of freshly-cut mustard. _She_ did not see the spectre sitting opposite,
pointing a minatory finger at that dreadful salad, but _he_ did, and
terrified, confessed to the crime. Sisterly affection was not proof
against this, and she laid information against the three accomplices
before a neighbouring Justice of the Peace, Sir William Sheffield of
Raskelfe Park. They were committed to York Castle, tried, and hanged on
July 28, 1623. The bodies were afterwards cut down and taken to the inn,
being gibbeted near the scene of the crime, on a spot still called
Gallows Hill, where the bones of the three malefactors were accidentally
ploughed up over a hundred and twenty years ago.
If its surroundings may be said to fit in with a crime, then this seems
an ideal spot for the commission of dark deeds, this eerie place where an
oozy plantation, or little wood, is placed beside the road, its trees
standing in pools or on moss-grown tussocks; the road in either direction
a solitude.
Raskelfe, or “Rascall,” as it is generally called, lies away from the
road. It has a church which still possesses a wooden tower, and the
local rhyme,
Wooden church, wooden steeple,
Rascally church, and rascally people.
is yet heard in the mouths of depreciatory neighbours.
XI
THE Hambleton Hills now come in sight, and close in the view on the right
hand, at a distance of five miles; running parallel with the road as far
as Northallerton; sullen hills, with the outlines of mountains, and
wanting only altitude to earn the appellation. The road, in sympathy
with its nearness to them, goes up and down in jerky rises and falls,
passing the outlying houses of Thormanby and the farmsteads of Birdforth,
which pretends, with its mean little church, like a sanctified cow-shed,
to be a village—and signally fails.
The gates of Thirkleby Park and the “Griffin” inn, standing where a
toll-gate formerly stood on what was once Bagby Common, bring one past a
bye-road which leads to Coxwold, five miles away, and to the Hambleton
White Horse, a quite unhistorical imitation, cut in the hillside in 1857,
of its prehistoric forerunners in Berkshire and Wilts. Coxwold is a
rarely pretty village, famous as having been the living of the Reverend
Laurence Sterne from 1760 to 1768. The house he lived in, now divided
into three cottages, is the place where _Tristram Shandy_ was finished
and the _Sentimental Journey_ written. “Shandy Hall” it is called,
“shandy” being the local dialect-word for “crazy.”
Thirsk lies less than three miles ahead. There have been those who have
called it “picturesque.” Let us pity them, for those to whom Thirsk
shows a picturesque side must needs have acquaintance with only the
sorriest and most commonplace of towns. The place is, in fact, a larger
Easingwold, with the addition of a market-place like that of Selby—after
the abbey has been subtracted from it! There are Old Thirsk and New
Thirsk, the new town called into existence by the railway, a mile to the
west. The “Three Tuns,” “Crown,” and “Fleece” were the three coaching
inns of Thirsk, and still show their hard-featured faces to the grey,
gaunt streets. The one pretty “bit” is encountered after having left the
town behind. Passing the church, the road is bordered by the beautiful
broad sheet of water formed by damming the Caldbeck. Looking backwards,
the view is charming, with the church-tower coming into the composition,
a glance to the left including the Hambleton Hills.
The hamlet of Thornton-le-Street, which derives its name from standing on
an old Roman road, is a tiny place with a small church full of large
monuments, and the remains of a huge old posting establishment, once
familiar to travellers as the “Spotted Dog,” standing on either side of
the road. One side appears to be empty, and the other is now the post
office. A graceful clump of poplars now shades the sharp bend where the
road descends, past the lodge-gates of the Hall, the seat of the Earl of
Cathcart. Presently the road climbs again to the crest whence
Thornton-le-Moor may be glimpsed on the left, and thence goes, leaving
the singularly named Thornton-le-Beans on the right, in commonplace
fashion to Northallerton.
[Picture: The “Spotted Dog,” Thornton-le-Street]
As are Easingwold and Thirsk, so is Northallerton. Let that suffice for
its aspect, and let us to something of its story, which practically
begins in 1138, at the battle of Northallerton, dimly read of in
schooldays, and still capable of conferring an interest upon the
locality, even though the site of that old-time struggle on Standard Hill
is three miles away to the north on Cowton Moor. The position of the
townlet, directly in the line of march of Scots descending to harry the
English, and of the English marching to punish those hairy-legged
Caledonians, led to many plunderings and burnings, and to various scenes
of retribution, enacted in the streets or along the road; and although
Northallerton must nowadays confess to a mile-long dulness, time cannot
have hung heavily with its inhabitants when the Scots burnt their houses
in 1319 and again in 1322; when the rebel Earls of 1569 were executed
near the church; when the Scottish army held Charles the First prisoner
here in 1647, or when—last scene in its story—the Duke of Cumberland
encamped on the hillsides in 1745.
The name of Allerton is said to derive from the Anglo-Saxon _aelr_, an
alder tree, and many are the Allertons of sorts in Yorkshire. Its
central feature—which, however, is not geographically central, but at the
northern end of the one long street—is the church, large and with a
certain air of nobility which befits the parish church of such a place as
Northallerton, anciently the capital of a “soke,” and still giving a name
to the “Northallertonshire” district of Yorkshire. The old coaching inns
of the town, like those of so many other northern towns and villages on
this road, are not impressive to the Southerner, who, the further north
he progresses, is, with Dr. Johnson, still more firmly convinced that he
is leaving the finest fruits of civilisation behind him. First now, as
then, is the “Golden Lion,” large but not lovely; the inn referred to as
the “Black Swan” by Sydney Smith when writing to Lady Grey, advising her
how to journey from London, in the passage, “Do not set off too soon, or
you will be laid up at the ‘Black Swan,’ Northallerton, or the ‘Elephant
and Castle,’ Boroughbridge; and your bill will come to a thousand pounds,
besides the waiter.” The true sportsman who reads these lines will put
up at the “Golden Lion” to test whether or not the reverend humorist is
out of date as regards the tariff; nor will he forget to try the
Northallerton ale, to determine if Master George Meryon’s verse, written
in the days of James the Second, is still topical:—
Northallerton, in Yorkshire, doth excel!
All England, nay, all Europe, for strong yell.
The “Golden Lion” was, at the close of the coaching era, the foremost inn
at Northallerton, and at its doors the “Wellington” London and Newcastle
coach changed teams until the railway ran it off the road. The Edinburgh
mail changed at the “Black Bull,” which survives as an inn, but only half
its original size, the other half now being a draper’s shop. The “King’s
Head,” another coaching-house, has quite retired into private life, while
the “Old Golden Lion,” not a very noted coaching establishment, except,
perhaps, for the bye-roads, remains much the same as ever.
XII
AT Northallerton we reach the junction of the alternative route, which,
branching from the Selby and York itinerary, goes over difficult, but
much more beautiful, country by way of Wetherby and Boroughbridge. The
ways diverge at the northern extremity of Doncaster, and as both can
equally claim to be an integral part of the Great North Road, it is
necessary to go back these sixty-three miles to that town and explore the
route. Beginning at a left-hand fork by the flat meadows that border the
river Don, it comes in a mile to York Bar, a name recalling the existence
of a turnpike-gate, whose disappearance so recently as 1879 seems to
bring us strangely near old coaching days. The toll-house still stands,
and with the little inn beyond, backed and surrounded by tall trees,
forms a pleasant peep down the long flat road. “Red House,” nearly three
miles onward, is plainly indicated by its flaring red-painted walls. Now
a farmhouse, it was once a small coaching-inn principally concerned with
the traffic along the Wakefield road, which branches off here to the
left.
[Picture: York Bar]
Passing this, we come in two miles to Robin Hood’s Well, a group of
houses by Skelbrooke Park, where at the “New Inn” and the “Robin Hood”
many coaches changed horses daily, the passengers taking the opportunity
of drinking from Robin Hood’s Well, a spring connected with that probably
mythical outlaw, who is said to have met the Bishop of Hereford
travelling along the road at this spot, and to have not only held him to
heavy ransom, but to have compelled him to dance an undignified jig round
an oak in Skelbrooke Park, on a spot still called (now the tree itself
has disappeared) “Bishop’s Tree Root.” Among famous travellers who have
sipped of the crystal spring of Robin Hood’s Well is Evelyn, who
journeyed this way in 1654. “Near it,” he says, “is a stone chaire; and
an iron ladle to drink out of, chained to the seat.”
[Picture: Robin Hood’s Well]
Some fifty years later, the very ugly building that now covers the spring
was erected by Vanbrugh for the Earl of Carlisle. It cannot be said to
add much to the romantic associations of the place, but the efforts of
the wayfarers, who in two centuries have carved every available inch of
its surface with their names, render it a curious sight.
Here the road begins a long climb up to the spot where five ways meet,
the broad left-hand road conducting into Leeds. This is, or was,
Barnsdale Bar, where some of the local Leeds coaches branched from the
Great North Road, the chief ones between London and Leeds continuing
along this route as far as Peckfield Turnpike, five miles to the other
side of Ferrybridge. Barnsdale Bar is, like all the other toll-bars, a
thing of the past, but the old toll-house still hides among the trees by
the roadside. Beyond it the way lies along an exposed road high up on
the hill-tops; a lonely stretch of country where it is a peculiarly ill
mischance to be caught in a storm. Thence it plunges suddenly into the
deep gorge of Went Bridge, where the little river Went goes with
infantile fury among rocks and mossy boulders along a winding course
thickly overhung with trees. The wooded sides of this narrow valley are
picturesque in the highest degree, but were probably not highly
appreciated by timid coach-passengers who, having been driven down the
precipitous road at one side at the peril of their lives, were turned out
by the guard to ease the toiling horses by walking up the corresponding
ascent at the other. This is the prettiest spot in all “merry
Barnsdale,” and anciently one of those most affected by Robin Hood. His
very degenerate successors, the poachers and cut-throats of James the
First’s time, found it a welcome harbourage and foregathered at the
predecessor of the Old Blue Bell Inn, which was accordingly deprived of
its license for some time. The old sign, bearing the date of 1633, when
business was probably resumed, is still kept within the house, as the
rhymed inscription on the modern one outside informs the passer-by:—
The Blae Bell on Wentbridge Hill,
The old sign is existing still
Inside the house.
An old posting-inn, the “Bay Horse,” has long since reverted to the
condition of a private house.
The road rising out of Went Bridge runs between the jagged rocks of a
cutting made in the last years of the coaching age to lighten the pull
up, but still it is a formidable climb. This is followed by a hollow
where a few outlying houses of Darrington village are seen, and then the
bleak high tableland is reached that has to be traversed before the road
drops down into the valley of the Aire at Ferrybridge, that now dull and
grimy town which bears no appearance of having had an historic past. Yet
Ferrybridge was the scene of the skirmish that heralded the battle of
Towton, and stands in the midst of that mediæval cockpit of England,
wherein for centuries so many rival factions contended together. Near by
is Pontefract, in whose castle Richard the Second met a mysterious death,
and not far off lies Wakefield. Towton Field itself lies along the
Tadcaster route to York. In every direction blood has been shed, for
White Rose or Red, for King or Parliament; but Ferrybridge is anything
but romantic to the eye, however greatly its associations may appeal to
the well-stored mind. Coal-mining and quarrying industries overlie these
things. The place-name explains the situation of the townlet
sufficiently well, and refers to the first building of a bridge over the
old-time ferry by which wayfarers crossed the Aire to Brotherton, on the
opposite bank. It is quite unknown when the first bridge was built, but
one existed here in 1461, the year when Towton fight was fought. This
was succeeded by a wooden structure, itself replaced by the present
substantial stone bridge, built at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. This was always a troublesome part of the road to keep in
repair, as we may judge from old records. A forty days’ indulgence was
granted by the Bishop of Durham early in the fourteenth century to the
faithful who would contribute to the repair of the road between
Ferrybridge and Brotherton, in these words:—“Persuaded that the minds of
the faithful are more ready to attach themselves to pious works when they
have received the salutary encouragement of fuller indulgences, trusting
in the mercy of God Almighty and the merits and prayers of the glorious
Virgin his Mother, of St. Peter, St. Paul, and of the most holy confessor
Cuthbert, our patron, and of all saints, we remit forty days of the
penances imposed on all our parishioners and others, sincerely contrite
and confessed of their sins, who shall help by their charitable gifts, or
by their bodily labour, in the building or in the maintenance of the
causeway between Brotherton and Ferrybridge, where a great many people
pass by.”
Let us hope that the pious, thus incited to the commission of good works,
responded. It was a more serious matter, however, in later ages, when a
great many more people passed by, and when road-surveyors, unable to
dispense these ghostly favours, repaired the roads only at the pecuniary
expense of the ratepayers. These Yorkshire streams, the Aire, the
Wharfe, and many others, descending from the high moorlands, develop an
extraordinary force in times of flood, and have often destroyed half the
communications of these districts. Such was the havoc wrought in 1795
that many of the bridges were washed away and great holes made in the
roads. Three bridges on this road between Doncaster and Ferrybridge
disappeared. With such perils threatened, travellers deserved to be
comfortably housed when they lay by for the night. And comfort was the
especial feature of these inns.
The most luxurious inn and posting-house in the north of England was held
to be the “Swan” at Ferrybridge; “in 1737 and since the best inn upon the
great northern road,” according to Scott. However that may have been,
certainly the “Angel” at Ferry-bridge was the largest. Both, however,
have long since been given up. The many scattered buildings of the
“Angel” have become private houses, and the “Swan,” empty for many years
past, is falling into a roofless ruin by the riverside. Innkeeping was
no mean trade in those times, especially when allied with the
proprietorship of horses and coaches. Thus, in the flower of the
coaching age, the “Angel” was in the hands of a medical man, a certain
Dr. Alderson, the son of a local clergyman, who actually found time to
attend properly to his practice and to conduct the business of a licensed
victualler and coach-proprietor. He thought it not derogatory to his
social position to be “mine host,” and he certainly made many friends by
his enterprise. Ferrybridge, as the branching-off place of yet another
Great North Road route—the Tadcaster route to York—was a very busy
coaching centre, and besides the two inns mentioned there were the
“Greyhound” and the “Golden Lion.” The last-named was especially the
drovers’ house. Drovers were a great feature of the road in these old
days, and their flocks and herds an unmitigated nuisance to all other
travellers. Uncouth creatures from Scotland, they footed it all the way
to London with their beasts, making their twenty miles a day; their sheep
and cattle often numerous enough to occupy a whole mile of road, and
raising dust-clouds dense enough to choke a whole district. It was, at
the pace they went, a three weeks’ journey from the far north to London
and the fat cattle that started on the four hundred miles walk must, with
these efforts, have become the leanest of kine on arrival at Smithfield.
The “Old Fox” inn, which still stands on the other side of the river at
Brotherton, was also a drovers’ place of call. It stands at the actual
fork of the roads, eleven miles from Tadcaster, and twenty from York.
The Edinburgh mail originally ran this way, finally changing to the Selby
route, while the “Highflyer” and “Wellington,” London and Edinburgh and
London and Newcastle, coaches kept on it until the end in 1840; but it
was chiefly crowded with the cross-country coach traffic, which was a
very heavy one.
The places are few and uninteresting on these twenty miles into York;
Sherburn and Tadcaster—that town of ales—the chief of them; while the
tiny godless village of Towton, without a church, on the way, is
disappointing to the pilgrim, eager to see it for the sake of its
association with the great battle. The road skirts the eastern side of
that tragic field, after passing the hamlet of Barkston Ash.
XIII
THE battle of Towton, March 29, 1461, was the bloodiest ever fought on
English ground, the slain on both sides in that desperate fight and in
the skirmishes at Ferrybridge and Dintingdale amounting to more than
30,000 men. The events that had preceded it were alternately cheering
and depressing to the hopes of the Yorkists, who had been defeated with
great slaughter at Wakefield on the last day but one of the previous
December, had gained the important victory of Mortimer’s Cross on the 2nd
of February, and had been defeated again at the second battle of St.
Albans on the 17th of the same month; and although on March 4th the young
Duke of York had entered London and assumed the crown as Edward the
Fourth, the Lancastrians still held the Midlands and, lying at York,
interposed a bold front against an advance. It was a singular position.
The Lancastrians had their headquarters at the city from which their
opponents took their title, and two kings of England, equally matched in
power, animated their respective adherents with the utmost loyalty.
After their victory at St. Albans the Lancastrians, exhausted, had
retired to York, the south being as dangerous to a Lancastrian army as
the north, loyal to the Red Rose, was to the Yorkists. The Yorkists, on
their part, eager to enter London, did not pursue their rivals. Both
sides required breathing time, for events had marched too rapidly in the
past two months for the pace to be maintained. Still, the Yorkists were
in force, three weeks later, at Pontefract, and threatening to cross the
Aire at Ferrybridge, a strategic point on their contemplated line of
advance to the city of York. It was here, early in the morning of the
28th, that the bloody prelude to the battle opened, in a sudden
Lancastrian attack on the Yorkist outpost. Lord Fitzwalter, the Yorkist
commander, lay asleep in bed at the time. Seizing a pole-axe at his
sudden awakening, he was slain almost instantly, but his force,
succeeding in driving the enemy across the river, took up a position at
Brotherton, the Lancastrians falling back in disorder to Dintingdale,
near Barkston Ash, where, later in the day, the Lancastrian, Lord
Clifford, was slain by an arrow.
[Picture: Map of Battlefield of Towton and Surrounding Country]
The advance-guard of the Lancastrian army now fell back upon the main
body, which took up a well-chosen position between the villages of Saxton
and Towton, lying across a rising road which led out of the former place,
and having on its right the steeply falling meadows leading down into the
deep depression of Towton Dale, where the Cock Beck still wanders in
far-flung loops in the flat lands below. On their left the ground
stretched away for some distance and then fell gently towards the flats
of Church Fenton.
[Picture: Saxton]
At their rear the road descended steeply again into Towton, while
Tadcaster lay three miles and York eleven miles beyond. It was a
position of great strength and one that could only possibly be turned
from the left. The fatal defect of it lay in the chance, in the case of
defeat, of the beaten army being disorganised by a retreat down so steep
a road, leading as it did to the crossing of a stream swollen with winter
rains.
In visiting this spot, we must bear in mind that the broad road from
Ferrybridge to Tadcaster and York was not then in existence. The way lay
across the elevated land which, rising from Barkston Ash towards Saxton,
reaches to a considerable height between that village and Towton. From
this commanding spot the valleys of the Wharfe and Ouse lie plainly
unfolded, and the towers of York itself may be seen on the skyline, on
the verge of this wide expanse of meadows and woodlands.
The hedgerows on the way to the battle-field are remarkable for the
profusion of briar roses that grow here in place of the more usual
blackberry brambles and thorns, and Bloody Meadow, the spot where the
thickest of the fight took place, was until quite recently thickly
overgrown with the red and white roses with which Nature had from time
immemorial planted this scene of strife. Latterly they have all been
grubbed up by farmers, keener on the purity of their grasslands than on
historic associations.
[Picture: Towton Dale]
The main body of the Yorkists, advancing to Saxton, opened the attack on
the Lancastrians early in the morning of Palm Sunday, the 29th. The
centre of the fight was in the meadow on the left hand of the road
leading towards Towton, a short distance beyond Towton Dale quarry. The
Lancastrians numbered 60,000 men, the Yorkists 48,600. For ten hours the
furious encounter raged, “sore fought, for hope of life was set aside on
every part.” Six years’ warfare, from 1455, when the first battle of St.
Albans had been fought, had rendered the enemies implacable. Almost
every combatant had already lost kinsfolk, and intense hatred caused the
order on both sides that no quarter was to be given and no prisoners
taken. The day was bitterly cold, and snowstorms swept the upland,
driving in the faces of the Lancastrians with such blinding fury that
their arrows, shot in reply to the Yorkist volleys, could not be properly
aimed, and so missed their mark. A hand-to-hand encounter with swords
and battle-axes then followed, obstinately fought, but resulting
practically in the butchery of the Lancastrians, for nearly the half of
their whole force were slain or met their death either in Towton Dale or
at the crossing of the stream down the road past Towton Hall. The rest
fled to Tadcaster and on to York, where Henry the Sixth, the Queen, and
the young Prince of Wales were waiting the result of the fight. They
left immediately, and the victorious Duke of York entered the ancient
city.
Many proud nobles fell that day with the men-at-arms; among others, Lord
Dacre, fighting for the Red Rose, shot by a boy concealed in what the
country people call a “bur-tree,” that is to say, an elder. He lies
buried in the churchyard of Saxton, on the north side of the church,
under a much-mutilated altar-tomb, whose inscription refers to him as
“verus miles”—a true knight. Tradition yet tells of his death, in the
local rhyme:—
The Lord of Dacres
Was slain in the North Acres,