Part 2

His descendant, the notable Lady Pembroke, whose initials are so conspicuous at Skipton, expended some of her energy here at Barden. This was one of the six castles she restored, and over the door we may read the inscription she placed there according to her habit, with all her names and titles recorded at length, and a reference to a complimentary text about "the repairer of the breach."

Those who wish to see the famous Strid--and none should miss the sight--may leave their cars by the wayside at a point not very far from Barden Tower; but this is not the course I recommend. The Bolton woods are beautiful beyond description, and it is only by walking or driving through them from the Abbey to the Strid, or even to Barden Tower, that one can fully enjoy their ferny slopes and serried stems, and the little shining streams that slip through them to the Wharfe. George Eliot and George Lewes once spent a whole day wandering together along these paths, and we might follow in their footsteps very happily, I think. Those who prefer to drive must hire carriages, for motors are not admitted to the woods; but the existence of a very nice little hotel at Bolton Bridge makes everything easy.

By one means or another the Strid must be seen. Here the Wharfe is contracted into a narrow cleft, an abrupt chasm between low masses of rock; and the angry river, suddenly straitened in its course, has in its convulsions bitten into the stone till it is riddled with a thousand holes and hollows. When the river is low it is possible to leap across from rock to rock. This is the leap that Alice de Meschines' boy attempted but failed to achieve so many years ago, when the hounds he held in leash hesitated to follow him, and so dragged him back into the torrent. "I will make many a poor man's son my heir," said his mother; and the priory that her parents had founded at Embsay was moved by her to Bolton, and greatly enriched in memory of the drowned Boy of Egremond. Here is the stone from which he leapt, they say, and here the stone he never reached, and both are polished by the feet of those who have been more successful. This legend--and I fear the unkinder "myth" would be the more accurate word--has prompted several poets to make verses, but has signally failed to inspire them.

All that is left of Bolton Priory is before us when we reach the Cavendish Memorial. Close to this spot, though hidden from the road, is the log hut known as Hartington Seat, the point of view whence the ruin looks its loveliest. We are at the edge of a wooded cliff. The Priory lies far below us in its level graveyard, framed in trees; the river sweeps away from our feet, and after curving thrice, disappears into the blue haze of the hills. Between the churchyard and the foot of the red cliffs beyond the Wharfe lies the regular line of the monks' stepping-stones, by which for many centuries, probably, the congregation of the faithful came from the hills to their devotions; and came, too, on other occasions, laden with fruit or game for the hospitable table of the prior. Do not go to Bolton on a bank holiday, nor, if you can help it, in August, lest you should find as many people as were there in the days of its splendour, when the canons and the lay-brethren and the men-at-arms and the thirty servants and the unnumbered serfs and the frequent guests made it a stirring place. Yet it is always possible to find an early hour when there is peace in the ruined choir, where somewhere in the shadow of the arcaded walls the dust of the Shepherd Lord lies under the grass. Bolton was sold to the Shepherd's son, the first Earl of Cumberland, at the time of the Dissolution, when the building of the west tower was brought to a sudden standstill, and the nave, the parish church, was separated by a wall from the choir, the monks' church, which would be needed no more. There stands the tower, still unfinished; and here is the nave, now, as then, a parish church, where for seven hundred years without interruption, it is said, services have been held Sunday by Sunday. The beauty of the interior, unfortunately, is not great. The Early Victorian Age has left its fatal stamp upon it. It was not till forty years ago that the walls were cleansed of whitewash; and in 1851 a large sum of money was mis-spent at the Great Exhibition in acquiring some dreadful glass.

The motorist's route from Bolton Bridge to Harrogate is undoubtedly the moorland road by Blubberhouses. The contour-book describes it as rough and steep; but the steepness is nowhere very severe, and the surface is now excellent, while the moors have their usual charms--charms not only for the artist, though these are appealing enough, but special charms for the motorist too, the delight of an unfenced road and a wide country. Not that this road lies altogether on the moors. There are woods here and there, and soft, green beds of bracken, and slopes of massive rock; and presently we pass the great reservoir of the Leeds waterworks. Then the country opens out again, and we have a series of fine wide views till Harrogate appears below us, occupying a considerable proportion of the landscape.

Harrogate is exactly what one would expect it to be: a place of large hotels and fine shops, a place whose ideals are comfort and prosperity. Those who like to motor round a centre--a plan which has many advantages--could hardly find a better base for their operations.

"The great merit of Harrogate," wrote George Eliot, "is that one is everywhere close to lovely open walks." Our field has widened since her day, but Harrogate's great merit is still its merit as a centre. In this respect it is superior even to York, though in itself not worthy to be named with that incomparable city. To the west, within easy distance, are Nidderdale and Wharfedale; to the north are Ripon, Fountains, and Jervaulx, with Middleham and even Wensleydale for the enterprising; to the south is Kirkstall Abbey on the outskirts of Leeds. Byland and Rievaulx may be seen in a single day's drive, and only twenty-one miles away is York itself.

Harrogate is so entirely, so aggressively modern, so resolute to let bygones be bygones, that one learns with something of a shock how it came by its name. Harrogate, it appears, means the Soldiers' Hill on the Road. The soldiers who lived on the hill were Roman: the road was the Roman road through the forest of Knaresborough. Except for this faint hint of an earlier and more strenuous life, the history of Harrogate is the history of its "Spaw." These crowded acres were a bare, uninhabited common at the end of the sixteenth century, when Captain Slingsby, wandering one day across the Stray, was led by the tewits to a spring that cured him of his ills, which had hitherto yielded only to the waters of Germany. He set a roof over the precious spot, and so this spring became the _fons et origo_ of modern Harrogate. And the Stray, though now in the heart of a large town, is still uninhabited, still common-land; for a century after the discovery of the Tewit Well, when hotels were already thick upon the surrounding ground, an Act of Parliament was passed by which two hundred acres of land were presented for ever to the people of Harrogate, to serve for the daily walks of those who drank the waters.

At Knaresborough, only three miles further on, we are in a very different world, the world of old houses and older tales, of monarchs and saints, of William the Conqueror and the proud de Stutteville, of Richard, king in name but not in deed, and of Oliver, king in deed but not in name--an inspiring world, one would think. The first view of the town, too--the river, and the high, unusual bridge, and the red houses on the hillside, and above them the castle that had once so proud a crown of towers--seems to promise much. Looking at that fragment of a fortress we remember those who have owned it; the de Burgh who built it; the de Stutteville who fought in the Battle of the Standard; Piers Gaveston, who is better forgotten; de Morville, murderer of Beckett, hiding here from justice; Queen Philippa, whom we are glad to remember for any reason; John of Gaunt; Charles I. And we remember Richard II., a prisoner in the one tower that still stands, alone with his humiliating memories.

This one glimpse of the castle and its past, however, is all that Knaresborough can give us of romance. It is almost best to ask no more, for a nearer view of the crumbling keep will leave us very sad. The path that leads to it, the path that took de Morville to safety and Richard to prison, is neatly asphalted, and lighted with gas-lamps on stone bases, which the local guide-book describes as "ornamental." Hard by the door through which the sad king passed from his shame at Westminster, and went forth again to the mystery of Pontefract, stands a penny-in-the-slot machine. A custodian will show us the guardroom and its relics, and even the dungeon; but we must be careful to look at them in the right order, or we shall be rebuked. The wolf-trap must be seen before the Conqueror's chest, and Philippa's chest before the armour from Marston Moor. By this time the glamour has faded. Even the fine view from the castle rock must be inspected--_inspected_ is the right word--from nicely painted seats, placed at regular intervals in the shelter of clipped evergreens.

The most satisfactory place in Knaresborough is the Old Manor beside the river, where the original "roof-tree" round which the house was built still grows up through the rooms, and would be taller if a too zealous workman had not aspired to "make it tidy." A great deal of beautiful furniture has been gathered in the panelled rooms, including the sturdy and simple oak bedstead in which Oliver Cromwell slept when he was staying in the house that faces the Crown Hotel, in the upper part of the town. Perhaps the bed was brought here when Oliver's lodging was pulled down and rebuilt, as happened some time ago. The floor of his room was carefully preserved; that floor on which the landlady's little girl, peeping through the keyhole at "this extraordinary person," saw him kneeling at his prayers. It was in this town that he gathered his troops to meet the Scottish invasion, and from hence that he marched out, by way of Otley, Skipton, and Clitheroe, to defeat the Duke of Hamilton at Preston. The siege of the castle was not his work: Fairfax had taken it by assault some years earlier. Cromwell had sad memories in connection with Knaresborough, for it was somewhere in its neighbourhood that his second boy, Oliver, was killed. "I thought he looked sad and wearied," said a contemporary who met him just before the battle of Marston Moor, "for he had had a sad loss--young Oliver had got killed to death not long before, I heard; it was near Knaresborough."

To see the Dropping Well we must cross the river by bridge or ferry, and walk along a pretty path under the beeches. Here, as everywhere in Knaresborough, disillusion dogs our steps. This beautiful curiosity of nature, this great overhanging rock, worn smooth by the perpetual dripping of the water, framed in moss and ferns, has been made into a "side-show," with a railing, an entrance fee, and a row of bowler hats, stuffed parrots, and other ornaments in process of petrifaction. On the other side of the river is St. Robert's Chapel. Here, too, the world is too much with us.

Leland, that stout traveller, who "was totally enflammid with a love to see thoroughly al those partes of this opulente and ample reaulme ... and notid yn so doing a hole worlde of thinges very memorable," tells us how Robert Flower, the son of a man "that had beene 2 tymes mair of York," came to these rocks by the river Nidd "desiring a solitarie life as an hermite." He made himself this chapel, "hewen owte of the mayne stone"; and he seems to have had some persuasive power of goodness or wisdom that turned his enemies into friends. "King John was ons of an il-wille to this Robert Flour," yet ended by benefiting him and his, an unusual developement in the case of King John; and de Stutteville, who lived up at the castle, had actually set out to raid the hermitage, suspecting it to harbour thieves, when he too, persuaded by a vision or otherwise, suddenly became the hermit's friend. This tiny sanctuary, eight or nine feet long, with its altar and groined roof and recesses for relics, all wrought in the solid rock, would be a place to stimulate the imagination if it were not that the surroundings and the guide are such as would cause the strongest imagination to wilt.

Some say that the black slab of marble which is now a memorial to Sir Henry Slingsby in the parish church once formed the altar-top in St. Robert's Chapel; others say it came from the Priory, and was raised there in honour of the saint who "forsook his fair lands" and caused the Priory's foundation. The slab lies in the Slingsby chapel, and records that Sir Henry was executed "by order of the tyrant Cromwell." Carlyle tells us that this Slingsby, "a very constant Royalist all along," was condemned for plotting the betrayal of Hull to the Royalists.

The road from Knaresborough to Ripon follows the valley of the Nidd as far as Ripley. This village has the air of being a feudal survival. Its cottages with their neatness and their flowers, its _Hôtel de Ville_, and even the "treated" surface of its excellent road, all bear the stamp of a close connection with the castle whose park gates are at the corner. In the sixteenth century the village of Ripley was under the eye of a very masterful lady. It was to this castle that Oliver Cromwell, tired from fighting on Marston Moor, came in search of rest. Rest, however, was denied him. His hostess, whose husband was away, had no sympathy with fatigue that came from resisting the King's Majesty, and so poor Oliver--"sad and wearied," as we know, even before the battle--spent the night on a chair in the hall, while Lady Ingilby, seated opposite to him with a couple of pistols in her hands, kept her relentless eye upon him till the morning. When he rode away she told him it was fortunate for him that he had been so tractable. I think this fierce lady must have been agreeable to Oliver's grim humour.

The approach to Ripon is pretty, by a road shaded with trees. Above the town rises the cathedral, massive and stately if not superlatively beautiful. Though it is not one of our largest cathedrals, its history is immense.

Even St. Wilfrid's seventh-century church was not the first that stood here, for before his remote day Eata had founded a monastery that was hardly built before the Danes burnt it. Indeed, the monastery was destroyed so often--by Danes, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Scots in turn--that every style of architecture, from Saxon to Perpendicular, is represented in the various restorations. There are even, I believe, in the crypt and chapter-house, fragments of Wilfrid's own church, among them being the curious slit called Wilfrid's Needle, which has been "mighty famous," as Camden said, for a great many centuries. The saint himself was mighty famous in his day, as he well deserved to be. Even still we know a good deal about him, through Bede and others: how, when he was a poor and ignorant boy of fourteen, "not enduring the frowardness of his stepmother, he went to seek his fortune," and was brought to the notice of Queen Eanfled, "whom for his wit and beauty he was not unfit to serve"; and how she sent him to Lindisfarne, where, "being of an acute understanding, he in a very short time learnt the psalms and some books"; and how he refused a wife in France; and was presented by King Alfred of Deira with a monastery at Rhypum, here on this very hill; and was consecrated at Compiègne in a golden chair carried by singing bishops; and how he converted the people of Bosham by teaching them to fish with eel-nets, so that "they began more readily at his preaching to hope for heavenly goods"; and how he won the day in the great controversy at Whitby, and finally died as an archbishop and was buried at the south end of the altar here at Ripon. He was a very human saint, and much beloved. His church was destroyed by Edred, but his monastery grew in power. The most beautiful part of the present building is the Early English west front, which dates from the reign of Henry III.

Ripon is altogether charming, and still does homage very prettily to its patron, King Alfred, who made it a royal borough. He it was who ordained that every night a horn should be blown by the wakeman, and that any one who was robbed between the blowing of the horn and the hour of sunrise should be repaid by the townsfolk. From his day to ours each night at nine o'clock the men of Ripon have heard the horn--three long, penetrating blasts before the town hall and three before the wakeman's house. Several centuries ago the wakeman became the mayor, and now he blows the horn by deputy. "Except ye Lord keep ye Cittie," are the words on the town hall, "ye wakeman waketh in vain"; and not far away, at one corner of the market-square, is a pretty old gabled house bearing this legend: "1604. In thys house lived a long time Hugh Ripley, ye last Wakeman and first Mayore of Rippon."

Yet it is not these links with the beginnings of our history, with Wilfrid the Saxon saint and Alfred the Saxon king, that draw so many people to Ripon. Ripon has a greater attraction than these. Only a few miles away is Fountains Abbey.

When approaching Fountains the motorist may feel very thankful that a few additional miles on the road are of little importance to him. By choosing the longer way, through the village of Studley Royal, he will certainly save himself a considerable walk and may possibly secure the unspeakable blessing of solitude. The walk through the park from the main entrance is, I know, regarded as one of the chief beauties of the place, with its Temple of Fame, and its Surprise View, and its little cascades; but except for the view of the Abbey, which is lovely, these artificial prettinesses are more appreciated by those who come forth on "an expedition" than by those who really wish to seize and keep something of the spirit of the place. The distant abbey seen from the east is part of a beautiful landscape, a satisfaction to the eye, a picturesque incident in the long glade; but those who approach it from the west come upon it suddenly in all its vastness, close at hand, and realise, probably for the first time, something of the splendour of the old monasteries.

Here--in this long line of doorways, in this enormous church which the choir of birds still fills with sacred music, this cloister-garth and chapter-house with the rich archways, these stairs and domestic buildings, wall beyond wall and room beyond room--here truly was a power to make a monarch jealous! It is no wonder that Yorkshire, crowded as it was with monasteries, thought a strength like theirs might pit itself against the strength of the king, and rose in protest against the Dissolution; it is no wonder that the king's agents could not find enough chains in the country to hang the prisoners in. If this vast skeleton is so magnificent, of what sort was the actual life! Close your eyes for a moment to it all, and think of the beginnings of it.

Think of those thirteen monks, Prior Richard and his brethren from St. Mary's at York, hungering for a more perfect fulfilment of their vows, who came here long ago, when this green sward was "overgrown with wood and brambles, more proper for a retreat of wild beasts than for the human species." Like wild beasts they lived, with no shelter but the trees and no food but herbs and leaves. They worked with their hands by day, and kept their vigils by night, "but of sadness or of murmuring there was not one sound," says the monk who wrote their story, "but every man blessed God with gladness." They lived under the thatched yews till they had raised a roof for themselves, but even when that was accomplished they were often on the point of starvation. One day when all the food they had was two loaves and a half, a beggar asked for bread. "One loaf for the beggar," was Abbot Richard's decree, "and one and a half for the builders. For ourselves God will provide." The cartload of bread which arrived immediately afterwards as a gift from a pious knight was the cause of much thankfulness among the monks, but of little surprise.

As the years passed, lands and legacies made the monastery rich. And so at last this splendid fabric rose--a triumph of the spirit over circumstances, a monument to those long-buried monks whose toils and sufferings are built into the mighty nave, though surely they never dreamed of such power and wealth as we are forced to dream of as we stand amid this mass of broken walls, now green with moss and weeds, but once the heart of a huge organism. It is a monument, too, to many who came after the brave thirteen: to Abbot Huby, who built the tower and is said to be buried near it; to John of Kent, who gave us the bewildering beauty of the Chapel of the Nine Altars, one of the most exquisite things ever wrought in stone: so spiritual, so aspiring, that it seems to be a prayer made visible, or even--with its slender arrowy columns rising into the air till, like fountains, they break into curves--to be the embodiment of the abbey motto: _Benedicite Fontes Domino_.

And while we are remembering those who laboured for Fountains, do not let us forget the man who died for it at Tyburn--William Thirsk. This abbot was rash enough to resist the messengers of Privy Seal, and was accused by them of many things. He had, they wrote, "gretly dilapidate his howse" by theft and sacrilege, had sold the plate and jewels of the abbey, and had not even secured a proper price for them. To those who were themselves bent upon theft and sacrilege on a large scale this last offence seemed worst of all. He had actually, they declared contemptuously, been persuaded by a jeweller that a valuable ruby was a mere garnet; "for the trewith ys he is a varra fole and a miserable ideote." He joined in that desperate protest the Pilgrimage of Grace, and so was hanged.

Fortunately for posterity as well as for himself, Thirsk's successor, Brodelay, who was a creature of Thomas Cromwell and chosen with a view to future events, was not a "varra fole," and yielded meekly when his abbey was demanded of him, saving it from the fate of Jervaulx. As it is, too much of it is gone--much that might have been preserved. The cloisters have vanished though the garth is there, with the long flight of steps and the great stone basin in the grass and the yew-tree beside it; and gone, too, is the magnificent infirmary, deliberately destroyed in the days of James I. by the vandal who owned it and was in want of some building material.

One thing, however, still stands, which is, perhaps, the last relic of the monks of Fountains that we should expect to find, and is certainly the most touching relic possible--actually linking us with those far-off days when the patient thirteen were left here in the wilderness by Archbishop Thurstan to keep their vow of poverty with such terrible literalness. Over there, beside the wall, is one of the yew-trees whose boughs, covered with thatch, formed the first monastery of Fountains.

Close to the western entrance is Fountains Hall. Surely we must forgive that wicked man who pulled down the infirmary, since the place he built with the stones is this lovely Jacobean house, a thing as beautiful in its own domestic way as time-worn stone and bays and mullions can make it. A balustrade, a sundial, an old-fashioned garden and ancient yew-hedge make the picture and our pleasure complete.