moth-eaten tapestry of a half-furnished room, and the storm-bound
traveller soon wearied of those objects. With nothing else to do, she
took out her purse and began to count her money and to calculate her
travelling expenses. Having counted the guineas over several times and
vainly tried to make the total balance properly with her expenditure and
the amount she had set out with, she chanced involuntarily to glance
across the room. Her gaze fell upon the stern visage of the helmeted
Roman, and to her horror the lack-lustre tapestry eyes were now replaced
by living ones, intently regarding her and her money. Ninety-nine of
every hundred women would have screamed or fainted, or have done both;
but our traveller was evidently the hundredth. She calmly allowed her
gaze to wander absent-mindedly away to the ceiling, as if still
speculating as to the disposition of the missing odd guineas; and then,
exclaiming, “Ah! I have it,” made for the door, to call her servant,
leaving her purse, apparently disregarded, on the table. In the passage
outside she met the landlord, who desired to know what it might be she
wanted. “To see my man, with orders for the morning,” said she. The
landlord shuffled away, and her servant presently appeared. She told him
what she had observed, and mounting upon the furniture, he examined the
tapestry, with the result that he found the wall behind it sound enough
in all places, with the exception of the eyes. On pressing the fabric at
those points it gave way, disclosing a hole bored through the wall and
communicating with some other room. This discovery of course aroused the
worst suspicions; but the storm still raged, it was now late, and to
countermand the accommodation already secured for the night would be to
apprise the landlord of something having been discovered. There was
nothing for it but to stay the night. To sleep was impossible, and so
the lady, retiring to her bedroom, securely bolting the door, and
assuring herself that no secret panel or trap-door existed, sat wakefully
in a chair all night. Doubtless the servant did the same, although the
story does not condescend to details where he is concerned. At length
morning came, without anything happening, and, equally without incident,
they set out after breakfast from this place of dread, the lady having
previously ascertained that the room on the other side of the wall behind
the tapestry was the landlord’s private apartment.
These adventures being afterwards recounted, it was called to mind that
an undue proportion of highway robberies had for some time past been
occurring in the immediate neighbourhood of the inn, and a queer story
was remembered of a traveller who had stayed there overnight being robbed
soon after leaving by a highwayman, who, without any preliminary parley,
desired him to instantly take off his right boot—the boot in which, as a
matter of fact, he had stowed away his money. The highwayman, who
evidently had been informed of this secret hiding-place, extracted the
coin, and, returning the boot, went on his way. It afterwards appeared
that the traveller had stowed his money in his boot while under the
impression that he was alone in the tapestry-room. He had reckoned
without the Centurion.
The inn of course fell into evil repute, and the landlord was soon
afterwards compelled to give up business. But the provoking part of it
all, from the point of view of the historian, is that the story does not
descend to topographical particulars, and that the description of the
place as being in Yorkshire is necessarily of the vaguest, considering
the vastness of the shire.
XVII
DALTON-UPON-TEES, three miles onward from High and Low Entercommon, shows
little to the passer-by on the Great North Road, who, a mile beyond its
scattered cottages, looking as though they had lost themselves, comes to
Croft, to the river Tees, and to the end of Yorkshire. It behoves one to
speak respectfully of Croft and its Spa, for its waters are as nasty as
those of Harrogate, with that flavour of rotten eggs so highly approved
by the medical profession, and only the vagaries of fashion can be held
accountable for the comparative neglect of the one and the favouring of
the other. Sulphur renders both equally nauseous and healthful, but
Croft finds few votaries compared with its great and successful rival,
and a gentle melancholy marks the spot, where, on the Yorkshire bank, the
mouldy-looking Croft Spa Hotel fronts the road, its closed assembly
rooms, where once the merry crowds foregathered, given over to damp and
mildew.
Croft is in the Hurworth Hunt, and it is claimed by local folk that the
Hurworth Country was indicated by “Handley Cross,” where Jorrocks and his
cronies chased the fox and enjoyed themselves so vigorously. The Spa
Hotel was then a place of extremely high jinks. Every night there would
be a dinner-party, with much competition as to who could drink the most
port or champagne. The test of the sturdiest fellow was to see who could
manage to place on his head a champagne or port bottle and lie down and
stand up with it still in place. Few reputations, or bottles, survived
that ordeal.
But Croft is a pretty place, straggling on both the Yorkshire and Durham
banks of the Tees; with a fine old church commanding the approach from
the south. It is worth seeing, alike for its architecture; for a huge
and preposterous monument of one of the Milbankes of Halnaby; and
especially for the extravagantly-arrogant manorial pew of that family,
erected in the chancel, and elevated in the likeness of two canopied
thrones approached by an elaborate staircase and over a crimson carpet.
This pompous structure dates from about 1760. The thing would not be
credible, did not we know to what extent the pride and presumption of the
old squirearchy sometimes went.
[Picture: Croft Bridge]
A sturdy old Gothic bridge here carries the road across the stream into
the ancient Palatinate of Durham. It were here that each successive
Prince-Bishop of that see was met and presented with the falchion that
slew the Sockburn Worm, one of the three mythical monsters that are said
to have infested Durham and Northumberland. Like the Lambton Worm, and
the Laidly—that is to say, the Loathly—Worm of Spindleston Heugh, the
Sockburn terror, according to mediæval chroniclers, was a “monstrous and
poysonous vermine or wyverne, aske or werme which overthrew and devoured
many people in fight, for yt ye sent of ye poyson was so strong yt noe
p’son might abyde it.” The gallant knight who at some undetermined
period slew this legendary pest was Sir John Conyers, descended from
Roger de Conyers, Constable of Durham Castle in the time of William the
Conqueror. The family held the manor of Sockburn by the curious tenure
of presenting the newly appointed Bishop Palatine of Durham on his first
entry into his diocese with the falchion that slew the Worm. The
presentation was made on Croft Bridge, with the words:—“My Lord Bishop, I
here present you with the falchion wherewith the champion Conyers slew
the worm, dragon, or fiery flying serpent which destroyed man, woman and
child; in memory of which the king then reigning gave him the manor of
Sockburn, to hold by this tenure, that upon the first entrance of every
bishop into the county the falchion should be presented.” Taking the
falchion into his hand, the bishop immediately returned it, wishing the
owner of Sockburn health, long life, and prosperity, and the ceremony was
concluded. Sockburn, seven miles below Croft, on the Durham shore of the
Tees, is no longer owned by that old heroic family, for the proud stock
which in its time had mated with the noblest in England decayed, and the
last Conyers, Sir Thomas, died a pauper in Chester-le-Street workhouse in
1810. The manor-house of Sockburn has long since been swept away, and the
old church is a roofless ruin, the estate itself having long since passed
to the Blackett family, in whose possession the wondrous falchion now
remains. The bishops of Durham, no longer temporal princes, do not now
receive it, the last presentation having been made to Bishop Van Mildert
by the steward of Sir Edward Blackett in 1826.
[Picture: Sockburn Falchion] Croft Bridge, a massive and
venerable-looking stone structure of seven arches, built in 1676, is
itself the successor of a much older building, referred to in a Royal
Brief of 1531 as being “the moste directe and sure waye and passage for
the King o’er Soveraigne Lorde’s armie and ordyn’ce to resort and pass
over into the north p’tes and marches of this his reaulme, for the surtie
and defence of the same againste the invasion of the Scotts and others
his enemyes, over which such armys and ordyn’ces hathe hertofor always
bene accostomyed to goo and passe.”
Here we are in Durham, and three miles from Darlington. Looking
backwards on crossing the bridge, the few scattered houses of the hither
shore are seen beside the way; one of them, the “Cornet” hotel, with a
weather-beaten picture-sign of the famous pedigree bull of that name, and
the inscription, “‘Comet,’ sold in 1810 for one thousand guineas.” The
Tees goes on its rippling way through the pointed arches of the historic
bridge, with broad shingly beaches over against the rich meadows, the
road pursuing its course to cross that rival stream, the Skerne, at
Oxneyfield Bridge, a quarter of a mile ahead. Close by, in a grass
meadow to the right of the road, are the four pools called by the
terrific name of “Hell’s Kettles,” which testify by the sulphureous taste
of their water to the quality of Croft Spa. Of course, they have their
wonderful legends; Ogilby in 1676 noted that. “At Oxenhall,” he says,
“are three Pits call’d Hell-kettles, whereof the vulgar tell you many
fabulous stories.” They have long been current, then; the first telling
how on Christmas Day 1179 the ground rose to the height of the highest
hills, “higher than the spires and towers of the churches, and so
remained at that height from nine of the morning until sunset. At the
setting of the sun the earth fell in with so horrid a crash that all who
saw that strange mound and heard its fall were so amazed that for very
fear many died, for the earth swallowed up that mound, and where it stood
was a deep pool.” This circumstantial story was told by an abbot of
Jervaulx, but is not sufficiently marvellous for the peasantry, who
account for the pool by a tale of supernatural intervention. According
to this precious legend, the farmer owning the field being about to carry
his hay on June 11, St. Barnabas’ Day, it was pointed out that he had
much better attend to his religious duties than work on the anniversary
of the blessed saint, whereupon he replied:—
Barnaby yea, Barnaby nay,
I’ll hae my hay, whether God will or nay:
and, the ground opening, he and his carts and horses were instantly
swallowed up. The tale goes on to say that, given a fine day and clear
water, the impious farmer and his carts and horses may yet be seen
floating deep down in these supposedly fathomless pools! De Foe,
however, travelling this way in 1724, is properly impatient of these
tales. “’Tis evident,” says he, “they are nothing but old coal-pits,
filled with water by the river Tees.”
XVIII
DARLINGTON, to which we now come, is a very busy, very prosperous, very
much rebuilt town, nursing a sub-Metropolitan swagger of architectural
pretension in its chief streets infinitely unlike anything expected by
the untravelled in these latitudes. There is a distinctly Holloway
Road—plus Whitechapel Road—and Kennington Lane air about Darlington which
does but add to the piquancy of those streets. Tumbledown houses of no
great age and no conceivable interest are shouldered by flaunting shops;
or rather, to speak by the card, by “stores” and “emporia”; these
alternating with glittering public-houses and restaurants. The effect
can be paralleled only by imagining a typical general servant dressed in
a skirt and train for a Queen’s Drawing Room, with ploughboy’s boots, a
cloth jacket, and ostrich-feathered hat to complete the costume. It is a
town only now beginning to realise that prosperity must make some outward
show of the fact, and it is accordingly going in for show in
whole-hearted fashion, and emerging from the grime in which James the
First found it in 1617. “Darneton!” he said when told its name; “I think
it’s Darneton th’ Dirt.” Dirty indeed it must have been for James, fresh
from his own capital, where they flung their sewage from the windows into
the streets, to have found it remarkable. De Foe, fifty years later,
said, “Darlington, a post-town, has nothing remarkable in it but dirt,
and a high bridge over little or no water.” An odd contemporary
commentary upon this seems to lurk in the fact that cloth was then
brought to Darlington from all parts—even from Scotland—to be bleached!
More akin to those times than these are the names of the streets, which,
like those of York, are chiefly “gates”:—High Northgate, Skinnergate,
Bondgate, Blackwellgate, and Priestgate.
In vain will the pilgrim seek the “Black Bear,” the inn at Darlington to
which Frank Osbaldistone, in the pages of _Rob Roy_, came. Scott
describes the wayfarers whom the young squire met on his way from London
to York and the North as “characters of a uniform and uninteresting
description,” but they are interesting to us, belonging as they do to a
time long past. “Country parsons, jogging homewards after a visitation;
farmers, or graziers, returning from a distant market; clerks of traders,
travelling to collect what was due to their masters in provincial towns;
with now and then an officer going down into the country upon recruiting
service.” These persons kept the tapsters and the turnpikes busy, and at
night time, when they foregathered at the roadside inns, sandwiched their
talk of cattle and the solvency of traders with terrifying tales of
robbers. “At such tales, like children, closing their circle round the
fire when the ghost-story draws to its climax, they drew near to each
other, looked before and behind them, examined the priming of their
pistols, and vowed to stand by each other in case of danger; an
engagement which, like other offensive and defensive alliances, sometimes
glided out of remembrance when there was an appearance of actual peril.”
This was about 1715. In those days, as Scott says, “journeys of any
length being made on horseback, and, of course, by brief stages, it was
usual always to make a halt on the Sunday in some town where the
traveller might attend divine service, and his horse have the benefit of
the day of rest. A counterpart to this decent practice, and a remnant of
old English hospitality, was, that the landlord of a principal inn laid
aside his character of publican on the seventh day and invited the guests
who chanced to be within his walls to take a part of the family beef and
pudding.”
[Picture: “Locomotion”]
The “Black Bear” at Darlington, as pictured by Scott, was such a place
and the landlord as typical a host, and here Frank Osbaldistone met the
first Scot he had ever seen, “a decentish hallion—as canny a North Briton
as e’er crossed Berwick Bridge”—which was high praise from mine host, for
innkeepers loved not Scottish folk and their thrifty ways. But, as
already remarked, the “Black Bear” at Darlington does not exist, and
coaching relics are rare in this town, whose modern prosperity derives
from railways. It is, therefore, with singular appropriateness that
Stephenson’s “Locomotion,” the first engine for that first of railways,
the Stockton and Darlington, long since withdrawn from service, has been
mounted on a pedestal at Darlington Station. In heathen lands this
ancestor of the modern express locomotive would be worshipped as a
fetich, and truly it is an ugly and uncanny-looking object.
[Picture: “The Experiment”]
The Stockton and Darlington Railway Act dates from 1821; the line to be
worked by “men and horses, or otherwise,” steam not being contemplated.
The construction was begun in May, 1822, and meanwhile the Rainhill
experiments had proved the possibility of locomotive engines. The Act
was therefore amended, to authorise the use of them and to permit the
conveyance of passengers; a kind of traffic which, odd though it may seem
now, was not contemplated by the projectors, whose original idea was a
railway for the conveyance of coal. It was on September 27th, 1825, that
the line was opened, a train of thirty-eight wagons travelling, as a
contemporary newspaper breathlessly announced, “with such velocity that
in some parts the speed was frequently twelve miles an hour.” Curiously
enough, however, the first passengers, after the opening ceremony, were
conveyed, not by steam, but by a rough coach, like a gipsy caravan,
running on the rails and drawn by a horse. This odd contrivance was
called the “Experiment,” and did the twelve miles in two hours. It was
followed by other vehicles, consisting of old stage-coach bodies mounted
on railway wheels, and it was not until some months had passed that
passengers were intrusted to the locomotive. The first passenger train
ran a spirited race with the coach over the twelve miles’ course, steam
winning by a hundred and twenty yards, amid the cheers of excited crowds.
After thirty-eight years of independent existence, the Stockton and
Darlington line was, with its branches, finally absorbed into the
North-Eastern system, in 1863.
Darlington is thus a place entirely inimical to coaching interests and
memories. Here, on its pedestal, stands the first of the iron monsters
that killed the coaches, and the town itself largely lives by
manufacturing railway wagons and iron and steel bridges. But coaching
had had its day, and did not die untimely. A few years longer and the
great highroads, already inconveniently crowded, must have been widened
to accommodate the increased traffic. Railways have been beneficent in
many directions, and they have enabled many hundreds of thousands to live
in the country who would otherwise have been pent in stuffy streets.
Imagination fails in the task of endeavouring to picture what the roads
would have been like to-day if road-travel had remained the only means of
communication. Locomotion would have been immensely restricted, of
course; but the mere increase of population must have brought huge crowds
of additional passengers. Figures are commonly said to be dry, but they
can occasionally be eloquent enough. For instance, when we compare the
population of the United Kingdom in 1837, when the Queen came to the
throne, and now, and consider the bearing of those figures on this
question, they are more than eloquent, and are even startling. There
were twenty-five and a half millions of persons in these islands in the
first year of Victoria’s reign. There are now forty-nine millions. Over
twenty-three millions of persons most of whom would have used the roads,
added in eighty years! Of course, the opportunities for cheap and quick
travel have made frequent travellers of those who otherwise would never
or rarely have stirred from their homes; but railways have wrought
greater changes than that. What, let us think, would have been the
present-day position of the city of London without railways? It must
needs have remained largely what it was when the “short stages” conveyed
such citizens as did not live in the city to and from their residences in
the suburbs, which then extended no further than Highgate, Chiswick,
Norwood, and Stockwell. A stage-coach commonly held sixteen persons,
twelve outside and four in; and allowing for those who might manage to
walk into the city, how many of such coaches should we require nowadays,
supposing railways suddenly abolished, to convey the city’s myriad day
population? So many thousands that the task would be impossible. The
impossibility of it gives us at once the measure of the railways’ might,
and raises them from the mere carriers we generally think them to the
height of all-powerful social forces whose effects may be sought in every
detail of our lives. To them the wide-spreading suburbs directly owe
their existence, equally as the deserted main roads of yester-year owed
their loneliness to the same cause; and social scientists have it that
they have performed what may at first sight seem a miracle: that, in
fact, they have increased the population. If railways had not come to
ease the growing pressure that began to be felt upon the roads in the
early “twenties,” something else must have appeared to do the work of
speedy conveyance, and that something would have been the Motor Car.
Railway competition and the restrictive legislation that forbade
locomotive carriages on highways served to keep motor cars under until
recently; but away back to 1787, when the first steam-carriage was made,
the problem of mechanical traction on roads was being grappled with, and
many very good steam-cars made their appearance between 1820 and 1830.
The caricaturists of the period were kept busily engaged making more or
less pertinent fun of them; in itself a testimony to the interest they
were exciting even then. Here is a typical skit of the period which
takes a renewed interest now that we are on the threshold of an era of
horseless traction.
[Picture: “Fellow, Give my Buggy A Charge of Coke, Your Charcoal is Too
D—d Dear.” From an old print]
Few things are more remarkable than the speed with which railways were
constructed through the length and breadth of the country, but it was
long before through communication between London and Edinburgh was
established. It was a coach-guard on this road who, just before the last
coach was run off it by the locomotive, sadly remarked that “railways
were making a gridiron of England.” They were; but it was not until 1846
and 1848, twenty-one and twenty-three years after the initial success of
the Stockton and Darlington line, that by the opening of the Edinburgh
and Berwick Railway, and the building of the railway bridge across the
Tweed, the last links of the railway journey between the two capitals
were completed. Even now, it requires the united efforts of three
entirely distinct and independent railway companies to convey the through
traffic of under four hundred miles between the two capitals. The Great
Northern territory ends at Shaftholme, near Doncaster, whence the
North-Eastern’s system conducts to the Border at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the
remaining fifty miles belonging to the North British Railway.
De Quincey, in his rhapsody on the “English Mail Coach,” says: “The
modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system
in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a
consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon
alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone
fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal
experience, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find
ourselves in York, four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an
assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But,
seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to
indicate the velocity. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a
thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind, insensate
agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery
eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostrils,
spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.”
[Picture: The Iron Road to the North]
But, in truth, railways and coaches have each their especial variety of
the romance of speed. De Quincey missed the quickening rush and contact
of the air quite as much as any other of the sights, sounds, and
sensations he speaks of when travelling by railway; a method of
progression which does not admit of outside passengers. Nothing in its
special way can be more exhilarating than travelling by coach as an
“outside”; few things so unsatisfactory as the position of an “inside”;
and if a well-groomed coach is a thing of beauty, there is also a
beautiful majesty in a locomotive engine that has been equally well
looked after. One of the deep-chested Great Northern expresses puffing
its irresistible way past the green eyes of the dropped semaphores of
some busy junction at night-time, or coming as with the rush and
certainty of Fate along the level stretches of line that characterise the
route of the iron road to the North, is a sight calculated to rouse
enthusiasm quite as much as a coach. Nor are railways always hideous
objects. It is true that in and around the great centres of population
where railway lines converge and run in filthy tunnels and along
smoke-begrimed viaducts they sound the last note of squalor, but in the
country it is a different matter. The embankments are in spring often
covered with a myriad wild flowers; the viaducts give a human interest to
coombe and gully. Lovers of the country can certainly point to places
which, once remote and solitary, have been populated and spoiled by the
readiness of railway access; but the locomotive has rendered more
holidays possible, and has kept the roads in a decent solitude for the
cyclist. Imagine, if you please, the Great North Road nowadays without
the railway. A hundred coaches, more or less, raced along it in the last
years of the coaching age, at all hours of the day and night. How many
would suffice for the needs of the travelling public to-day? and what
chance would be left to the tourist, afoot or awheel?
XIX