Chapter 4

We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in the mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable monuments which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel and its adjacent railway station. All underground York is doubtless fuller of Home than even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome, but Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended in New York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of the British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis before Constantine was elected emperor there.

I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home and is not merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is very well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long thoughts, and Milan is mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa, or Marseilles, or Paris, or those romantic German towns where the legends, if not the facts, abound; but, after all, for my pleasure in the past, I could not choose any place before York. You need not be so very definite in your knowledge. The event of Constantine’s presence and election is so spacious as to leave no room for particulars in the imagination; and you are so rich in it that you will even reject them from your thoughts, as you sit in the close-cropped flowery lawn of your hotel garden (try to imagine a railroad hotel garden in _New_ York!) on the sunniest of the afternoons before you are turned out for Doncaster Week, and, while you watch a little adventurous American boy climbing over a pile of rock-work, realize the most august, the most important fact in the story of the race as native to the very air you are breathing! Where you sit you are in full view of the Minster, which is to say in view of something like the towers and battlements of the celestial city. Or if you wake very early on a morning still nearer the fatal Doncaster Week of your impending banishment, and look out of your lofty windows at the sunrise reddening the level bars of cloud behind the Minster, you shall find it bulked up against the pearl-gray masses of the sunny mist which hangs in all the intervening trees, and solidifies them in unbroken masses of foliage. All round your hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such is the force of the English genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of trains; the expresses whir in and out of the station with not more noise than humming-birds; and amid this peace the past has some chance with modernity. The Britons dwell, unmolested by our latter-day clamor, in their wattled huts and dugouts; the Romans come and make them slaves and then Christians, and after three or four hundred years send word from the Tiber to the Ouse that they can stay no longer, and so leave them naked to their enemies, the Picts and Scots and Saxons and Angles; and in due course come the ravaging and burning Danes; and in due course still, the murdering and plundering and scorning Normans. But all so quietly, like the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of railway celerity in the foreshortened retrospect; and after the Normans have crushed themselves down into the mass of the vanquished, and formed the English out of the blend, there follow the many wars of the successions, of the Roses, of the Stuarts, with all the intermediate insurrections and rebellions. In the splendid Histories of Shakespeare, which are full of York, the imagination visits and revisits the place, and you are entreated by mouth of one of his princely personages,

“I pray you let us satisfy our eyes With the memorials and things of fame, That do renown this city,”

where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors abide still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts.

VI

Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out of our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to be increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the sweet regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They would have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but, when we showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had no rooms at any price. From house to house, then, we went, at first vaingloriously, in the spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into any side street, wherever the legend of Apartments showed itself in a transom. At last, the second day, after being denied at seven successive houses, we found quite the refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means very much more than the ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms looked on a pretty grassy garden space behind, where there was sun when there was sun, and in front on the fine old brick dwellings of a most personable street, with a sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end of it was a famous city gate--Bootham Bar, namely--with a practicable portcullis, which we verified at an early moment by going up into “the chamber over the gate,” where it was once worked, and whence its lower beam, set thick with savage spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there was a sign in the wall saying that guards were to be had there to guide travellers through the Forest of Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them from the wolves. Now woods and wolves and guards are all gone, and Bootham Bar is never closed.

The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to give them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and top-hats, which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of England. For a Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair, and it is very clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday best by clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There was no parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that without trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for under the parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys, with untidy goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a moat outside the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it with their gardens full of bright flowers. At one point there were far-spreading sheep and cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and at another the old Norman castle which cruel Conqueror William built to hold the city, and which has suffered change, not unpicturesque, into prisons for unluckier criminals, and the Assize Courts for their condemnation. From time to time the wall left off, and then we got down, perforce, and walked to the next piece of it. In these pieces we made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate Bar, which has a barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican should have commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for the first time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now. Otherwise, I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being more like those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to Bootham Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican, and feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.

There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores, newspaper stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and there was one united florist’s and fruiterer’s which I particularly liked because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout man, of a vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our speech is mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and wandering aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my breakfast one of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in England, and which put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always fell into a little talk over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence, as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he said one day, “Ah, the Americans are clever people.” Then he added, “I hope you won’t mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are rather harder than our English ladies, sir.”

“Yes,” I eagerly assented. “How do you mean? Sharper? Keener?”

“Well, not just that, sir.”

“More practical? More business-like?” I pursued.

“Well, I shouldn’t like to say that, sir. But--they seem rather harder, sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York, sir. Rather harder, sir.”

We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty, and degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their advantage with the summer hardness of our women.

VII

It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to lose one’s self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of streets except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness, if it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they captured it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the Angles kept it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its streets and call them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to be called bars, or else the stranger might take them for streets. If he asked another wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get to the point he aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always amuse himself in them; they would take a friendly interest in him, and show him the old houses and churches which the American stranger prefers. They abound in the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just as they do in the poorer sorts of people, but in their simpler courts and squares and expanses they have often dignified mansions of that Georgian architecture which seems the last word in its way, and which is known here in our older edifices as there in their newer. Some of them are said to have “richly carved ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms, chimneypieces with paintings framed in the over-mantel, dentilled cornices, and pedimented doors,” and I could well believe it, as I passed them with an envious heart. There were gardens behind these mansions which hung their trees over the spiked coping of their high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know not what damp social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.

At times I distinctly wished to know something of the life of York, but I was not in the way of it. The nearest to an acquaintance I had there, besides my critical fruiterer, was the actor whose name I recognized on his bills as that of a brave youth who had once dramatized a novel of mine, and all too briefly played the piece, and who was now to come to York for a week of Shakespeare. Perhaps I could not forgive him the recrudescence; at any rate, I did not try to see him, and there was no other social chance for me, except as I could buy in for a few glimpses at the tidy confectioners’, where persons of civil condition resorted for afternoon tea. Even to these one could not speak, and I could only do my best in a little mercenary conversation with the bookseller about York histories. The bookstores were not on our scale, and generally the shops in York were not of the modern department type, but were perhaps the pleasanter for that reason.

In my earlier wanderings I made the acquaintance of a most agreeable market-place, stretching the length of two squares, which on a Saturday afternoon I found filled with every manner of bank and booth and canopied counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly with traffic in everything one could eat, drink, wear, or read; there seemed as many book-stalls as fruit-stalls. What I noted equally with the prettiness of the abounding flowers was the mild kindness of the market-people’s manners and their extreme anxiety to state exactly the quality of the things they had for sale. They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do not say they really were so. My own transactions were confined to the purchase of some golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader rather to buy greengages; the other plums practised the deception in their looks which their venders abhorred.

VIII

I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long ranks and lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one end of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place for those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact from a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets for the Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me for this horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a certain spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading a rising against Henry IV.; or some such execution.

What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the storyless New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen triumphing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Roses, where the Red was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy to have Northumberland, when he bade him come to York, pass through the gateway on which the head of his son, Hotspur Harry, was festering. No wonder the earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully meant to imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him. But there seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the beginning, in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting. After the citizens drove out Conqueror William’s garrison, and Earl Waltheof provided against the Normans’ return by standing at the castle gate and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came forth, William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far as Durham. His son William gave it a church, and that “worthy peer,” King Stephen, a hospital. In his time the archbishop and barons of York beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to Henry II. at York for his kingdom. Henry III. married his sister at York to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king’s successor. Edward I. and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of St. William’s bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his defeat at Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king’s varied occasions of fighting and feasting. Weak Henry VI. and his wilful Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father’s head on Micklegate Bar. Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout and death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII. wedded Elizabeth, the “White Rose of York,” and afterward visited her city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her uncouth son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in London. His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched many for the king’s evil; later, he was there again, but could not cure the sort of king’s evil which raged past all magic in the defeat of his followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell. The city yielded to the Puritans, whose temperament had already rather characterized it. James II., as Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; “proud Cumberland,” returning from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the city and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts; perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting to play the horses. The reigning family has paid divers visits to the ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was heard of. The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if it is to fulfil itself and increase York’s seventy-two thousand beyond London’s six million.

IX

I should be at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York less than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however, rather a clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of Hadrian’s stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election of Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass of the place, but leave a roominess in which the fancy may more commodiously orb about. I was on terms of more neighborly intimacy with the poor Punic emperor than with any one else in York, doubtless because, when he fell sick, he visited the temple of Bellona near Bootham Bar, and paid his devotions unmolested, let us hope, by any prevision of the misbehavior of his son Caracalla (whose baths I had long ago visited at Rome) in killing his other son Geta. Everywhere I could be an early Christian, in company with Constantine, in whom the instinct of political Christianity must have begun to stir as soon as he was chosen emperor. But I dare say I heard the muted tramp of the Sixth Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other martial sounds because I stayed as long as Doncaster Week would let me in the railway hotel, which so many of their bones made room for when the foundations of it were laid, with those of the adherent station. Their bones seem to have been left there, after the disturbance, but their sepulchres were respectfully transferred to the museum of the Philosophical Society, in the grounds where the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey rise like fragments of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the moonlight and the nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the noonday and the babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading novels.

The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities, which is richer in Roman remains than any that one sees outside of Italy. There are floors of mosaic, large and perfect, taken from the villas which people are always digging up in the neighborhood of York, and, from the graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of lead and stone for civilians, and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the Sixth Legion; the slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties and left to indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the universal incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest Christians at York; certainly the monuments are pagan, as the inmates of the tombs must have been. Some of the monuments bear inscriptions from loving wives and husbands to the partners they have lost, and some of the stone coffins are those of children. It is all infinitely touching, and after two thousand years the heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid their little ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep. Faith changes, but constant death remains the same, and life is not very different in any age, when it comes to the end. The Roman exiles who had come so far to hold my British ancestors in subjection to their alien rule seemed essentially not only of the same make as me, but the same civilization. Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods expressed a human piety of like anxiety and helplessness with ours, and called to a like irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal state--jars and vases and simple household utensils--fill the shelves of the museum; but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past is in that mass of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special urn and uncovered for your supreme emotion. It is equally conjectured to be the hair of a Roman lady or of a British princess, but is of a young girl certainly, dressed twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which it was found, and still faintly lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day, and kept in form by pins of jet. One thinks of the little, slender hands that used to put them there, and of the eyes that confronted themselves in the silver mirror under the warm shadow that the red-gold mass cast upon the white forehead. This sanctuary of the past was the most interesting place in that most interesting city of York, and the day of our first visit a princess of New York sat reading a book in the midst of it, waiting for the rain to be over, which was waiting for her to come out and then begin again. We knew her from having seen her at the station in relation to some trunks bearing her initials and those of her native city; and she could be about the age of the York princess or young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn hard by.

X

There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend name I have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy Trinity Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the Minster. We came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September afternoons, after we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly overhanging the canal calm of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for its York histories in stained glass. The custodian had surprised us and the gentlemen of the committee by taking us into the room where they were investigating the claims of the registered voters to the suffrage; and so, much entertained and instructed, we issued forth, and, passing by the church in which Guy Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually, we came quite unexpectedly upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and not another is indeed its name.

It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own, with a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the immemorial homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air of not knowing that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with a square, high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble height from the turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice girl sketching its doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and funerals may enter. It is open once a year for service, and when the tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful stained glass of its eastward window. The oaken pews are square and high-shouldered, like the low church tower; and, without, the soft yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the window traceries. The church did not look as if it felt itself a thousand years old, and perhaps it is not; but I never was in a place where I seemed so like a ghost of that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was stirring the leaves of its embowering trees and scattering them on the graves of my eleventh and twelfth century contemporaries.

XI