Part 10

Framwellgate is scarce left behind before there rises up in the far distance, on the summit of one of the many hills to the north-east, a hill-top temple resembling the Athenian Acropolis, and as you go northward it is the constant companion of your journey for some seven or eight miles. This is “Penshaw Monument,” erected on that windy height in 1844, four years after his death, to the memory of John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham. It cost £6,000, and commemorates the championship of the Reform movement in its earlier and precarious days by that statesman. Like many another monument, impressive at a distance, a near approach to it leads to disillusion, for its classic outlines are allied to coarse workmanship, and its eighteen great columns are hollow. Penshaw, deriving its name from Celtic words, signifying a wooded height, still has its woodlands to justify the name given nearly a thousand years ago.

[Picture: Penshaw Monument]

The little town of Chester-le-Street lies three miles ahead, past the few cottages of Plawsworth, once the site of a turnpike-gate, and by Chester Moor and the pretty wooded hollow of Chester Dene, where the Con Burn goes rippling through the undergrowth to join the river Wear, and a bridge carries the highway across the gap. Approaching Chester-le-Street, the bright yellow sandstone mass of Lumley Castle, the ancient seat of the Earl of Scarborough, is prominent in the valley to the right, while beyond it rise the woods of Lambton Castle, the Earl of Durham’s domain. The neighbourhood of Chester-le-Street yet preserves the weird legend of the “Lambton Worm,” and Worm Hill is still pointed out as the home of that fabulous monster who laid the country under contribution for the satisfying of his voracious appetite, and was kept in good humour by being provided with the milk of nine cows daily. Many had essayed to slay the serpent and had fallen victims instead, until the heir of Lambton, returned from the red fields and hair’s-breadth escapes of foreign wars, set forth to free the countryside from the terror. But before he started, he was warned (so the legend runs), that unless he vowed, being successful in his enterprise, to slay the first living thing he met on his return, the lords of Lambton would never, for nine generations to come, die in their beds. He took that vow, and, armed with his trusty sword and a suit of armour made of razor-blades, met and slew the Worm, who coiled himself round the knight in order to crush him as he had the others, and so was cut in pieces against the keen edges. But the victor on returning was met by his father, instead of by the favourite dog who had been destined for the sacrifice. The sword dropped from his nerveless hand, and he broke the vow. What mattered it where the future generations died; in their beds, or, as warriors might wish, in their boots?

As a matter of fact, the next nine heirs of Lambton did die more or less violent deaths; a circumstance which is pointed to in proof of the legend’s truth. If other proof be wanting, one has only to visit Lambton Castle, where the identical trough from which the Worm drank his daily allowance of milk is still shown the curious tourist!

Chester-le-Street bears little in its appearance to hint at its great age and interesting history. A very up-to-date little town, whose prosperity derives from its position as a marketing centre for the surrounding pitmen, it supports excellent shops and rejoices in the possession of Co-operative Societies, whose objects are to provide their subscribers with whatever they want at cost price, and to starve the trader, who trades for profit, out of existence. That shops and societies exist side by side, and that both look prosperous, seems remarkable, not to say miraculous. Let the explanation of these things be left to other hands.

The name of Chester-le-Street doubly reveals the Roman origin of the place from the castle on the road which existed here in those distant times, and has easily survived the name of Cunecaster, which the Saxons gave it. At Cunecaster the ancient bishopric of Bernicia, forerunner of the present See of Durham, had its cathedral for a hundred and thirteen years, from A.D. 882 to 995; having been removed from the Farne Islands on the approach of the heathen Danes, the monks carrying the coffin of their sainted bishop, St. Cuthbert, with them on their wanderings. The dedication of the present church to Saints Mary and Cuthbert is a relic of that time, but the building itself is not older than the thirteenth century. It preserves an ancient anchorites’ cell.

The finest surviving anchorage in England is this of Chester-le-Street. It is built against the north wall of the tower, and is of two storeys with two rooms on each. Two “low-side” windows communicating with the churchyard remain, and a smaller opening into the church is close by. Through this, food and offerings were passed to the anchorite, together with the keys of the church treasure-chest, left in his custody by the clergy. From this orifice the holy hermit could obtain a view all over the building, and an odd hagioscope or “squint,” pierced through one of the pillars, allowed of his seeing the celebration of Mass at a side-chapel, in addition to that at the High Altar. This was no damp and inconvenient hermitage, for when the anchorite was kicked out at the Reformation, and bidden go and earn an honest living, his old home was let to three widows. Eventually, in 1619, the curate found the place so desirable—or, as a house-agent would say, so “eligible”—that he took up his abode there.

The church also contains fourteen monumental effigies ascribed, without much truth in the ascription, to the Lumleys. John, Lord Lumley, collected them from ruined abbeys and monasteries in the neighbourhood some three hundred years ago, and called them ancestors. He was technically right; for we all descend from Adam, but not quite so right when, finding he could not steal a sufficient number of these “ancestors,” he commissioned the local masons to rough-hew him out a few more. They are here to this day, and an ill-favoured gang they look, too.

The town of Chester-le-Street found little favour with De Foe, who, passing through it, found the place “an old dirty thoroughfare town.” The modern traveller cannot say the same, but it is possible that if he happened to pass through on Shrove Tuesday, he would describe the inhabitants as savages; for on that day the place is given up to a game of football played in the streets, the town taking sides, and when the ball is not within reach, kicking one another. With a proper respect for their shop fronts, the trades-folk all close on this day.

The three miles between Chester-le-Street and Birtley afford a wide-spreading panorama of the Durham coal-field. Pretty country before its mineral wealth began to be developed, its hills and dales reveal chimney-shafts and hoisting-gear in every direction, and smoke-wreaths, blown across country by the raging winds of the north, blacken everything. Birtley is a typical pit village and its approaches characteristic of the coal country. The paths are black, the hedges and trees ragged and sooty, and tramways from the collieries cross the road itself, unfenced, the trucks dropping coal in the highway. One coal village is as like another as are two peas. They are all frankly unornamental; all face the road on either side, each cottage the exact replica of its unlovely neighbour, and the footpaths are almost invariably unpaved. These are the homes of the “Geordies,” as the pitmen once were invariably called. They were rough in their ways, but very different from the more recent sort: the trade-unionist miner: the better educated but more discontented and unlovable man. But “Geordie,” the old-type typical pitman, was not a bad fellow, by any means. If any man worked, literally, by the sweat of his brow, it was he, in his eight hours’ shift down in the stifling tunnels of the coal-mine. He earned a high wage and deserved a higher, for he carried his life in his hand, and any day that witnessed his descent half a mile or so into the black depths of the pit might also have seen an accident which, by the fall of a roof of coal, by fire or flood, explosion, or the unseen but deadly choke-damp, should end his existence, and that of hundreds like him.

The midday aspect of a coal village is singularly quiet and empty. Scarce a man or boy is to be seen. Half of them are at work down below, in the first day shift to which they went at an early hour of the morning: and those of the night, who came up when the others descended, are enjoying a well-earned repose. A coal-miner just come to bank from his coal-hewing, looks anything but the respectable fellow he generally is, nowadays. With his peaked leathern cap, thick short coat, woollen muffler, limp knickerbockers, blue worsted stockings, heavy lace-up boots and dirty face, he looks like a half-bleached nigger football-player. When washed, his is a pallid countenance which the stranger, unused to the colourless faces of those who work underground, might be excused for thinking that of one recovering from an illness. And washing is a serious business with “Geordie.” Every pitman’s cottage has its tub wherein he “cleans” himself, as he expresses it, while the women-folk crowd the street. What the cottages lack in accommodation they make up for in cleanliness and display. The pitman’s wife wages an heroic and never-ending war against dirt and grime, and both have an astonishing love of finery and bright colours which reveals itself even down to the door-step, coloured a brilliant red, yellow, or blue, according to individual taste. Nowadays football claims “Geordie’s” affections before anything else. That rowdy game, more than any other, serves to work off any superfluous energy, and there are stories, more or less true, which tell of pitmen, tired of waiting for “t’ ball,” starting “t’ gaame” by kicking one another instead! Coursing, dog-fancying, and the breeding of canaries are other favourite pitmen’s pastimes, and they dearly love a garden. Where an outdoor garden is impossible, a window garden is a favourite resource, and even the ugliest cottages take on a certain smartness when to the yellow doorstep are added bright green window-shutters and a window full of scarlet geraniums. Very many pitmen are musical. We do not in this connection refer to the inevitable American organ whose doleful wails wring your very heart-strings as you pass the open cottage doors on Sunday afternoons, but to the really expert violinists often found in the pit villages.

[Picture: The Coal Country]

XXIV

AT Harlowgreen Lane, where a little wayside inn, the “Coach and Horses,” stands beside a wooded dingle, we have the only pleasant spot before reaching Gateshead. Prettily rural, with an old-world air which no doubt gains an additional beauty after the ugliness of Birtley, it looks like one of those roadside scenes pencilled so deftly by Rowlandson, and might well have been one of the roadside stopping-places mentioned in that book so eloquent of the Great North Road, Smollett’s _Roderick Random_. No other work gives us so fine a description of old road travel, partly founded, no doubt, upon the author’s’ own observation of the wayfaring life of his time. Smollett himself travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh and London in 1739, and in the character of Roderick he narrates some of his own adventures. For a good part of the way Roderick found neither coach, cart, nor wagon on the road, and so journeyed with a train of pack-carriers so far as Newcastle, sitting on one of the horses’ pack-saddles. At Newcastle he met Strap, the barber’s assistant, and they journeyed to London together, sometimes afoot; at other times by stage-wagon, a method of travelling which, practised by those of small means, was a commonplace of the period at which Smollett wrote. It was a method which had not changed in the least since the days of James the First, and was to continue even into the first years of the nineteenth century. Fynes Morrison, who wrote an _Itinerary_—and an appallingly dull work it is—in the reign of the British Solomon, talks of them as “long covered wagons, carrying passengers from place to place; but this kind of journeying is so tedious, by reason they must take wagon very early and come very late to their innes, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.” Hogarth pictured these lumbering conveyances, which at their best performed fifteen miles a day, and Rowlandson and many other artists have employed their pencils upon them.

[Picture: A Wayside Halt. After Rowlandson]

Smollett is an eighteenth-century robust humorist, whose works are somewhat strong meat for our times; but he is a classic, and his works (unlike the usual run of “classics,” which are aptly said to be books which no one ever reads) have, each one, enough humour to furnish half a dozen modern authors, and are proof against age and change of taste. To the student of bygone times and manners, _Roderick Random_ affords (oh! rare conjunction) both instruction and amusement. It is, of course, a work of fiction, but fiction based on personal experience, and palpitating with the life of the times in which it was written. It thus affords a splendid view of this great road about 1739, and of the way in which the thrifty Scots youths then commonly came up to town.

Their first night’s halt was at a hedgerow alehouse, half a mile from the road, to which came also a pedlar. The pedlar, for safety’s sake, screwed up the door of the bedroom in which they all slept. “I slept very sound,” says Roderick, “until midnight, when I was disturbed by a violent motion of the bed, which shook under me with a continual tremor. Alarmed at this phenomenon, I jogged my companion, whom, to my amazement, I found drenched in sweat, and quaking through every limb; he told me, with a low, faltering voice, that we were undone, for there was a bloody highwayman with loaded pistols in the next room; then, bidding me make as little noise as possible, he directed me to a small chink in the board partition, through which I could see a thick-set, brawny fellow, with a fierce countenance, sitting at a table with our young landlady, having a bottle of ale and a brace of pistols before him.” The highwayman was cursing his luck because a confederate, a coachman, had given intelligence of a rich coach-load to some other plunderer, who had gone off with £400 in cash, together with jewels and money.

“But did you find nothing worth taking which escaped the other gentleman of the road?” asked the landlady.

“Not much,” he replied. “I gleaned a few things, such as a pair of pops, silver-mounted (here they are); I took them, loaded, from the charge of the captain who had charge of the money the other fellow had taken, together with a gold watch which he had concealed in his breeches. I likewise found ten Portugal pieces in the shoes of a Quaker, whom the spirit moved to revile me, with great bitterness and devotion; but what I value myself mostly for is this here purchase, a gold snuff-box, my girl, with a picture on the inside of the lid, which I untied out of the tail of a pretty lady’s smock.”

Here the pedlar began to snore so loudly that the highwayman heard him through the partition. Alarmed, he asked the landlady who was there, and when she told him, travellers, replied, “Spies! you jade! But no matter, I’ll send them all to hell in an instant.”

The landlady pacified him by saying that they were only three poor Scotchmen; but Strap by this time was under the bed.

The night was one of alarms. Roderick and Strap awakened the pedlar, who, thinking the best course was not to wait for the doubtful chance of being alive to see the morning dawn, vanished with his pack through the window.

After having paid their score in the morning, the two set out again. They had not gone more than five miles before a man on horseback overtook them, whom they recognised as Mr. Rifle, the highwayman of the night before. He asked them if they knew who he was. Strap fell on his knees in the road. “For heaven’s sake, Mr. Rifle,” said he, “have mercy on us, we know you very well.”

“Oho!” cried the thief, “you do! But you shall never be evidence against me in this world, you dog!” and so saying, he drew a pistol and fired at the unfortunate shaver, who fell flat on the ground, without a word. He then turned upon Roderick, but the sound of horses’ hoofs was heard, and a party of travellers galloped up, leaving the highwayman barely time to ride off. One of them was the captain who had been robbed the day before. He was not, as may already have been gathered, a valiant man. He turned pale at the sight of Strap. “Gentlemen,” said he, “here’s murder committed; let us alight.” The others were for pursuing the highwayman, and the captain only escaped accompanying them by making his horse rear and snort, and pretending the animal was frightened. Fortunately, Strap “had received no other wound than what his fear had inflicted”; and after having been bled at an inn half a mile away, they were about to resume their journey, when a shouting crowd came down the road, with the highwayman in the midst, riding horseback with his hands tied behind him. He was being escorted to the nearest Justice of the Peace. Halting a while for refreshment, they dismounted Mr. Rifle and mounted guard, a circle of peasants armed with pitchforks round him. When they at length reached the magistrate’s house, they found he was away for the night, and so locked their prisoner in a garret, from which, of course, he escaped.

Roderick and Strap were now free from being detained as evidence. For two days they walked on, staying on the second night in a public-house of a very sorry appearance in a small village. At their entrance, the landlord, who seemed a venerable old man, with long grey hair, rose from a table placed by a large fire in a neat paved kitchen, and, with a cheerful countenance, accosted them with the words: “_Salvete_, _pueri_; _ingredimini_.” It was astonishing to hear a rustic landlord talking Latin, but Roderick, concealing his amazement, replied, “_Dissolve frigus_, _ligna super foco large reponens_.” He had no sooner pronounced the words than the innkeeper, running towards him, shook him by the hands, crying, “_Fili mi dilectissime_! _unde venis_?—_a superis_, _ni fallor_.” In short, finding them both read in the classics, he did not know how to testify his regard sufficiently; but ordered his daughter, a jolly, rosy-checked damsel, who was his sole domestic, to bring a bottle of his _quadrimum_; repeating at the same time from Horace, “_Deprome quadrimum Sabinâ_, _O Thaliarche_, _merum diota_.” This was excellent ale of his own brewing, of which he told them he had always an _amphora_, four years old, for the use of himself and friends.

The innkeeper proved to be a schoolmaster who was obliged, by his income being so small, to supplement it by turning licensed victualler. He was very inquisitive about their affairs, and, while dinner was preparing, his talk abounded both with Latin tags and with good advice to the inexperienced against the deceits and wickedness of the world. They fared sumptuously on roast fowl and several bottles of quadrimum, going to bed congratulating themselves on the landlord’s good-humour. Strap was of opinion that they would be charged nothing for their lodging and entertainment. “Don’t you observe,” said he, “that he has conceived a particular affection for us; nay, even treated us with extraordinary fare, which, to be sure, we should not of ourselves have called for?”

Roderick was not so sanguine. Rising early in the morning, and having breakfasted with their host and his daughter on hasty-pudding and ale, they desired to know what there was to pay.

“Biddy will let you know, gentlemen,” said the old rascal of a tapster, “for I never mind these matters. Money-matters are beneath the concern of one who lives on the Horatian plan: _Crescentem sequitur cura pecuniam_.”

Meanwhile, Biddy, having consulted a slate that hung in a corner, gave the reckoning as eight shillings and sevenpence.

“Eight shillings and sevenpence!” cried Strap; “’tis impossible! You must be mistaken, young woman.”

“Reckon again, child,” said the father very deliberately; “perhaps you have miscounted.”

“No, indeed, father,” replied she. “I know my business better.”

Roderick demanded to know the particulars, on which the old man got up, muttering, “Ay, ay, let us see the particulars: that’s but reasonable”; and, taking pen, ink, and paper, wrote:

_s._ _d._ To bread and beer, 0 6 To a fowl and sausages, 2 6 To four bottles of quadrim, 2 0 To fire and tobacco, 0 7 To lodging, 2 0 To breakfast, 1 0 8 7

As he had not the appearance of a common publican, Roderick could not upbraid him as he deserved, simply remarking that he was sure he had not learned from Horace to be an extortioner. To which the landlord replied that his only aim was to live _contentus parvo_, and keep off _importuna pauperies_.

Strap was indignant. He swore their host should either take one-third or go without; but Roderick, seeing the daughter go out and return with two stout fellows, with whom to frighten them, thought it politic to pay what was asked.

It was a doleful walk they had that day. In the evening they overtook the wagon, and it is here, and in the following scenes, that we get an excellent description of the cheap road travel of that era.

Strap mounted first into the wagon, but retired, dismayed, at a tremendous voice which issued from its depths, with the words, “Fire and fury! there shall no passengers come here.” These words came from Captain Weazel, one of the most singular characters to be found in Smollett’s pages.

Joey, the wagoner, was not afraid of the captain, and called out, with a sneer: “Waunds, coptain, whay woan’t you soofer the poor wagoneer to make a penny? Coom, coom, young man, get oop, get oop; never moind the coptain.”

“Blood and thunder! where’s my sword?” exclaimed the man of war, when the two eventually fell, rather than climbed, into the wagon’s dark recesses, and incidentally on to his stomach.

“What’s the matter, my dear?” asked a female voice.

“The matter?” replied the captain; “my guts are squeezed into a pancake by that Scotchman’s hump.” The “hump,” by the way, was poor Strap’s knapsack.

“It is our own fault,” resumed the feminine voice; “we may thank ourselves for all the inconveniences we meet with. I thank God I never travelled so before. I am sure, if my lady or Sir John were to know where we are, they would not sleep this night for vexation. I wish to God we had written for the chariot; I know we shall never be forgiven.”

“Come, come, my dear,” replied the captain, “it don’t signify fretting now; we shall laugh it over as a frolic; I hope you will not suffer in your health. I shall make my lord very merry with our adventures in the diligence.”

[Picture: Travellers arriving at an Inn. After Rowlandson]