Meadow, where a rude cross leans, half hidden under a tangled hedge; and
in 1848, during some excavations in Saxton churchyard, a stratum of
bones, four feet in thickness, was exposed, the poor relics of those who
fell in the great fight. Others still are said to have been buried in
the little chapel of Lead, a mile away, by the banks of the Cock, whose
stream ran red that day. A few stones at the back of Towton Hall mark
the place where a votive chapel was erected, where prayers might be said
for the souls of the dead, whose numbers on both sides are said by one
authority to have reached 36,776.
[Picture: Lead Chapel]
Relics have been found on the battle-field. Many years ago a wandering
antiquary found a farmer’s wife breaking sugar with a battle-axe
discovered in the river. She did not know what it was, but he did, and
secured it. It is now at Alnwick Castle. In 1785 was found a gold ring
which had belonged to the Earl of Northumberland, who was carried
mortally wounded from the field. It weighs an ounce, and bears the Percy
Lion, with inscription, “Now ys thus.” Another interesting and pathetic
find was a spur, engraved with “En loial amour, tout mon coer,” the relic
of some unknown knight.
XIV
IT is a wild, weird kind of country upon which we enter, on the way from
Brotherton to Aberford and the North. Away to the left suddenly opens a
wide valley, in an almost sheer drop from the road, looking out upon
illimitable perspectives. Then comes Fairburn, followed by what used to
be Peckfield Turnpike, where the “Boot and Shoe” inn stands at the fork
of the roads, and where the Leeds and London “Royal Mail,” “Rockingham,”
and “Union Post” coaches turned off. Micklefield, two miles beyond,
approached by a fine avenue of elms, is an abject coal-mining village,
and hauling-gear, smoke, and the inky blackness of the roads emphasise
the fact, even if the marshalled coal-wagons on the railway did not give
it insistence. Coming up the craggy rise out of Micklefield and its
coal, on to Hook Moor, one of the finest stretches of the road, _quâ_
road, brings the traveller past the lodge-gates of Parlington Park and
the oddly ecclesiastical-looking almshouses beyond, down into the stony
old village of Aberford, which lies in a depression on the Cock Beck.
Beyond the village, on journeying towards it, one sees the long straight
white road ascending the bastioned heights of windy Bramham Moor; and the
sight clinches any half-formed inclination to rest awhile at Aberford
before climbing to that airy eminence.
Aberford still seems to be missing its old posting and coaching traffic,
and to be awaiting the return of the days when the Carlisle and Glasgow
mail changed at the “Swan,” a fine old inn, now much shrunken from its
original state. Stone-quarrying and the neighbouring coal-mines keep the
village from absolutely decaying; but it still lives in the past. The
picturesque old settles and yawning fireplaces of the “Swan,” and of that
oddly-named inn, the “Arabian Horse,” eloquent of the habits of
generations ago, survive to show us what was the accommodation those old
inns provided. If more primitive, it was heartier, and a great deal more
comfortable than that of modern hotels.
By the churchyard wall stands part of the old Market Cross, discovered by
the roadside and set up here in 1911; with the “Plague Stone” in whose
water-filled hollow purchasers placed their money, so that the sellers
might not risk infection.
A ruined windmill of strange design, perched on the hillside road behind
the village, is the best point whence to gain an idea of the country in
midst of which Aberford is set. It is boldly undulating country, hiding
in the folds of its hills many old-world villages. Chief among them, two
miles off the road, is Barwick-in-Elmete—_i.e._ in the elm country—with
its prehistoric mounds and the modern successor of an ancient maypole,
set up in the village street by the cross, presented in May 1898 by
Major-General Gascoigne, of Parlington Park.
[Picture: Ruined Mill, Overlooking Aberford]
The road two miles out of Aberford reaches that home of howling winds,
that most uncomfortable and undesirable place, Bramham Moor. Here, where
the Bramham Moor inn stands at the crossing of the Leeds and York road, a
considerable traffic enlivened the way until eighty years ago. Since
that time the broad roadways in either direction have been empty, except
when the hounds meet here in the hunting season, when, for a brief hour,
old times seem come again. It was along this cross-road that “Nimrod,”
that classic coaching authority, travelled in 1827, his eagle eye engaged
in criticism of the Yorkshire provincial coaches.
[Picture: Barwick-in-Elmete]
The rustical driver of the Leeds to York stage, happily, did not know who
his passenger was. Let us hope he never saw the criticism of himself,
his coach and horses, and everything that was his, which appeared shortly
afterwards in the _Sporting Magazine_. Everything, says “Nimrod,” was
inferior. The man who drove (he scorns, you see, to call him a coachman)
was more like a Welsh drover than anything else. The day was cold, but
he had neither gloves, boots, nor gaiters. However, he conducted the
coach only a ten miles’ stage, and made up with copious libations of gin
for the lack of warm clothing. On the way he fell to bragging with his
box-seat passenger of the hair’s-breadth escapes he had experienced when
driving one of the Leeds to London opposition coaches; and “Nimrod,”
complimenting him on the skill he must have shown on those occasions, he
proceeded to give a taste of his quality, which resulted in his getting
the reins clubbed and a narrow escape from being overturned. “Nimrod”
soon had enough of it, and at the first opportunity pretended to be ill
and went inside, as being the least dangerous place. Arriving at
Tadcaster, ten miles from York, the door was opened, and “Please to
remember the coachman” tingled in the ears of the passengers. “What
now,” asked “Nimrod,” “are you going no farther?” “No, sir, but ah’s
goes back at night,” was the Yorkshireman’s answer. “Then you follow
some trade here, of course?” continued the great coaching expert. “No,
sir,” said a bystander, “_he has got his horses to clean_.” Fancy a
coachman, even if only of that inferior kind, who could not be called
anything better than “the man who drove,”—fancy a coachman seeing to his
own horses. “Nimrod” was properly shocked at this, and with memories of
coaching nearer London, with stables and yards full of ostlers and
helpers, and the coachmen, their drinking done, flirting with the Hebes
of the bar, could only say, with a gasp, “Oh! that’s the way your
Yorkshire coaching is done, is it?”
He then saw his fellow-passengers pull out sixpence each and give it to
the driver, who was not only satisfied, but thankful. This also was a
novelty. Coachmen were, in his experience, tipped with florins and
half-crowns, nor even then did they exhibit symptoms of thankfulness, but
took the coin as of right. “What am I to do?” “Nimrod” asked himself; “I
never gave a coachman sixpence yet, and I shall not begin that game
to-day.” So he “chucked” him a “bob,” which brought the fellow’s hat
down to the box of the fore-wheel in gratitude.
With a fresh team and another driver the journey was continued to York.
About half-way, the coach stopped at a public-house, in the old style;
the driver got down, the gin bottle was produced, and, looking out of the
window, “Nimrod” was surprised to see the man whom he had thought was
left behind at Tadcaster. “What, are you here?” he asked. “Why, yes,”
answered the man; “’tis market-day at York, and ah’s wants to buy a goose
or two.” “Ah,” observed “Nimrod,” “I thought you were a little in the
huckstering line.”
XV
BRAMHAM MOOR leads down into Bramham village, past the Park, where a
ruined manor-house, destroyed by fire, stands amid formal gardens and
looks tragical. The place wears the aspect of romance, and seems an
ideal home for the ideal Wicked Squire of Early Victorian novels. Lord
Bingley, who built it and laid out the grounds in the time of Queen Anne,
was not more wicked than the generality of his contemporaries, but here
are all the “properties” with which those novelists surrounded the
cynical deceivers of innocence, who stalked in inky cloaks, curly hats,
and tasselled riding-boots through their gory pages. Here is Lord
Bingley’s Walk, an avenue of gigantic beeches where he did not meet the
trustful village maiden, as he ought to have done, by all the rules; here
also is the obelisk at the suggestively named Blackfen, whence twelve
avenues diverge—where no tattered witch ever cursed him, so far as can be
ascertained. Lord Bingley evidently did not live up to the possibilities
of the place, or of his station, nor did those who came after him, for no
horrid legend is narrated with bated breath in Bramham village, which
lies huddled together in the hollow below the park, the world forgetting,
and by the world forgot, ever since that leap year, 1408, when on the
29th of February the Earl of Northumberland, rebelling against Henry the
Fourth, was defeated and slain by Sir Thomas Rokeby at the battle of
Bramham Moor.
[Picture: Moor End]
Rising steeply out of Bramham and coming to the crest at Moor End, where
the road descends long and continuously to Wetherby and the river Wharfe,
we come to what used to be regarded as the half-way town between London
and Edinburgh. The exact spot, where a milestone told the same tale on
either face, is, in fact, one mile north, where the “Old Fox” inn stands.
This was, of course, the most noted landmark on the long road, and the
drovers who journeyed past it never failed to look in at the “Old Fox”
and “wet their whistles,” to celebrate the completion of half their task.
At Wetherby itself the “Angel” arrogated the title of “half-way house,”
and was the principal coaching inn. It still stands, like its rival, the
“Swan and Talbot,” smaller than of yore, the larger portion of its
stables now converted into cottages. At the “Angel” the down London and
Glasgow mail dined, with an hour to spare; the up coach hurrying through
to its change at Aberford. Wetherby was a change for the stage-coaches,
which ran the whole seventeen miles to Ferrybridge with the same teams; a
cruelly long and arduous stretch for the horses.
[Picture: Nineveh]
This is a hard-featured, stony town; still, as of old, chiefly concerned
with cattle-raising and cattle-dealing, and crowded on market-days with
farmers and drovers driving bargains or swearing at the terrified efforts
of beasts and sheep to find their way into the shops and inns. Down on
the southern side of the town runs the romantic Wharfe, between rocky
banks, hurrying in swirling eddies towards its confluence with the Ouse,
below Tadcaster; and on to the north goes the road, through the main
street, on past the conspicuous spire of Kirk Deighton church, coming in
three miles to Walshford, where a bridge crosses the rocky,
tree-embowered Nidd, and that old posting-house, the comfortable-looking
“Walshford Bridge Inn,” stands slightly back from the road, looking like
a private mansion gone diffidently into business.
Beyond Walshford Bridge the road turns suddenly to the left, and,
crossing the railway at lonely Allerton station, passes a substantial
red-brick farmhouse which looks as if it has seen very different days.
And indeed it has, for this was once the “New Inn,” a changing-place for
the mails. Now on the right comes the long wall of Allerton Park, and
presently there rises ahead that strange mound known by the equally
strange name of Nineveh, a tree-crowned hill, partly artificial, girdled
with prehistoric earthworks, and honeycombed with the graves of the
forgotten tribes, to whom it was probably at once a castle, a temple, and
a cemetery. The road onward to Boroughbridge is, indeed, carried over a
Roman way, which itself probably superseded the tracks of those vanished
people, and led to what is now the village of Aldborough near
Boroughbridge, once that great Roman city of Isurium which rivalled York
itself, and now yields inexhaustible building-stones for modern cottages,
and relics that bring the life of those ancients in very close touch with
that of our own time: oyster-shells and oyster knives, pomatum-pots,
pins, and the hundred little articles in daily use now and fifteen
hundred years ago.
Boroughbridge was originally the settlement founded by the Saxons near
the ruined and deserted city of Isurium. Afraid of the bogies and evil
spirits with which their dark superstitions peopled the ruins, they dared
not live there, but built their abiding-place by the river Ure, where the
mediæval, but now modernised, village of Boroughbridge stood, and where
the bridge built by Metcalf, the blind road- and bridge-maker, over a
century ago spans the weedy stream in useful but highly unornamental
manner. The battle of Boroughbridge, fought in 1322, is almost
forgotten, and coaching times have left their impress upon the town
instead. The two chief coaching inns, the “Crown” and the “Greyhounds,”
still face one another in the dull street; the “Greyhounds” a mere ghost
of its former self, the “Crown” larger, but its stables, where a hundred
horses found a shelter, now echoing in their emptiness to the occasional
footfall. Oddly enough a medical practitioner, a Dr. Hugh Stott, was
landlord of the “Crown” for more than fifty years. Probably he and the
landlord of the “Angel” at Ferrybridge were the only two inn-keeping
doctors in the kingdom. The “Crown” was anciently the home of the
Tancreds, a county family owning property in the neighbourhood: the
“Greyhounds” obtains its curious plural from the heraldic shield of the
Mauleverers, which displays three greyhounds, “courant.” Hotel
accommodation was greatly in request at Boroughbridge in the old days;
for from this point branched many roads. Here the Glasgow coaches turned
off, and a number of coaches for Knaresborough, Ripon, Harrogate, and the
many towns of south-west Yorkshire. The “Edinburgh Express,” which went
by way of Glasgow, also passed through. Boroughbridge was a busy
coaching town, so that ruin, stark, staring, and complete fell upon it
when railways came.
The remaining nineteen miles to Northallerton scarce call for detailed
description. Kirkby Hill, a mile out of Boroughbridge, lies to the left,
its church-tower just within sight. This is followed by the unutterably
dull, lifeless, and ugly village of Dishforth, leading to the hamlet of
Asenby, where the road descends to the picturesque crossing of the Swale
and the Cod Beck, with the village of Topcliffe crowning the ridge on the
other side: a village better looking, but as lifeless as the others.
Thence flat or gently undulating roads conduct in twelve miles to
Northallerton, past Busby Stoop Inn, the villages of Sand Hutton,
Newsham, and North and South Otterington.
South Otterington lives with a black mark in the memory of antiquaries as
that benighted place where the parishioners thought so little of their
church registers some years ago that they allowed the parish clerk to
treat all the old ones, dating from before the eighteenth century, as so
much waste-paper; some of them making an excellent bonfire to singe a
goose with. They were not singular in this respect, for churchwardens of
different places have been known to do the most extraordinary things with
these valuable documents. Thoresby, the antiquary, writing of a
particular register, remarks that “it has not been a plaything for young
pointers. It has not occupied a bacon-cratch or a bread-and-cheese
cupboard. It has not been scribbled on, within and without,” from which
we infer that that was the common fate, and that others had been so
treated.
The junction of the two main routes of the Great North Road at
Northallerton takes place ignominiously outside the goods station at a
level-crossing.
[Picture: The Edinburgh Express, 1837. After Jason Pollard]
XVI
THE alternative route now described and Northallerton regained by it, we
may resume the long journey to Edinburgh. It is the completest kind of
change from the wild ups and downs of the Boroughbridge and Wetherby
route to the long featureless stretches that now lie before us. We will
not linger in the town, but press onward to where the battle of the
Standard, as the battle of Northallerton is often known, was fought, on
the right-hand side of the road, near the still unenclosed fragments of
Cowton Moor. It was not a great struggle, for the Scots fled after a
short resistance, and the great numbers of their slain met their fate
rather at the hands of the peasantry, while fleeing through a hostile
country, than in combat with the English army.
Standing amid the heathy tussocks of Standard Hill, looking over the
Moor, the wide-spreading hill and dale of the Yorkshire landscape fades
into a blue or misty distance, and must in its solitude look much the
same as it did in those far distant days. Nothing save the name of the
hillock and that of the farm called Scot Pits, traditionally said to have
been the place where the Scottish dead were buried, remains to tell of
the struggle. “Baggamoor,” as old chroniclers call the battle-field,
from the baggage thrown away by the Scots in their flight, is traversed
by the road, which proceeds by way of Oak Tree and Lovesome Hills to
Great Smeaton, where the mails changed horses on the short seven miles’
stage between it and Northallerton, or the nine miles to Darlington. The
“Blacksmith’s Arms” was in those times the coaching inn here, but it has
long since been converted into cottages. William Tweedie, the last of a
succession of three Tweedies who kept the “Blacksmith’s Arms” and owed
their prosperity to the mails changing at their house, was also the
village postmaster. A God-fearing man and an absent-minded, it is
recorded of him that during a sermon at the parish church he was
surprised in the midst of one of his mental absences by hearing the
preacher enlarge upon the text of “Render unto Cæsar.” “Ay,” he said, in
a loud voice, when the duty of paying the king’s taxes and just demands
was brought home to the congregation, “that puts me in mind o’t: there’s
old Granny Metcalf’s bin owin’ the matter o’ eightpence on a letter these
two months past.”
Now Widow Metcalf _had_ paid that eightpence. She was in church, too.
The suddenness of the unjust accusation made her forget time and place,
and she retorted with, “William Tweedie, y’re a liar!”
One has a distinct suspicion that by “Lowsey Hill, a small Village
contiguous on the Left” (but a place so-named would more properly have
been “contagious”) mentioned here by Ogilby, he must have meant what is
now Lovesome Hill.
The old coach passengers, driving through, or changing at, Great Smeaton
must have often wondered, seeing the smallness of the place, what size
the neighbouring Little Smeaton, away off to the left, could have been.
Their inquiries on that head were usually answered by the coachmen, who
were wags of sorts, that Little Smeaton consisted of one dog-kennel and
two hen-coops. It is a lonely road between Northallerton and Darlington,
and quips of this kind probably tasted better when administered on the
spot than they do to the armchair traveller. Particularly lonely is High
Entercommon, where a turnpike-gate stood in the days that are done,
together with an inn, the “Golden Lion,” where a few coaches which made a
longer stage from Northallerton changed. Were it not that William
Thompson, landlord at the best period in the history of coaching, was a
highly reputable person, and had been coachman to Sir Bellingham Graham
before he set up as innkeeper, we might point to the house and say how
suitable a locality for the secret roadside crimes of old, of which
novelists delight to tell! Roads, and travelling before railways, used
to set the romancists busily engaged in spinning the most blood-curdling
stories of villainous innkeepers who, like Bob Acres, kept “churchyards
of their own,” and murderous trap-doors in their guest-rooms giving upon
Golgothas filled with the bones of their many victims. If one might
credit these astounding stories, the inns that were not murder-shops were
few and far between; but happily those writers, anxious only to make your
blood creep, were as a rule only exercising their particularly gory
imaginations.
A story of this order is that of a lady who set out in her carriage to
visit some friends in Yorkshire. She had come to within thirty miles of
her destination, when a thunderstorm which had been threatening broke
violently overhead. Struggling against the elements, the coachman was
glad to espy an old-fashioned roadside inn presently visible ahead, and,
his mistress expressing a wish to alight and rest until the storm should
abate, he drove up to the door. It was a wild and solitary spot (they
always are in these stories, and it is astonishing how solitary and wild
they are, and how many such places appeared to exist). The rusty sign
creaked dismally overhead, and the window-shutters flapped violently in
the wind on their broken hinges; altogether it was not an inviting spot.
But any port in a storm, and so the lady alighted. She was shown into a
large old-fashioned apartment, and the horses and carriage were stabled
until such time as it might be possible to resume the journey. But,
instead of passing off, the storm grew momentarily worse. Calling her
servant she asked him if it were possible to continue that night, and on
his replying in the negative, reluctantly resigned herself to staying
under a strange roof. She had her dinner in solitary state, and then
found all the evening before her, with nothing to occupy the time. She
went to the window and looked out upon the howling storm, and, tired of
that uninviting prospect, gazed listlessly about the room. It was a
large room, ill-furnished, and somewhat out of repair, for the inn had
seen its best days. Evidences of a more prosperous time were left in the
shape of some scattered articles of furniture of a superior kind and in
the presence of a curious piece of ancient tapestry facing her on the
opposite wall, bearing a design of a life-sized Roman warrior wielding a
truncheon.