there was never a mediæval
hostel here, but to very old coaching days. Already, in 1776, when the
Rev. Thomas Twining was ambling about the country on “Poppet,” making
picturesque notes, it was a “gentlemanlike, comfortable house,” and
Sterne knew it well. “I am worn out,” says he in one of his letters,
“but press on to Barnby Moor to-night.” Even the “worn-out” would make
an effort, you see, to reach this hospitable roof-tree.
But a greater fame was earned by the “Bell” in its later days, when it
was kept by George Clark, at once innkeeper, sportsman, and breeder of
racehorses. He was famed for his anecdotal and conversational powers,
and when free from gout was reputed “a tough customer over the mahogany,”
in which testimony we may read, in the manner of that time, a crowning
virtue. Something—nay, a great deal—more than the “red-nosed innkeepers”
of whom Sir Walter Scott speaks, he was also a landed proprietor, and
supplied his extensive establishment from his own farm. Peculiarly the
man for this road, and especially for this portion of the road, his
personality made the “Bell” inn—the word “hotel” was in those days an
abomination and an offence—the especial resort of the sporting
fraternity, and racing men generally contrived to make his house their
halting-place.
Clark reigned at the “Bell” for forty years, from 1800, dying of gout in
1842, shortly after he had sold the house to a Mr. Inett. His was that
famous mare, Lollypop, who gave birth to the yet more famous Sweetmeat.
But Clark did not live to learn the quality of that foal, and Sweetmeat
was sold at the dispersal of his stable for ten guineas. Three years
later, when he had won the Somersetshire Stakes at Bath, Lord George
Bentinck in vain offered four thousand guineas for him, and later in that
year, 1845, he won the Doncaster Cup.
Clark was chiefly instrumental in bringing to justice two incendiaries,
disciples of “Captain Swing,” who had fired a hayrick not far from the
“Bell.” At that period—the early “thirties”—when the Reform agitation
was embittering the relations between the squires and the peasantry,
rick-burnings were prevalent all over the country. They went by the name
of the “Swing Riots,” from the circumstance of the threatening letters
and notices received being signed in the name of that entirely
pseudonymous or mythical person. One night Clark was roused from his bed
with the information that the rioters were at work close at hand.
Hastily rising and dressing by the glare of his neighbour’s burning
ricks, he told off fifty from his numerous staff of postboys and stable
helpers to mount and to thoroughly explore the country within a circuit
of ten miles, offering a reward of £5 to the one who would discover the
miscreants, together with five shillings a head to all who took part in
the chase. It was a successful foray; for, before morning dawned, two
shivering “rioters” were brought to him. They had been found hiding in a
ditch. Matches and other incriminating things were found on them, and,
being committed to York Castle, they eventually were awarded fourteen
years’ transportation.
The old “Bell” is still standing. A hundred and twenty horses for the
road were kept here in those old times, but to-day, instead of horses, we
have motor-cars.
Soon after railways had driven the coaches off the road, the “Bell”
ceased to be an inn. Its circumstances were peculiar. Standing as it
did, and still does, away from any town or village, its only trade was
with coaching or posting travellers, and when they disappeared altogether
there was nothing for it but to close down. And so for sixty years and
more the “Bell” became a private residence, and it would have remained so
had not a road-enthusiast taken it and re-opened the old house in 1906 as
a hotel for touring motorists. The enthusiast took other hotels on this
road. Took so many indeed that his resources as a private person were
overstrained, and he went bankrupt. But the “Bell,” in this, its second
time, flourishes exceedingly.
[Picture: Scrooby Church]
From hence the bleak hamlets of Torworth and Ranskill lead to Scrooby,
set amidst the heathy vale of the winding Idle, which sends its silver
threads in aimless fashion amidst the meadows. Here the road leaves
Nottinghamshire and enters Yorkshire. Beside the road at the little rise
called Scrooby Top, stands a farmhouse, once the old Scrooby Inn, kept by
Thomas Fisher as a kind of half-way house between Bawtry and Barnby Moor,
and calculated to intercept the posting business of the “Bell” and of the
Bawtry inns. Competition was keen-edged on the roads in those times.
[Picture: Scrooby Manor House]
There seems to have once been a turnpike gate at Scrooby, for a murder
was committed there in 1779, when John Spencer, a shepherd, calling up
William Geadon, the turnpike man, one July night under the pretence of
having some cattle to go through, knocked him down and killed him with a
hedge-stake and then went upstairs and murdered the turnpike man’s
mother. Spencer was hanged at Nottingham, and gibbeted on the scene of
his crime. The stump of the gibbet was still visible in 1833.
This is the place whence came the chief among the “Pilgrim Fathers” who
at last, in 1620, succeeded in leaving England in the _Mayflower_, for
America. Scrooby is the place of origin of that Separatist Church which
refused allegiance to the Church of England. Here lived William
Brewster, son of the bailiff of Scrooby Manor, once a Palace of the
Archbishops of York. In those times the Great North Road wandered, as a
lane, down through Scrooby village, and all traffic went this way.
William Brewster the elder, bailiff and postmaster, was a government
servant who kept relays of horses primarily for the use of State
messengers. His salary was “twenty pence a day”; the equivalent of about
£300 per annum of our money. Although very definite regulations were
laid down by the Board of Posts for the conduct of this service, they
were not strictly observed, and a postmaster often traded for himself as
well, keeping horses for hire and being an innkeeper as well.
At any rate, the Brewsters were considerable people; and William the
elder could afford to send his son to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and later
had sufficient influence to secure him service with one of Queen
Elizabeth’s Secretaries of State in Holland. But the Secretary fell into
disgrace, and young William’s diplomatic career ended at an early age.
He returned home to Scrooby, where he found employment with his father,
and eventually succeeded him, in 1594, holding the position of postmaster
for seventeen years.
Let us see, from one surviving record, what kind of business was his, and
how prosperous he must have been apart from his official emoluments. One
of his guests, as virtually an innkeeper, was Sir Timothy Hutton, in
1605. Sir Timothy paid him, for guide and conveyance to Tuxford, 10s.,
and for candle, supper and breakfast 7s. 6d. On his return journey he
paid 8s. for horses to Doncaster, and a threepenny tip to the ostler.
Meanwhile, Brewster, nourished in that old nest of Archbishops, had
imbibed distinctly anti-episcopal ideas, probably in Holland. His
activities in founding the Separatist Church led to his resignation of
the postmaster’s office in 1607. In that old Manor House where he lived
assembled others of his ways of thought: the Revd. Mr. Clifton, rector of
Babworth, near Retford, William Bradford of Austerfield, John Smyth, and
other shining lights and painful and austere persons. William Bradford
records how the congregation “met ordinarily at William Brewster’s house
on the Lord’s Day; and with great love he entertained them when they
came, making provision for them, to his great charge.”
They would not attend services at the parish church; an offence then
punishable by fine and imprisonment, and thus, persecuted, there was no
ultimate course but to leave the country: itself not for some time
permitted. “They were,” wrote William Bradford, “hunted and persecuted
on every side. Some were taken and clapt up in prison, others had their
houses beset and watched, night and day, and hardly escaped their hands;
and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations and
the means of their livelihood.”
The Manor Farm, where these early developments of the Puritan movement
took place, and where the Brewsters lived, remains in part, and bears an
explanatory bronze tablet placed there by the Pilgrim Society of
Plymouth, Massachusetts. And there, too, near the road, stands Scrooby
church, rather dilapidated, with its stone spire, much the same as ever.
[Picture: The Stables, Scrooby Manor House]
Yorkshire, upon which we have now entered, is the largest shire or county
in England. In one way it seems almost incredibly large, for it has more
acres than there are letters (not words) in the Bible. There are
3,882,851 acres in Yorkshire, and 3,566,482 letters in the Bible.
Yorkshire does not reveal its full beauty to the traveller along this
road. Its abbeys and waterfalls, its river-gorges and romantic valleys,
belong rather to the by-ways. Picturesqueness and romance spelt
discomfort, and the uneventful road was the one the travellers of old
preferred. Thus it is that those who pursue this route to the North, and
know nothing else of Yorkshire, might deny this huge county, more than
twice the size of Lincolnshire, the next largest, that variety and beauty
which, in fact, we know it to possess. For eighty miles the Great North
Road goes through Yorkshire with scarce a hill worthy the name, although
towards the north the Hambleton Hills, away to the east, give the views
from the road a sullen grandeur.
But if the highway and the scenery bordering it are characterless, this
is a region of strongly marked character, so far as its inhabitants are
concerned. Many wits have been to work on the Yorkshireman’s
peculiarities. While they all agree to disregard his hospitality and his
frank heartiness, they unite to satirise his shrewdness, and his clannish
ways. The old Yorkshire toast is famous:—
“Here’s tiv us, all on us, me an’ all.
May we niver want nowt, noan on us,
Nor me nawther.”
And this other:—
“Our Native County: t’biggest,
t’bonniest, and t’best.”
The character of John Browdie is a very accurate exemplar of the
Yorkshire yeoman, and you could not wish to meet a better fellow, but you
would rather not have any dealings with the Yorkshireman of popular
imagination, whose native wit goes beyond shrewdness and does not halt on
the hither side of sharp practice. The Yorkshireman’s armorial bearings
are wickedly said to be a flea, a fly, and a flitch of bacon; because a
flea will suck any one’s blood, like a Yorkshireman; a fly will drink out
of any one’s cup, and so will a Yorkshireman; and a flitch of bacon is no
good until it is hung, and no more is a Yorkshireman! No native of the
county can be expected to subscribe to this, but no one ever heard of a
Yorkshireman objecting to be called a “tyke.”
A “Yorkshire tyke” is a familiar phrase. By it we understand a native of
this immense shire to be named. No one knows whence this nickname arose,
or whether it is complimentary or the reverse. To be sure, we call a dog
a “tyke,” and to describe any one as a dog is not complimentary, unless
qualifications are made. Thus, the man who is insulted by being called a
dog rather takes it as a compliment to be dubbed a “sad dog” or a “sly
dog,” and, like Bob Acres, lets you know, with a twinkle of the eye, that
on occasion he can be a “devil of a fellow.”
By common consent, whatever its origin may have been, “tyke,” applied to
a Yorkshireman, is taken in the complimentary sense. Indeed, the
Yorkshireman’s good conceit of himself does not allow him to think that
any other sense could possibly be intended. He generally prides himself,
like Major Bagstock, on being “sly, devilish sly.” That he is so, too,
those who have tried to overreach him, either in his native wilds or
elsewhere, have generally discovered. “He’s a deep ’un,” says a
character in one of Charles Reade’s novels, “but we are Yorkshire too, as
the saying is.” When tyke meets tyke, then, if ever, comes the tug of
war. “That’s Yorkshire,” is a saying which implies much, as in the story
of the ostler from the county who had long been in service at a London
inn. “How is it,” asked a guest, “that such a clever fellow as you, and
a Yorkshireman, remains so long without becoming master of the house?”
“Measter’s Yorkshire too,” answered the servant.
It is a sporting—more especially a horsey—county. “Shake a bridle over a
Yorkshireman’s grave, and he will rise and steal a horse,” is a proverb
which bears a sort of testimony to the fact.
XXXIII
YORKSHIRE and Yorkshiremen, their virtues and vices, bring us to Bawtry,
where the High Sheriff and those in authority used to welcome kingly and
queenly visitors to Yorkshire, or escort them over the border, on
leaving; performing the latter office with the better heart, there can be
little doubt, for royal progresses often left a trail of blood and ruin
behind them in those “good” old times. Happy Bawtry! for little or no
history attaches to the little town, and it lives in the memory only as
the home of that saddler who, although famous as a proverb, has come down
to us a nameless martyr to the Temperance Cause.