portals in the west front, but by the south porch, the most impressive
entrance, as it happens. For this is at once the noblest and the
earliest portion of the great church, and here, in one magnificent view
from south to north we obtain one of the finest architectural vistas in
England. Majesty personified, these Early English transepts are in
themselves broad and long and lofty enough to furnish a nave for many
another cathedral. Spaciousness and nobility of proportion are the notes
of them, and even the beautiful nave, with its aisles, light and
graceful, loftier and broader than almost any other in the land, dwindles
by comparison. They produce in the surprised traveller who first beholds
them the rare sensation of satisfaction, of expectations more than
realised, and give an uplifting of spirit as thrilling as that caused by
some inspiring passage of minstrelsy. To stand at the crossing and gaze
upwards into that vast tower which looks so clumsy to the outward view,
is to receive an impression of beauty, of combined strength and
lightness, which is not to be acquired elsewhere, for it is the finest of
lantern towers, and, open to the vaulting of its roof, a hundred and
eighty feet above the pavement, its great windows on all sides entrap the
sunbeams and shed a diffused glory on arcade and pier. Perhaps one of
the most daring attempts at effect is that which confronts the visitor as
he enters by the south porch. Daring, not from the constructional, but
from the decorative point of view, the five equal-sized lancet windows,
the “Five Sisters” that occupy three parts of the space in the wall of
the north transept, might so easily have been as glaring a failure as
they are a conspicuous success. Their very prominence has doubtless
given them their name, and caused the legend to be invented of their
having been the gift of five maiden sisters. The beauty of the original
Early English glass which still remains in these lancets has a
considerable share in producing this successful effect. That the
unearthly beauty of that pale green glass is preserved to us, together
with much more in the Minster, is due to Sir Thomas Fairfax, the
Parliamentary general, himself a Yorkshireman, who kept the pious but
narrow-minded and mischievous soldiery in order, who otherwise would have
delighted in flinging prayer-books and missals through every window in
this House of God, and have accounted it an act of religious fervour.
We cannot explore the Minster in greater detail, for the road yet lies in
many a league before us; nor recount how York, city and shire, broke into
rebellion when the old religion was suppressed by Henry the Eighth, and
the Minster’s treasures, particularly the head of St. William, stolen.
The Pilgrimage of Grace was the result, in which the Yorkshire gentlemen
and others assembled, with Robert Aske at their head, and taking as their
badge the Five Wounds of Christ, prepared to do battle for their Faith.
Aske ended on a gallows from the height of Micklegate Bar. The same
troubles recurred in the time of Elizabeth, and Yorkshire, the last
resort of Roman Catholicism, was again in arms, with the Earls of
Northumberland and Westmoreland conspiring with the Duke of Norfolk to
release the captive Queen of Scots and restore the old religion. The
movement failed, and Northumberland was executed on the Pavement, others
being put to death or deprived of their estates. That was the last
popular movement in favour of the old faith, and although the city had
been prelatical and Royalist during the first years of Charles the
First’s reign, public opinion at last veered completely round, so that
shortly after the Parliamentary victory of Marston Moor in 1644, and the
consequent surrender of the Royalist garrison of York, the city became as
Puritan and republican as it had been the opposite. Gifts made by
Charles to the Minster were torn down and dispersed, the very font was
thrown out, and dean and chapter were replaced by four divines elected by
an assembly. Many of the York parish churches were wrecked by fanatics
carrying out an order to destroy “superstitious pictures and images,” and
nearly all were without incumbents. When the restoration of the monarchy
and the church was effected together in 1661, York became “one of the
most factious and malignant towns in the kingdom,” and two years later
broke into a revolt for which twenty-one rebels were executed. The final
outburst occurred in 1688, when James the Second was suspected of an
intention to appoint the Roman Catholic Bishop of Callipolis to the
vacant see of York. The bishop was taking part in a religious procession
through the streets when an infuriated mob set upon him and seized his
silver-gilt crozier, which was taken as a trophy to the vestry, where it
may yet be seen. The bishop fled. A few days later James the Second
ceased to reign, and with that event ended these religious contentions.
[Picture: All Saints’ Pavement]
IX
BUT the stirring history of the Minster itself was not yet completed, for
the final chapter in a long record of events was not enacted until the
early years of the nineteenth century.
The roads in the neighbourhood of York on February 2, 1829, were thronged
with excited crowds hurrying to the city. Dashing through them came the
fire-engines of Leeds, and others from Escrick Park. Far ahead, a great
column of smoke hovered in the cold February sky. York Minster was on
fire.
It was no accident that had caused this conflagration, but the wild
imaginings of one Jonathan Martin, which had prompted him to become the
incendiary of that stately pile. A singular character, compacted of the
unlovely characteristics of Mawworm and the demented prophet, Solomon
Eagle, this was the crowning act of a life distinguished by religious
mania. Jonathan Martin was born at Hexham in 1782, and apprenticed to a
tanner. His parents were poor, and he had only the slightest kind of
education. At the expiration of his apprenticeship he found himself in
London, and was speedily entrapped by the press-gang and sent to serve
his Majesty as an able seaman. It seems to have been at this period that
the unbalanced state of his mind first became noticeable. He was with
the fleet at many places, and often in action, from Copenhagen to the
Nile. At times he would exhibit cowardice, and at others either
indifference to danger or actual bravery. He would be religious,
dissolute, industrious, idle, sulky, or cheerful by turns: a pretended
dreamer of dreams and communicant with angels. “Parson Saxe,” his
shipmates named him; “but,” said one, years afterwards, “I always thought
him more rogue than fool.”
Martin was paid off in 1810. He settled to work for a farmer at Norton,
near Durham, and shortly afterwards married. He became a member of the
Wesleyan Methodist body at Norton, and began those religious exercises
which he claims to have converted him and to have emancipated him from
the law, being “justified by faith” only. How dangerous such views of
personal irresponsibility can be when held by the weak-minded his
after-career was only too plainly to show. He immediately conceived an
abhorrence of the Church of England, as a church teaching obedience to
pastors and masters, and of the clergy for their worldliness. In this
last respect, indeed, Martin—as we think now—had no little justification,
for the Church had not then begun to arise from the almost Pagan slough
of laziness, indifference, and greed of wealth and good living which
throughout the previous century had marked the members of the
Establishment, from the country parson up to the archbishops. When
clergymen could find it in them to perform the solemn rite of the burial
service while in a state of drunkenness; when, under Martin’s own
observation at Durham, the Prince-Bishop of that city enjoyed emoluments
and perquisites amounting to £30,000 per annum, there is little cause for
surprise that hatred and contempt of the cloth should arise.
This basis of justification, acting upon a mind already diseased, and not
rendered more healthy by fasting and brooding over the Scriptures,
resulted in his attempting to preach from church pulpits, in writing
threatening letters to the clergy, and eventually to a silly threat to
shoot the Bishop of Oxford when at Stockport. For this he was rightly
confined in a lunatic asylum at Gateshead. Some months later he managed
to escape, and after wandering about the country took service with his
former employer at Norton, the magistrates consenting to his remaining at
liberty. In 1822 he left for Darlington, where he lived until 1827. His
wife had died while he was in the asylum, and in 1828, while engaged in
hawking a pamphlet biography of himself at Boston, he made the
acquaintance of a young woman of that town and married her. By this time
his religious mania had grown worse, and when, on December 26, 1828, he
and his wife journeyed to York, it would appear that he went there with
the design of burning the Cathedral already half-formed. He haunted the
building day by day, leaving denunciatory letters from time to time.
One, discovered on the iron grille of the choir screen, exhorted the
clergy to “repent and cry For marcey for know is the day of vangens and
your Cumplet Destruction is at Hand for the Lord will not sufer you and
the Deveal and your blind Hellish Docktren to dseve the works of His
Hands no longer. . . . Depart you Carsit blind Gides in to the Hotest
plase of Hell to be tormentid with the Deveal and all his Eanguls for
Ever and Ever.”
Violent language! but one may hear harangues very like it any day within
Hyde Park, by the Marble Arch. There are many incendiaries in the making
around us to-day, and as little attention is paid to them as to Martin’s
ravings.
Undoubtedly mad, he possessed something of the madman’s cunning, and with
the plan of firing the Cathedral fully formed, set out with his wife for
Leeds, as he gave out, on the 27th of January. At Leeds he remained a
few days, and was remarkable for his unusually quiet and orderly
behaviour. He left on Saturday morning, ostensibly for Tadcaster, saying
he should return on the Monday; but went instead to York. Here the
madman’s cunning broke down, for he stayed at a place where he was well
known; at the lodgings, in fact, that he had left a few days before. He
prowled about the Cathedral the whole of the next day, Sunday, and
attended service there, hiding behind a tomb in the north transept;
overheard the notes of the organ—the finest in England—thundering and
booming and rolling in echoes amid the fretted roofs. The sound troubled
the brain of the maniac. “Buzz, buzz,” he whispered; “I’ll teach thee to
stop thy buzzing,” and hid, shivering with religious and lunatic ecstasy,
in the recess until the building was empty.
[Picture: Jonathan Martin, Incendiary]
The short February day closed, and left the Cathedral in darkness; but he
still waited. The ringers paid their evening-visit to the belfry, and he
watched them from his hiding-place. He watched them go and then began
his work. The ringers had left the belfry unlocked. Ascending to it, he
cut a length of about a hundred feet off the prayer-bell rope, and, with
his sailor’s handiness, made a rough ladder of it, by which to escape.
Those were the days before lucifer matches. He had come provided with a
razor, which he used as a steel; a flint, tinder, and a penny candle cut
in two. Climbing, then, into the choir, he made two piles on the floor
of prayer-books, curtains, hassocks, and cushions, and taking a candle
from the altar, cut it up and distributed it between the two. Then,
setting light to them, he set to work to escape. He had taken a pair of
pincers from the shoemaker with whom he lodged, and breaking with them a
window in the north transept, he hauled his rope through, and descended
into the Minster Yard, soon after three o’clock in the morning.
The fire was not discovered until four hours later. By that time the
stalls were half-consumed, and the vestry, where the communion plate was
kept, was on fire. The plate was melted into an unrecognisable mass. By
eight o’clock, despite the exertions of many willing helpers, the
organ-screen was burnt, and the organ-pipes fell in thunder to the
pavement, to the accompaniment of a furious shower of molten lead from
the roof, which was now burning. The city fire-engines, those of the
Cathedral, and others from Leeds and Escrick were all playing upon the
conflagration that day, and the 7th Dragoon Guards and the Militia helped
with a will, or kept back the vast crowds which had poured into the city
from far and near. It was not until evening that the fire was quenched,
and by that time the roof of the choir, over 130 feet in length, had been
destroyed, and with it the stalls, the Bishop’s throne, and all the
mediæval enrichments of that part of the building. Curiously enough, the
great east window was but little damaged. The cost of this madman’s act
was put at £100,000. A singular coincidence, greatly remarked upon at
the time, was that on the Sunday following this disaster, one of the
lessons for the day was the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, the Church’s
prayer to God, of which one verse at least was particularly applicable:
“Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is
burned with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste.”
Martin was, in the first instance, connected with the outrage by the
evidence of the shoemaker’s pincers he had left behind him. They were
identified by his landlord. Meanwhile, the incendiary had fled along the
Great North Road; first to Easingwold, thirteen miles away, where he
drank a pint of ale; and then tramping on to Thirsk. Thence he hurried
to Northallerton, arriving at three o’clock in the afternoon, worn out
with thirty-three miles of walking. That night he journeyed in a
coal-cart to West Auckland, and so eventually to a friend near Hexham, in
whose house he was arrested on the 6th of February. Taken to York, he
was tried at the sessions at York Castle on March 30th. The verdict,
given on the following day, was “not guilty, on the ground of insanity,”
and he was ordered to be kept in close custody during his Majesty’s
pleasure. Martin was shortly afterwards removed from York Castle to St.
Luke’s Hospital, London, in which he died in 1838. Two years later, the
Minster was again on fire, this time as the result of an accident, and
the western tower was burnt out.
[Picture: York Minster on Fire, May 20th, 1840]
Insanity in some degree ran through the Martin family. His brother John,
who died in 1854, was a prominent artist, whose unbalanced mind did not
give way, but led him to paint extraordinary pictures, chiefly of
Scriptural interest and apocalyptic horrors. He was in his day
considered a genius, and many of his terrific imaginations were engraved
and must yet be familiar: such pictures as “Belshazzar’s Feast,” “The Eve
of the Deluge,” “The Last Man,” and “The Plains of Heaven”: pictures well
calculated to give children nightmares.
X
WE must now leave York for the North. To do so, we proceed through
Bootham Bar, where the taxis linger that ply between the city and the
railway station.
Let us glance back upon the picturesque sky-line of City and Minster and
read, maybe, the modern explanatory historical inscription placed on the
ancient Bar. Thus:—
“Entry from North through Forest of Galtres. In old times armed men
were stationed here to watch, and to conduct travellers through the
forest and protect them against the wolves.
“The Royal Arms were taken down in 1650, when Cromwell passed
through, against Scotland. Heads of three rebels exposed here, for
attempting to restore Commonwealth, 1663.
“Erected on Roman foundation, probably early in 13th centy.
“Interior rebuilt with freestone, 1719.
“The portcullis remains.”
So, in those ancient times when the Forest of Galtres lay immediately
before you on passing out of Bootham Bar and going North—the forest with
wolves and bandits—you stepped not into a suburb, but came directly off
the threshold into the wild.
[Picture: Bootham Bar]
To-day, outside the walls we come at once into the district of Clifton,
after Knavesmire the finest suburb of York; the wide road lined with old
mansions that almost reek of prebendal appointments, J.P.’s, incomes of
over two thousand a year, and butlers. It is true that there are those
which cannot be included in this category, but they are here on
sufferance and as a foil to the majesty of their superiors, just as the
Lunatic Asylum a little farther down the road gives, or should give, by
contrast a finer flavour to the lives of those who have not to live in
it. There is another pleasing thing at Clifton, in the altogether
charming new building of the “White Horse” inn, which seems to hint that
they have at last begun to recover the lost art in Yorkshire of building
houses that are not vulgar or hideous. It is full time.
Would you see a charming village church, a jewel in its sort? Then, when
reaching Skelton, three miles onward, explore the bye-road at the back of
the village, over whose clustered few roofs its Early English bell-cote
peeps. But a moment, please, before we reach it. This “bye-road” is the
original highway, and the “back” of the village street its old front.
There is a moral application somewhere in these altered circumstances for
those who have the wit, the inclination, and the opportunity to seek it.
[Picture: Skelton Church]
The improved road, a hundred years old, is carried straight and level
past the rear of the cottages, and the rugged old one goes serpentining
past the front doors, where the entrance to the “Bay Horse” looks out
across a little green to where the church stands, the faded old Bay Horse
himself wondering where the traffic that use to pass this way has all
gone to. The signs of the “Bay Horse” and the “Yorkshire Grey” are, by
the way, astonishingly frequent on the Great North Road.
But the church. It is an unpretending building, without a tower, and
only a bell-cote rising from its broad roof; but perfect within its
limits. Early English throughout, with delicately-cut mouldings,
beautiful triple lancets at the east end, and fine porch, the green and
grey harmonies of its slate roof and well-preserved stonework, complete a
rarely satisfying picture. A legend, still current, says it was built
from stone remaining over after the building of the south transept of
York Cathedral, in 1227. The Church in the Wood it was then, for from
the gates of York to Easingwold, a distance of thirteen miles, stretched
that great Forest of Galtres, through which, to guide wandering
travellers, as we have already seen, the lantern-tower and burning
cresset of All Saints in the Pavement, at York, were raised aloft.
Red deer roamed the Forest of Galtres, and bandits not so chivalrous as
Robin Hood; so few dared to explore its recesses unarmed and
unaccompanied. But where in olden times these romantic attendants of, or
dissuading circumstances from travel existed, we have now only occasional
trees and an infinity of flat roads, past Shipton village to Tollerton
Cross Lanes and Easingwold. This country is dulness personified. The
main road is flat and featureless, and the branch roads instinct with a
melancholy emptiness that hives in every ditch and commonplace hedgerow.
A deadly sameness, a paralysing negation, closes the horizon of this
sparsely settled district, depopulated in that visitation of fire and
sword when William the Conqueror came, in 1069, and massacred a hundred
thousand of those who had dared to withstand him. They had surrendered
on promise of their lives and property being respected, but the fierce
Norman utterly destroyed the city of York and laid waste the whole of the
country between York and Durham. Those who were not slain perished
miserably of cold and famine. Their pale ghosts still haunt the route of
the Great North Road and afflict it, though more than eight hundred years
have flown.
Now comes Easingwold; grimly bare and gritty wide street, with narrow
pavements and broad selvedges of cobbles sloping from them down into a
roadway filled, not with traffic, but with children at noisy play.
Shabby houses lining this street, houses little better than cottages, and
ugly at that; grey, hard-featured, forbidding. Imagine half a mile of
this, with a large church on a knoll away at the northern end, and you
have Easingwold. One house is interesting. It is easily identified,
because it is the only one of any architectural character in the place.
Now a school, it was once the chief coaching and posting establishment,
under the sign of the “Rose and Crown,” and in those times kept five post
boys, and, by consequence, twenty horses, others being kept for the
“Wellington” and “Express” coaches which Lacy, the landlord, used to
horse on the Easingwold to Thirsk stage. The “New Inn,” although an
inferior house, was the place at which the Royal mail and the “Highflyer”
changed.
An old post boy of the “Rose and Crown” survived until recent years, in
the person of Tommy Hutchinson. Originally a tailor, he early forsook
the board and the needle for the pigskin and the whip. If a tailor be
the ninth part of a man, certainly the weazened postboys (who ever saw a
fat one?) of old were themselves only fractions, so far as appearance
went; and accordingly Tommy was not badly suited. But a power of
endurance was contained within that spare frame, and he eclipsed John
Blagg of Retford’s hundred and ten miles’ day on one occasion, riding
post five times from Easingwold to York and back, a distance of a hundred
and thirty miles. Tommy used to express an utter contempt for “bilers on
wheels,” as he called locomotives. “Ah divvent see nowt in ’em,” he
would say; “ye can’t beat a po’shay and good horses.” Peace be with him!
That rare thing on the Great North Road, a rise, leads out of Easingwold,
past unkempt cottages, to “White House Inn,” a mile and a half distant,
where the inn buildings, now farmhouses, but still brilliantly
whitewashed, stand on either side of the road, in a lonely spot near
where the Kyle stream, like a flowing ditch, oozes beneath Dawnay Bridge.
The “White House” was the scene of a murder in 1623. At that time the
innkeeper was a certain Ralph Raynard, who “kept company” with a girl in
service at Red House, Thornton Bridge. The lovers quarrelled, and in a
pique the girl married a farmer named Fletcher, of Moor House, Raskelfe.
Unhappily, she did not love the man she had married, while she certainly
did retain an affection for her old sweetheart, and he for her. Going
between Raskelfe and Easingwold on market-days on her horse, she would
often stop at the “White House,” and chat with Ralph Raynard; the ostler,
Mark Dunn, minding the horse when she dismounted. Raynard’s sister kept
house with him at the inn, and she saw that no good could come of these
visits, but he would not listen to her warnings, and the visits
continued. It was not long before Fletcher’s neighbours began to hint to
him something of these little flirtations of his wife with her old lover;
and one evening he caught the ostler of the “White House” in his orchard,
where he was waiting for an opportunity to deliver a message from Raynard
to her. The man returned to the inn without having fulfilled his
mission, and smarting from a thrashing he had received at the hands of
the indignant farmer. Shortly after this, Fletcher had occasion to go a
journey. Things had not been going well with him latterly, and his home
was rendered unhappy by the evidence of his wife’s dislike of him.
Little wonder, then, that he had dismal forebodings as he set out.
Before leaving, he wrote on a sheet of paper:—
If I should be missing, or suddenly wanted be,
Mark Ralph Raynard, Mark Dunn, and mark my wife for me,
addressing it to his sister.
No sooner was he gone than Mrs. Fletcher mounted her horse and rode to
Raskelfe, where, with Raynard and Mark Dunn, a murderous plot was
contrived for putting Fletcher out of the way. They were waiting for him
when he returned at evening, and as he stood a moment on Dawnay Bridge,
where the little river runs beneath the highway, two of them rushed upon
him and threw him into the water. It would be difficult for a man to
drown here, but the innkeeper and the ostler leapt in after him, and as
he lay there held his head under water, while his wife seized his feet.
When the unfortunate man was quite dead they thrust his body into a sack,
and, carrying their burden with them to the inn, buried it in the garden,
Raynard sowing some mustard-seed over the spot. This took place on the
1st of May. On the 7th of July, Raynard went to Topcliffe Fair, and put
up at the “Angel.” Going into the stable, he was confronted by the
apparition of the unhappy Fletcher, glowing with a strange light and
predicting retribution. He rushed out among the booths, and tried to
think he had been mistaken. Coming to a booth where they sold small
trinkets, he thought he would buy a present for his sweetheart, and,
taking up a chain of coral beads, asked the stallkeeper how it looked on
the neck. To his dismay the apparition stood opposite, with a red chain
round its neck, with its head hanging to one side, like that of an
executed criminal, while a voice informed him that presently he and his
accomplices should be wearing hempen necklaces.
When night had fallen he mounted his horse and rode for home. On the
way, at a spot called the Carr, he saw something in the road. It was a
figure emerging from a sack and shaking the water off it, like a
Newfoundland dog. With a yell of terror the haunted man dug his heels
into his horse and galloped madly away; but the figure, irradiated by a
phosphorescent glimmer and dragging an equally luminous sack after it,
was gliding in front of him all the while, at an equal pace, and so
continued until the “White House” was reached, where it slid through the
garden hedge and into the ground where Fletcher’s body had been laid.