Part 8
The castle of Sheriff Hutton is more impressive at a distance than close at hand. It is visible miles away across the flat country, and the jagged outlines of its cluster of towers stand up so imposingly against the sky that one is led to expect something rather vast and effective. But these gaunt remnants are all there is to see. They stand in a farmyard and are surrounded with haystacks. Once upon a time this castle was fine enough. It had eight or nine great towers, "and the stately staire up to the haul" was very magnificent, and so was "the haul it self, and al the residew of the house." It owed its splendour to the splendid Nevilles, to the great Warwick among others, who seems always to have lived in a state of kingly magnificence, as befitted one who made kings. When he died it passed, with his other castles, to his son-in-law Richard III., who used it as a prison for such claimants of the throne as he did not trouble to murder. There was humour in this plan of sending the two young cousins to keep each other company--Edward IV.'s daughter, Elizabeth of York, and the youthful Warwick, son of that Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a butt of Malmsey. They were not here very long, for hardly had their Uncle Richard's ill-gotten crown fallen under the hawthorn on Bosworth Field, before the new king's emissary was riding in all haste to Sheriff Hutton. There was a crowd that day about this gate that still bears the arms of the Nevilles and of England, for from all the country round the people gathered to do honour to their future queen; and as she was led out from her prison to share Henry's throne, the gentry of the neighbourhood, an eager bodyguard, pressed forward to escort her to London. Poor cousin Warwick went to London too, with a bodyguard of a sterner sort; for since his claims could not, like Elizabeth's, be merged in those of the new king, he was destined for the Tower and the block.
There is no record, apparently, of how this stately castle was transformed in the course of one century from a "Princely Logginges" to a mere shell. The usual death sentence of castles, "dismantled by order of the Parliament," was never pronounced in this case, for the mischief was done before Charles I. was king. In Henry VIII.'s reign this was for a time the home of that Duke of Norfolk who was the uncle of two queens, and lived to see them both upon the scaffold. He was a witness at Anne Boleyn's wedding and a judge at her trial, and was himself only saved from the block by Henry's death. His son Surrey, the sweet singer, has walked here too, where now the hay is stacked.
Richard III. was here at least once, in the year before his death. He and his sad wife--sad all her life, but now heart-broken--came here to bury their little son. At the end of the sloping village street is the old church where they laid him; and there we may still see, not the place of his burial, for that is unknown, but the little alabaster figure that once lay upon his tomb. It has the air of being a good portrait. The features are still faintly visible; the pathetic down-drawn mouth suggests that Anne Neville's son was not much happier than herself. Circling the boyish head is a heavy crown, the only crown it ever wore. The reason that the Prince of Wales was buried here does not appear. Some suggest that his mother, who was with Richard at Nottingham, could not bear to return to Middleham, and so met the funeral procession here; but there is at least one historian[6] who describes her despair when she saw her dead son in his own home. Elizabeth of York was probably at Sheriff Hutton when her little cousin Edward was brought here to his grave. She must have remembered another Edward, nearer and dearer to her, whose grave, not yet discovered, had been so lately made at the foot of the dark staircase in the Tower of London.
This ancient church has some fine brasses in it. One of them is hidden beneath a trap-door in the floor; another bears the figures of two babies in swaddling clothes. The church's patron saint is St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, and the discoverer, through a vision, of the Holy Cross. The historians give us a good deal of choice in the matter of this lady's origin. Some declare that she was the daughter of a British king, a woman of surprising beauty and intelligence; but it seems to be more likely that her father was an innkeeper.
Sheriff Hutton is only about ten miles away from York, but if possible we should add a few miles to the distance by making a _détour_ to Kirkham Priory. All that there is to be seen there is comprised in one picture, so to speak, a picture of an old gateway and the base of a cross; but it is a picture that one remembers.
To reach it we pass through country that is sometimes moderately pretty, sometimes dull. There is a little church at Foston that is pleasant to the eye, with a red-tiled roof, and a miniature bell-tower, and a pathway where the yew-trees nearly meet. But we are now on the borderland between the beautiful part of Yorkshire and the uninteresting south-eastern plain. After we leave Kirkham we shall see little more of the beauties of nature. We shall see some beautiful architecture, and various things that are more appealing to the imagination than to the eye. And here, too, as is so often the case where the scenery is tame, the roads are sufficient in themselves for the pleasure of the day's journey.
About a mile beyond Foston we turn on to the high-road from Scarborough to York; but after a few moments leave it again for a road on the right, by which we slowly descend into the valley of the Derwent. The hillside is thickly wooded, and as we pass beyond the overarching trees we see Kirkham lying below us: the little village, and the wooded hill beyond it, and the beautiful gateway that is so entirely unlike all others, and, fringed with rushes, the wide, smooth river--the Derwent, which we last saw at Ayton, shadowed by the birches of the Forge Valley and overlooked by the ruins of Margaret Bromflete's castle.
This was the first of the monasteries founded by Walter of Espec. In front of the gateway is the base of an old cross, of which the top step is carved with an almost illegible design. Local tradition, in its courageous way, declares that there is incorporated with these steps a fragment of the "little stone cross" that caused the death of Walter of Espec's son. The truth of this tale seems to depend a good deal on whether Walter ever had a son.
It is this gateway that we have come to see. The fragment of wall in which it is framed was probably built in the twelfth century, but all this wealth of ornament and heraldry belongs to a much later date. The quiet valley and the stream would suggest to one that this, like Walter's Rievaulx, was a Cistercian house; but there was never a Cistercian community that would have countenanced all this display of tracery and crockets and statuary, and all these worldly coats of arms. They were Augustinian Canons who made their gate so fine, and carved upon it these ten shields of men with sounding names--Clare and Vaux, Scrope, Ros, Plantagenet--and set these saints in their niches, and above them the seal of the priory; and who passed to their meals in the refectory under all the varied mouldings of this magnificent Norman door south of the cloister-garth; and who chanted their Credo with their eyes fixed on that lovely lancet window, once part of the east-end of their church.
And now we are at last bound for York. We cross the Derwent and climb the hill again to the high-road, and there before us, very far away, lies our goal. Faintly shining, York Minster shows like a pale opal hanging above the horizon.
The very thought of York and all that it stands for makes the heart beat faster. Let us open the throttle then, and speed to it as quickly as we may; for the road lies broad and level between the fields, and nearly as straight as an arrow's path, and never, if we love our engine and our England as we should, shall we forget this flight of ours to the city of all our kings.
YORK AND THE SOUTH
SUMMARY OF TOUR IN THE SOUTH
DISTANCES.
York Pontefract 24 miles Beverley, _viâ_ Selby 45 " Hull 9 " -- Total 78 miles
ROADS.
Usually good and level.
IV
YORK AND THE SOUTH
No man knows the spell of York till he has approached it by road in the evening. Of all the fresh experiences that the motor-car has brought to us there are few from which the imagination gains so much as from this way of entering old and beautiful towns. We have too long accepted the roof of a railway station as our first view of such places. It is not an inspiring view. But to see York Minster from afar, shining under the evening sky and lifted high above the city; to watch it growing larger and larger, rising higher and higher, increasing in beauty every moment, until at last one drives slowly into its huge shadow; to pass under one of the great gates that have survived so many centuries, so many wars, so many pageants, that have welcomed so many kings, and dripped with the blood of so many warriors; to see the ancient streets for the first time idealised by the dusk of twilight, will help us, if anything will, to recall and realise something of what York has been during the eighteen hundred years of her history.
The past is very insistent here. Here are the walls, encircling the whole city, that were built by Edward I. and repaired after the Civil War. We may drive round them, and pass in and out of the four gates that were once so hard to enter: Monk Bar, by which we come in from Kirkham under the arms of England and France quartered together; and Bootham Bar on the Newcastle Road; and Micklegate Bar on the Tadcaster Road; and Walmgate Bar, where the restored barbican reminds us that it was undermined during the long siege of the Civil War. All these bars are turreted and ornamented with painted shields and statues or helmets of stone; three of them still have their portcullises; three still bear the arms of France.
Walmgate, or Watling Gate, Bar is the most picturesque of them on the inner side, for it carries on its stone pillars an Elizabethan house of timber and plaster. But by far the richest in memories is Micklegate Bar. Some of these memories are of a very ghastly kind, for it was here that the heads of "traitors" were set up. It was here that Harry Hotspur's head looked down upon his doubly treacherous old father, the Duke of Northumberland, as that time-server rode out through the gate in perfect friendliness with Henry IV., and found it advisable, no doubt, to ignore the thing that stared above the parapet. Here, in Henry V.'s reign, the head of Lord Scrope of Masham was set up because he favoured the House of York; and here, half a century later, was the head of the Duke of York himself, crowned with paper--to be replaced, almost before Margaret of Anjou had finished laughing at it, by the head of the man who put it here--Clifford the Butcher. The hideous series closed with the followers of Prince Charlie in the Forty-five.
Meantime there were other sights to be seen at Micklegate Bar. Richard III., fresh from one coronation and eager for another, was received here "with great pomp and triumph" by the citizens and the clergy "in their richest copes," and passed through this archway with his stolen crown upon his head, followed by his luckless queen and the little boy who was so soon to die. His successor's daughter, Margaret Tudor, entered York very gaily by this gate with five hundred lords and ladies, on her way to her unhappy marriage with James IV. of Scotland. James I. was on his way to Scotland, too, when he rode to Micklegate Bar from Tadcaster, with the sheriffs of York bearing their white rods before him. He waited here while the Mayor, kneeling in the road, presented him with a sword and the city keys, and a cup and a purse, "and made a worthy speech at the delivery of each particular." Still braver was the scene when Charles I. came in, with that strange army that was no army; the army that was commanded by an "amateur general" and was intended to overawe the Scots by pomp. "The progress was more illustrious than the march, and the soldiers were the least part of the army," says Clarendon. This sombre bar was gay enough that day. So splendid a procession has seldom been seen as that which filed through its dark shadow then, all glittering and glowing, while the trainbands of the city, magnificent in scarlet and silver and feathered caps, greeted Charles with a volley, and the civic authorities on their knees greeted him with flattery. It was not many years before another sort of scene was enacted on this spot: when the army of Fairfax--commanded by no amateur--was drawn up in a double line that stretched away from this gate for a mile, and the two Royalist generals who had defended the city so finely, Glenham and Slingsby, marched out between the two lines with the remnant of the garrison, with all the honours of war. That was the most stirring sight, I expect, that Micklegate Bar has seen.
Fairfax and the other victorious generals marched to the Minster and "sang a psalm." What that psalm must have meant to Fairfax we can hardly realise. The siege had lasted for thirteen weeks; more than four thousand of his men had died in the course of it; twenty-two times they had assaulted the walls. He was himself a Yorkshireman, and like all Yorkshiremen, loved and honoured the city that has held so proud a place in English history, and the Minster that is the city's crown. No wonder he marched straight from the gate to the Minster and sang a psalm! What York Minster meant to Fairfax it must in a lesser degree mean to every Englishman. It combines superlative interest with superlative beauty. We may come to it primed with its history--the history that begins with the Roman temple whose foundations are hidden beneath it, the history that includes so many great names; we may know that Paulinus of the seventh century--the tall, majestic man with the hawk-face whom Bede has described for us--built the first church here of wood, and was the first Archbishop of York; that three other churches stood here and were destroyed before the present building was begun in the thirteenth century and slowly rose to its perfection; but when we see it we can remember nothing but its beauty. It completely dominates York. It is impossible to forget its presence for a moment, whether it be dim and blurred in the dawn or flushed with the light of sunset.
Nearly every one, I suppose, has seen it. Nearly every one has felt, on passing through the entrance in the south transept, that breathless sensation of awe that is almost fear, of reverence that is almost worship. The first sight of those immense arches, so absolutely simple, so indescribably majestic, with the lancets of the Five Sisters behind them, is overwhelming. It is only gradually that memory returns, and the great nave slowly fills with the processions of the past, with the weddings and funerals and coronation pageants that have swept by, century after century, to choir or chapter-house. Young Edward III. and Philippa of Hainault were a comely pair when they were married here in the presence of the Parliament and Council, surrounded by the nobles of England and Scotland. Not very many years later their little son was carried to his grave in the north aisle of the choir. Much was spent in alms and masses, many pounds of wax were burnt, many widows watched round the little coffin before William of Hatfield was laid in this tomb where we see his effigy, a slender, boyish figure lying very straightly under the high canopy. In the next century a sinister scene took place here: Richard Crookback mourning for his brother, coming here to hear a requiem sung, with his head full of plots against the dead man's little sons. Very soon he was here again, entering those splendid doors with the iron scrollwork, which lead into the chapter-house where he was crowned for the second time--the chapter-house that Pius II. described as "a fine lightsome chapel, with shining walls and small, thin-waisted pillars quite round." "As the rose is the flower of flowers," said the monks, "so is this the house of houses."
There are not very many notable tombs here, though there is much illustrious dust. Here was buried the head of King Edwin of Northumbria, who so "often sat alone by himself for a long time, silent as to his tongue, but deliberating in his heart" whether he should become a Christian. This Minster is in a sense the fruit of his deliberations. There is no monument to him, nor to Earl Tostig of the violent temper, whose body was carried here from Stamford Bridge; but the founder of the present building lies in his robes under a canopy in the south transept. We may see, too, in the Lady Chapel, the marble tomb of Archbishop Scrope, the builder of Bolton Castle, who preached a sermon in this Minster inciting the people to take up arms, and lost his head in consequence. And near the altar of the same chapel is a little black kneeling figure that deserves attention. It is a monument to Frances Matthew, the wife of Tobie Matthew, Archbishop of York, and the daughter of William Barlow, Bishop of Chichester. "She had four sisters married to four bishops.... So that a bishop was her father, an archbishop her father-in-law, she had four bishops her brethren, and an archbishop her husband." Unless I am much mistaken she had also an abbess for her mother, which was the strangest thing of all. There was a William Barlow, at one time Bishop of St. David's, who is said to have married an abbess as soon as the Reformation made it possible, and had five daughters married to five bishops. Frances Matthew must surely have been one of these. Tradition says that Bishop Barlow, who had many unpleasant traits, stripped the lead from the Palace of St. David's and dowered his daughters with it; but Frances must have been a baby, if indeed she was born, when her father was guilty of this thievish vandalism. She herself is described as being above her sex, and even above the times--but indeed all the women who were buried in ages gone by seem to have been superior to all the rest. She gave her husband's library to the Minster.
Close to her mural monument is the largest window in England. There is no building, I believe, that has so much ancient and beautiful glass as this, and it is a miracle to be thankful for that it was not destroyed in the last century, when the poor maniac set fire to the Minster because he disliked the buzzing of the organ. The soft-toned window of the Five Sisters is the loveliest of all.
But all these are modern things. Down in the crypt we shall find ourselves in touch with the century of Paulinus and St. Chad and St. Wilfrid, the three earliest Archbishops of York; for here is the herringbone work of the first stone church, and here, they say, are the pillars of the building that succeeded it and was destroyed by the Danes. This is the spot on which the Roman temple stood, and the wooden church where King Edwin was baptized, and the altar on which Ulphus the Saxon laid his horn. This Ulphus was a prince in Deira, whose sons were of a quarrelsome temper, and were likely, he thought, to fall out over the division of his property after his death. So "he presently took this course to make them equal." He carried his favourite drinking-horn, his horn of ivory and gold, to York, and filling it there he knelt before the altar of the Minster and drank the wine in token that he endowed the church with all his lands for ever. That this brought peace to his family I rather doubt; but the lands of Ulphus are to this day in the possession of York Minster, and the horn of Ulphus is to this day within its walls. If we go through this door in the south aisle of the choir we may see it--an elephant's tusk, rich tawny in colour, finely carved. It disappeared mysteriously at the time of the Civil War, but somehow fell into the hands of Fairfax, whose son returned it to the Minster. How it came to Fairfax is not recorded; but is it not possible that he may have quietly taken possession of it, knowing how unsafe it was in the hands of the Puritans, and have told his son to give it back in less troubled times? Or was it perhaps one of those relics which would have "irrecoverably perished in the late wars" if Fairfax had not paid "that industrious antiquary, Mr. Dodsworth," to collect them? We know that Fairfax had "a peculiar respect" for antiquities, and that it was owing to his unceasing care that the Minster suffered so little in the war.
It is not in a few days that York can be seen. Only those really know the place who live within the enchanted walls; we should linger here as long as possible, and return again and again. Yet those whose time is limited will find that even a couple of nights spent at the justly famous Station Hotel will enable them to see more than the Minster without suffering from that sense of hurry that spoils pleasure.
York has not hurried. In the Museum Gardens, themselves a wonderful museum, we may realise how many centuries she has taken to become what she is. Here is a tower that was raised by the Romans. The date of it is uncertain, but Mr. Wellbeloved tells us it was probably built when the Conquering Legion came to Eboracum. This, says Gibbon, was at the beginning of the second century; so this tower of many angles takes us back to the time of Hadrian, to days before the Emperor Severus died here in the palace that has altogether vanished, bidding his sons let all their conduct tend to each other's good; days long before the death of Constantius and the accession of Constantine the Great. It is not true that Constantine was born in York, but it was here that he went through his little performance of reluctant modesty when the soldiers made him Emperor--weeping and spurring his horse while they pursued him with the imperial robes.
In the same garden are the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey. The Benedictine monks who founded this community came from Whitby, and were perhaps the builders of the Norman apse we saw at Lastingham, where they paused for a time on their way to York. It is easy to see that this remnant of a most beautiful church was not of their raising: there is nothing Norman here, nothing but the purest Gothic work. It was while the earlier eleventh-century church was still standing that a strange scene took place here; when the Archbishop of York with his retinue clamoured long upon the abbey gates in vain, while the abbot refused to open to him; then forced his way at last into the abbey and pronounced an interdict--here where the grass grows under our feet--against the abbot and his monks. The cause of all this commotion was that little band of brethren who built the Abbey of Fountains with so much toil and endurance. They were at that time monks of St. Mary's, and had appealed to Archbishop Thurstan to reform their house. Abbot Geoffrey, however, preferred to remain unreformed; and so the fiery prelate swept off with the zealous thirteen and set them down in the wilderness beside the Skell to live as austerely as they would. The Abbey of St. Mary, in spite of the interdict, grew very great as well as beautiful.