CHAPTER VIII.

BEVERLEY--STONE CROSSES--NORTHUMBERLAND--ALNWICK--HEXHAM--NEWCASTLE--DURHAM--KEPIER HOSPITAL--CARLISLE.

The entrance gate to Beverley is a rather fine specimen of brick architecture, with mouldings and niches all in the same material. It fully carries out the principles of brickwork that have been the subject of a former chapter, and is a delightful entrance to a country town of first-class importance. The houses of Beverley are good, and it is resorted to by many retired merchants and tradesmen who wish to pass what remains of life in quiet.

In the market place, which the engraver has given an excellent idea of, is a quaint cross of the Carolean period. This market place occupies some four acres, and is a perfect gem of picturesque town beauty. The cross must have been among the last that were built as market crosses. The history of these beautiful remains, that have done so much to enliven old towns and cities, may be told in a few words. They were devoted to various uses. Sometimes they were preaching crosses, as the one at _Iron Acton_, where probably in very warm weather the vicar or incumbent would address the congregation in the open air, or, like the black friars in Hereford, where the pulpit cross seems to have stood in cloisters. Sometimes they were memorial crosses, like the three grand Eleanor crosses that are left us out of the original twelve; and it is satisfactory to be able to think that these beautiful memorials will again be copied very freely. The colonies even are beginning to erect some imitations of the Waltham cross,[9] and indeed its marvellous beauty speaks for itself. At one time there were certainly 5000 crosses in England, but they were so easily destroyed in Cromwell’s time, that very little trace of all this luxuriance of architecture is left. Some crosses may be buried only a foot under the soil, and noble examples lost to our sight; indeed it is by no means uncertain that we shall not be able to add at least one Eleanor cross to our list, if not two. The Chester Cross was buried for years, indeed centuries, before it was discovered in front of St. Peter’s Church, only a few inches below the footwalk, apparently placed reverently by some careful hand; and since these pages have been commenced, and in some very recent alterations to Neston church in this neighbourhood, the remains of three fine stone crosses were exhumed. A cross filled many uses, as has been said, but it was always contrived to make it an object of beauty to the neighbourhood. The Charing Cross that has been recently erected opposite the new hotel is one of the most successful that has been put up in modern days, and much resembles the roadside one at Waltham. From these old crosses proclamations used to be read, and tolls collected from the market people. The modern drinking-fountain also is an adaptation of the idea that suggested some of the crosses, and several of the old conduits might be copied with great advantage. The one at Sherborne, which has been illustrated in these pages, would be an excellent model for a drinking-fountain, and one that has not yet been copied. The covered market cross at Beverley is one of the last that was built, and answered the same purposes as those of Salisbury or Malmesbury. These were merely covered spaces for country people to rest in, in the heat and the rain, and generally connected with some religious house in the neighbourhood. They were usually octagonal and richly groined. That at Chichester is the most elaborate, though the more ancient one at Salisbury, engraved in page 119, is the most graceful and picturesque in the country. One thing strikes us in these crosses--the smallness of the accommodation for a public market; but then, as now, the market square was covered with awnings or tents. And one of the most picturesque sights in England is an old market square like the one at Hexham, or the one at Salisbury, with their booths, on a busy market-day. Sometimes a cross was built on an octagonal shaft surmounted with a crucifix, or a head with niches and small statues, and an octagonal covering was built up round it reaching to about half the height of the original shaft. This, as at Cheddar in Somerset, is sometimes of later date, and sometimes, as at Shepton-Mallet, in the same vicinity, built contemporaneously with the central column. In great numbers of villages we find flights of steps where a cross has once stood; but the eyesore being removed, the Puritans allowed the steps to remain. In Malpas these are of enormous dimensions, and when they were surmounted with a tall cross the effect in this picturesque little country town must have been most striking. As a rule, our modern representations of crosses have not been very successful; they are wanting in lightness and ingenuity. One mode of decoration, however, that is thoroughly unsuited to our climate, we are not likely to see renewed, and that is the gilding of crosses. The magnificent cross at Coventry was regilded in the reign of James II., and is said to have used up 15,403 books of gold.

Beverley was at one time surrounded by lakes that were formed by the overflowing of the Humber, and its name is said to be derived from Beaver lake, as at one time these animals were very abundant in this part of Yorkshire. There is a grammar school here of great antiquity.

The towns of Scarborough and Whitby contain nothing at all that could illustrate the subject in hand; indeed, on the accession of Queen Elizabeth, Whitby only contained thirty or forty houses.

In the adjoining county of Westmoreland there is not very much that comes within our range. The beauty of the county needs no telling here. The English lakes are hardly excelled in beauty anywhere in the world, but of course their requirements for modern travel have caused a modern growth of architecture. The ruins of the castle where Catherine Parr was born are near Kendal, but the town itself contains nothing of interest architecturally.

Appleby, the county town, was at one time a place of importance, but it was twice burned down during the wars, and the present appearance is quite modern. Ambleside is a charming town almost entirely composed of modern detached cottages, each in its own garden.

The county of Northumberland suffered, like Dorset, severely, from incursions of the Danes, though in the former county they were suffered to settle after their overthrow by King Alfred; and Mr. G. Tate, in an interesting history of Alnwick, has given a curious list of Danish words that are still preserved in the dialect spoken about that town.

Indeed he shows that every word which is of strange origin has come from Scandinavia. This work of Mr. Tate’s was reviewed some ten years since, in the _Builder_, in a very interesting article, from which I do not hesitate to borrow.

The writer says that in general the people who visit Alnwick for the first time feel sadly disappointed. They look upon it as the ancient home of the Percies, and almost expect to find men in mediæval costume, or at any rate they do think that the town should have the appearance of some newly fought field, and there should be some few pieces of armour lying about; and often the disappointment is expressed loudly at the first sight of the small quiet gray town lying in its green basin. Wordsworth and Pennant even make no secret of their chagrin, as they found their hopes all scattered; and Halleck, the American poet, is very much exercised at the appearance of the liveried menial who let him through the ancient halls of Hotspur and his wife, for the modest sum of “ten shillings and sixpence sterling.” Yet it seems that the inhabitants are all antiquaries, either from the associations with which they are surrounded or the force of old customs, and there is hardly a tradesman that does not possess some collection of local antiquities. Mr. Tate reinvests Alnwick, as it were, with some of its ancient glories. He says, “When several of our great towns were mere villages, Alnwick was a walled town and enjoyed a corporate existence; warlike barons, wielding power little less than regal, resided within its great castle, ruled their vassals, and hatched their plots against their sovereign, or devised schemes for public liberty. Malefactors were executed there, and grisly and gory heads were exhibited over the gates; mitred abbots and cowled monks lived hard by, and dispensed a splendid hospitality within their abbeys. Old customs lingered long here; and there yet remains somewhat of the racy savour of olden times, in the tastes and associations of the inhabitants.”

The Percies were in possession of Alnwick at least 120 years before it was walled and fortified, and the wall that surrounded it does not seem to have differed very much from that of Chester. The Border warfare, or rather perhaps armed plunder, that one might almost have supposed was inherited from the Danish blood that flowed in the veins of the northern people, accounts for much of their architecture.

When Worcester says--

---- “The fox Who ne’er so tame, so cherished, and locked up, Will have a wild trick of his ancestors,”

he might have been alluding to the neighbours by whom Hotspur was surrounded. It is computed that no less than 2000 men must have been employed in a complicated system of day and night watching to guard against the lawless raids of the Middle Ages. The day watches began their duty at daylight, and blew a horn on the approach of the foe, and all men were bound on pain of death to follow the fray with hue and cry. Goods captured from the Scots were restored to the owner, and the capturer was rewarded. No man was permitted to speak to a Scotsman without leave from the warder, so great a terror did the inroads of the Northerners cause among the English.

Perhaps there may have been a reverse to this picture, and the hands of the Englishmen were not quite clean. The conduct of the stout Earl of Northumberland in Chevy Chase is not such as we can well excuse. He certainly had no pretence of right on his side to take three summer days of pleasure in the Scottish woods, and kill and bring back to Alnwick the chiefest harts in Douglas’s manor. This must always have struck even the most youthful admirer of the beautiful ballad. Then they were not satisfied with moderate, or indeed excellent sport. A hundred fallow deer did not appease the “stout Earl” and his friends, for they seem to have coolly prepared for further hunting. The chronicler simply says--

“And long before high noon they had A hundred fat bucks slain; Then, having dined, the drovers went To rouse them up again.”

This ballad is evidently written in the interests of the English, and whoever may have been generally most to blame in the Border quarrels, it is clear that the English on the occasion of Chevy Chase had a good deal of wrong on their side.

The waits were suppressed in 1831 by the Corporation. They used to last from Martinmas to January, and Mr. Tate remembers the criers perambulating the town at night with a “Good morrow, masters all! half-past three on a frosty morning;” and once or twice a week altering their apostrophe to the name of a householder, “Good morrow, Mistress Turner! half-past two on a cloudy morning.” Singular as such customs may seem now, it is only a comparatively few years since constables used to perambulate the city at night time in Liverpool and other large towns, using almost similar language. Fortunately the establishment of new police has deprived them of the power of paying off some old grudge against any particular inhabitant who might be supposed to require information about the time of night and the state of the weather; and the watchman with his lantern has now become a thing of the past,--more so even than mail-coaches with their rumbles and horns, which, indeed, have not even yet disappeared from some of the more remote parts of the island.

Hexham is a very imposing-looking town, as it is approached from the railway. The Moot Hall and the Abbey Church occupy commanding features in the landscape. The Abbey Church was at one time a cathedral, dedicated to St. Andrew. Every building in Hexham that can boast of any antiquity bears testimony to the disturbed state of the old times. This is the case also with Haltwhistle, on the left bank of the Tyne, and other Northumbrian towns. Those who are in the habit of spending time in amateur gardening may be interested to know that the gloves called “Hexham tans” are manufactured here, and sent into the country to be sold at exactly double the price they bring in Hexham. Formerly hats like the Monmouth caps were made here, but, as in Monmouth, all the factories are now closed. Hexham has produced two remarkable chroniclers--John of Hexham and Prior Richard.

The Black Gate at Newcastle-on-Tyne is a singular example of the architecture of the period we have been describing. Gloomy and forbidding it looks, as if really every man’s hand was against his neighbour, and his neighbour’s against him. It has been recently destroyed, but the engraving is taken from a photograph that was fortunately made before. Of course the windows are modern in comparison with the rest of the building. This gate was built at an enormous cost in the reign of Henry III., and, as a recent chronicler has said, “it is apt to convey a gloomy impression of Norman character and times, in passing under the low and narrow arch. Louring and characteristic is the effect of its great depth, thirty-six feet, and suggestive of thoughts of the awful dungeons of the mighty barons, and the deeds of cruelty too often perpetrated in them.” The older fortifications were quite inadequate for the defence of Newcastle against the Scots, who seem to have ravaged it at will. Part of them remained until very recently behind the priory of Black Friars.

The history of the walls is very illustrative of the times. On one of the inroads of the Scots, after they had exhausted the old programme of plunder and fire, they carried off a wealthy citizen with them to Scotland, and held him for ransom. This was not long in coming, and on his return to his town he resolved to protect the city with walls in order to prevent similar accidents. In this he was assisted by the inhabitants and the King, and he was enabled to build a wall of twelve feet high and eight feet thick, strongly resembling, it is said, the walls of Avignon. This wall measured about a mile and three quarters in circuit, and was surrounded with a ditch of more than twenty yards in breadth. There were said to be seven gates in these walls, and seventeen round towers, and effigies of men cut in stone to represent watchers. All these works were completed in the fourteenth century.

A description of Durham would hardly be complete without some reference to St. Cuthbert, to whom the See owes its origin. He was originally a cowherd, but believing that he had a calling for holy orders he left his sheep in the wilderness and soon obtained admission. His piety and austere life at once marked him out for high office, and he ultimately became Bishop of Lindisfarne. This office was no sinecure in his day, and it required all the efforts of the ecclesiastics and their see to preserve any of their property from the ravages of the Danish invasions, which seem to have occurred as often as it was supposed there was anything worth plundering, and they could collect sufficient men to plunder, with the necessary ships and arms.

Lindisfarne Island is the part most exposed to any incursions of the Danes, and the ecclesiastics finally grew tired of the wearisome and unequal contest and determined to remove to safer quarters; and after various wanderings, in which they carried with them the body of St. Cuthbert, they finally rested at

Durham. The saint, who during many years retained his flesh and natural appearance, pointed out this spot, and the corpse seemed very angry when they attempted to pass it in quest of any other. This, of course, decided the question finally, and so Durham was originally founded. It would be impossible to find a more magnificent site for a building in England than that which Durham Cathedral occupies. The Wear sweeps round a bluff that is covered with noble trees, and above this rise the three vast towers of the cathedral, all of which are reflected in the still broad water below.

From the churchyard, also, of St. Oswald’s, the view, though striking, is very different. Here the great central tower is the prominent object, supported by the western ones rising in the rear; while another grand view of the building presents itself from Palace Green, a large open space on the north side of the cathedral.

Notwithstanding the enormous advantages that such a building must afford to the landscape of a city, the streets are not very picturesque, and there is an unpleasantly squalid look about nearly all parts of it. From the railway station or the banks of the Wear the views are incomparably grand; but, like Constantinople seen from the Bosphorus, the charm of the city melts away on entering: and for so important a city the hotel accommodation is very inadequate.

Elver Bridge, when Britton published his _Picturesque Antiquities of English Cities_, must have been one of the most picturesque objects in the kingdom. It was formed of pointed arches finely ribbed underneath, and it supported a pile of gabled houses with tall chimneys and ancient balconies of unsurpassed beauty, and variety of form. The windows were deeply recessed and mullioned, and there were stacks of tall chimneys, square, octagonal, and divided into stages; indeed, if these buildings had been simply taken as examples of mediæval architecture, they would have been extremely valuable, but spreading over a fine roomy old bridge and reflected in the waters below, they formed a picture that was a loss to the nation when it was destroyed.

The view of Durham Castle here given, as the city is entered over the bridge, is very striking. It seems as if it must have been secure from the attacks of any enemy, with such contrivances of offence as were then known, and well suited for the residence of a line of bishops whose weapons of warfare were but too often carnal.

Kepier Hospital stands on the banks of the Wear, and is a delightful resort for the inhabitants of Durham. The gateway here given is easily fixed as to date, from the arms on the keystones of the groining; they are those of two masters of the hospital from the years 1341 to 1345, and this date exactly corresponds with the style of architecture. The remains of the hospital itself are inside the gateway and of much later date. It is occupied as a country inn, and some of the rooms are filled with magnificent oak carvings.

Kepier Hospital was endowed with the large sum of £186 per annum, which the bishops of Durham had given it out of the plenitude of their riches, and a list of the offices of the thirteen brethren will throw some light upon the singular requirements of the age. Six of these were to be chaplains; the seventh brother was to be dispenser and larderer; the eighth was keeper of the tannery; ninth the baker; tenth the miller; eleventh the gauger; twelfth the keeper of stock; and the thirteenth general proctor for all business of the hospital.

We notice in Carlisle, as in all these northern cities, the same indications of an age of turmoil. What few houses are left appear to have been built

to resist some sudden violence, and tell the bygone tale of insecurity. For nearly two centuries Carlisle lay in ruins from the ravages of the Danes, and it was only restored in the time of William Rufus. He planted a colony of Flemings there--their type of feature is still to be noticed among the inhabitants--and he encouraged an immigration of husbandmen from the south. The singular way in which a type of feature is preserved from generation to generation is certainly exhibited in Chester, in the Roman character of many of the features of the country people near the city. This has never been noticed, as far as I know, and it was only in looking over a collection of Roman coins that it occurred to me. These characteristics are especially to be noticed in the coins of Hadrian, or Claudius, or Agricola--a full neck, a Roman nose, and strongly marked features; indeed, nobody can go through the Chester market on a Saturday, and observe the various types of feature, without being struck with these peculiarities in the Cheshire women.

The old houses at Hexham which are engraved at the end of the chapter, are extremely characteristic of the older northern towns, where cut stone is more in vogue than “post and petrel.”