Part 14

The road at this point was the scene of Grizel Cochrane’s famous exploit, in 1685, when at night-fall, disguised as a man, and mounted on horseback, she waylaid the mail rider, and, holding a pistol to his head, robbed him of the warrant he was carrying for the execution of her father, Sir John Cochrane, taken in rebellion against James the Second. By this means she obtained a fortnight’s respite, a delay which was used by his friends to secure his pardon. Grizel Cochrane has, of course, been ever since the heroine of Border song. A clump of trees on a hillock, surrounded by a wall, to the right of the road, long bore the name of “Grizzy’s Clump,” but it has recently been felled and so much of the landmark destroyed. The country folk, possessed of the most invincible ignorance of the subject, know the place only as “Bambrough Hill,” a title they have given it because from the summit an excellent view of Bambrough Castle is gained.

[Picture: Bambrough Castle]

The plantations of Haggerston Castle now begin to cover the land sloping down toward the sea, and, after passing a deserted building on the left, once a coaching inn, the park surrounding the odd-looking modern castellated residence is reached. Here, by the entrance to the house, the road goes off at an acute angle to the left, and, continuing thus for a quarter of a mile, turns as sharply to the right. An old manorial pigeon-house, still with a vane bearing the initials C.L.H., stands by the way, and bears witness to the ownership of the estate in other times by the old Haggerston family. It was to Sir Carnaby Haggerston that those initials belonged, the late eighteenth-century squire, who destroyed the old Border tower of Haggerston Castle, and built a new mansion in its stead, just as so many of his contemporaries did.

Sir Carnaby Haggerston does not appear—apart from this vandal act of his—to have been an especially Wicked Squire, although his devastating name launched him upon the world ear-marked for commission of all the crimes practised by the libertine landowners who made so brave a show in a certain class of literature and melodrama once popular. His name strikes the ear even more dramatically than that of Sir Rupert Murgatroyd, the accursed Baronet of Ruddigore in Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s comic opera, but he never lived up to its possibilities. The only things he seems to have had in common with the typical squire of old seem to have been a love of port and whist, and a passion for building houses too large for his needs or means.

The Wicked Squire who unwillingly sat to the novelists who used to write in the pages of _Reynolds’ Miscellany_ and journals of that stamp fifty years ago, as the high-born villain of their gory romances, may be regretted, because without him the pages of the penny novelist are become extremely tame; but his disappearance need not be mourned for any other reasons.

It is to him we owe the many supposedly “classical” mansions that, huge and shapeless, like so many factories, reformatories, or workhouses, affront the green sward, the beautiful gardens, and the noble trees of many English parks. To build vast mansions of this “palatial” character, the squires often pulled down middle-Tudor or Elizabethan, or even earlier manor-houses of exquisite beauty, vying with one another in the size and extravagance of the new buildings, whose original cost and subsequent maintenance have during the past hundred and fifty years kept many county families in straitened circumstances, and do so still. There was a squire who pulled down a whole series of mediæval wayside crosses in his district, and used the materials as building-stones toward the great mansion he was erecting for the purpose of outshining a neighbour. Those transcendent squires, the noblemen of old, had larger opportunities and made the worst use of them. The Duke of Buckingham, for example, bought a property, demolished the Elizabethan hall that stood on it, and built Stowe there in its place; a building of vast range and classic elevation with colonnades and porticoes, and “windows that exclude the light and lead to nothing,” as some one has very happily remarked. Sir Francis Dashwood, that hero of the Hell Fire Club, pulled down West Wycombe church and built the existing building, that looks like a Lancashire cotton-mill, and every one built houses a great deal larger than were wanted or they could afford; which, like the Earl of Leicester’s seat at Holkham were so little like homes that they could neither live in their stately apartments nor sleep in their vast bedrooms. Like the Earl and Countess of Leicester, who were compelled for comfort’s sake to sleep in one of the servants’ bedrooms in the attics, they lived as settlers in corners of their cavernous and uncomfortable palaces.

Pity the poor descendant of the Squires! He cannot afford in these days to keep up his huge house; to pull it down would in itself cost a fortune; and its very size frightens the clients of the house-agent in whose hands he has had it for letting, these years past. All over England this is seen, and the old Yorkshire tale would stand true of any other county and of many other county magnates of that time. The Marquis of Rockingham, according to that story, built a mansion at Wentworth big enough for the Prince of Wales; Sir Rowland Winn built one at Nostel Priory fit for the Marquis of Rockingham; and Mr. Wrightson of Cusworth built a house fit for Sir Rowland Winn. No doubt the farmers carried on the tale of extravagance down to their stratum of society, and so _ad infinitum_.

But to return to Haggerston Castle, which now belongs to the Leylands. Conspicuous for some distance is the tower built of recent years to at one and the same time resemble a mediæval keep and to serve a practical purpose as a water-tower, engine-room, and look-out. The place, however, is remarkable for quite other things than its mock castle, for in the beautiful park are kept in pens, or roaming about freely, herds of foreign animals which make of it a miniature Zoological Gardens. It is, in a sense, superior indeed to that well-known place, for if the collections do not cover so wide a range, the animals are in a state of nature. Emus, Indian cattle, kangaroos, and many varieties of wild buck roam this “paradise,” together with a thriving herd of American bison. The bison is almost extinct, even in his native country, but here he flourishes exceedingly and perpetuates his kind. A bison bull is a startling object, come upon unawares, and looks like the production of a lunatic artist chosen to illustrate, say, the Jabberwock in _Alice in Wonderland_. He is all out of drawing, with huge shaggy forelegs, and head and shoulders a size too large for the rest of his body; an eye like a live coal, tufted coat, like a worn-out door-mat, and uncomfortable-looking horns: the kind of creature that inhabits Nightmare Country, popularly supposed to be bred of indigestion and lobster mayonnaise.

XXIX

BEYOND Haggerston, and up along the rising road that leads for six of the seven miles to Berwick, the journey is unexpectedly commonplace. The road has by this time turned away from the sea, and when it has led us through an entirely charming tunnel-like avenue of dwarf oaks, ceases to be interesting. Always upwards, it passes collieries, the “Cat” inn, and the hamlet of Richardson’s Stead or Scremerston, whence, arrived at the summit of Scremerston Hill, the way down into Tweedmouth and across the Tweed into Berwick is clear.

Tweedmouth sits upon the hither shore of Tweed, clad in grime and clinkers. Like a mudlark dabbling in the water but not cleansing himself in it, Tweedmouth seems to acquire no inconsiderable portion of its dirt from its foreshore. Engineering works and coal-shoots are responsible for the rest. Little or nothing of antiquity enlivens its mean street that leads down to the old bridge and so across the Tweed into Scotland. The roofs of Berwick, clustered close together and sealing one over the other as the town ascends the opposite shore of the river, are seen, with the spired Town Hall dominating all at the further end of the long, narrow, hump-backed old structure, and away to the left that fine viaduct of the North Eastern Railway, the Royal Border Bridge. But the finest view, and the most educational in local topography, is that gained by exploring the southern shore of the Tweed for half a mile in an easterly direction. An unlovely waterside road, it is true, a maze of railway arches spanning it, and shabby houses hiding all but the merest glimpses of Tweedmouth church and its gilded salmon vane, referring to the salmon-fishery of the Tweed, but leading to a point of view whence the outlook to the north-west is really grand. There, across the broad estuary of the Tweed, lies Berwick, behind its quays and its enclosing defences. Across the river, in the middle distance, goes Berwick Bridge, its massive piers and arches looking as though carved out of the rock, rather than built up of single stones. Beyond it, in majestic array, go the tall arches of the Royal Border Bridge, and, in the background, are the Scottish hills. Tweedmouth, its timber jetty, its docks, and church spire, and its waterside lumber are in the forefront. This, then, is the situation of Berwick, for centuries the best-picked bone of contention between the rival countries of England and Scotland; the Border cockpit, geographically in the northern kingdom, but wrested from it by the masterful English seven hundred and fifty years ago, and taken and re-taken by or from stubborn Scots on a round dozen of occasions afterwards. Sieges, assaults, stormings, massacres under every condition of atrocity; these are the merest commonplaces of Berwick’s story, until the mid-sixteenth century; and the historian who would write of its more unusual aspects must needs turn attention to the rare and short-lived interludes of peace.

[Picture: The Scottish Border: Berwick Town and Bridge from Tweedmouth]

It was in 1550, during the short reign of Edward the Sixth, that the existing fortifications enclosing the town were begun, whose river-fronting walls are so conspicuous from Tweedmouth. The old bridge, built by James the First, was the first peaceful enterprise between the two kingdoms, for, although Berwick had for over a century been recognised as a neutral or “buffer” state, peace went armed for fear of accidents, and easy communication across the Tweed was not encouraged. There is food for reflection in comparison between that bridge and the infinitely greater work of the railway viaduct. The first, 1,164 feet in length, with only 17 feet breadth between the parapets, bridging the river with fifteen arches, cost £17,000, and took twenty-four years to build; the railway bridge of twenty-eight giant arches, each of 61½ feet span, and straddling the Tweed at a height of 129 feet, was built in three years, at a cost of £120,000. The “Royal Border Bridge,” as it was christened at its opening by the Queen, has precisely the appearance of a Roman aqueduct and belongs to the Stone and Brick Age of railways. Were it to do over again, there can be no doubt that, instead of a long array of graceful arches, half a dozen lengths of steel lattice girders would span the tide. It was at a huge cost that England and Scotland were thus joined by rail; bridge and approaches swallowing up the sum of £253,000. The first passenger train crossed over, October 15, 1848, but the works were not finally completed until 1850. In the August of that year the Queen formally opened it, nearly two years after it was _actually_ opened; a fine object-lesson for satirists. How we laugh at ceremonials less absurd than this when they take place in China and Japan.

Berwick town is seen, on entering its streets, to be unexpectedly modern and matter-of-fact. The classically steepled building that bulks commandingly in the main thoroughfare and looks like a church is the Town Hall, and displays the arms of Berwick prominently, the municipal escutcheon supported on either side by a sculptured bear sitting on his rump and surrounded by trees. It is thus that one of the disputed derivations of Berwick’s name is alluded to. At few towns has the origin of a place-name been so contested as at Berwick; and, for all the pother about it, the question is still, and must remain, unanswered. It might as reasonably have come from _aberwic_, the mouth of a river, as from _bergwic_, the hillside village, and much more reasonably than from the fanciful “bar” prefix alluding to the bareness of the country; while of course the legend that gives the lie to that last variant, and seeks an origin in imaginary bears populating mythical woods, is merely infantile.

The church-like Town Hall, which is also a market-house and the town gaol, does indeed perform one of the functions of a church, for the ugly Puritan parish church of the town has no tower, and so the steeple of the Town Hall rings for it.

In the broad High Street running northward from this commanding building are all the prominent inns of the town, to and from which the coaches came and went until the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway in 1846. Some of the short stages appear to have been misery-boxes, according to Dean Ramsay, who used to tell an amusing anecdote of one of them. On one occasion a fellow-traveller at Berwick complained of the rivulets of rain-water falling down his neck from the cracked roof. He drew the coachman’s attention to it on the first opportunity, but all the answer he got was the matter-of-fact remark, “Ay, mony a ane has complained o’ that hole.”

The mail-coaches leaving Berwick on their journey north were allowed to take an extra—a fourth—outside passenger. Mail-coaches running in England were, until 1834, strictly limited to four inside and three outside. Of these last, one sat on the box, beside the coachman, while the other two were seated immediately behind, on the fore part of the roof, with their backs to the guard. This was a rule originally very strictly enforced, and had its origin in the fear that, if more were allowed, it would be an easy matter for desperadoes to occupy the seats as passengers and to suddenly overpower both coachman and guard. The guard in his solitary perch at the back, with his sword-case and blunderbuss ready to hand, could have shot or slashed at those in front, on his observing any suspicious movement, and it is somewhat surprising that no nervous guard ever did wound some innocent passenger who may have turned round to ask him a question. The concession of an extra seat on the outside of coaches entering Scotland was granted to the mail-contractors in view of the more widely scattered population of Scotland, and of the comparative scarcity of chance passengers on the way.

But there is very great uncertainty as to the number of passengers allowed on the mails in later years. Moses Nobbs, one of the last of the old mail-guards, states that no fewer than eight passengers were allowed outside at the end of the coaching age. Doubtless this was owing both to the complaints of the contractors that with the smaller complement they could not make the business pay, and to the growing security of the roads.

Royal proclamations used, until recent times, to specifically mention “our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed” when promulgating decrees, for as by treaty an independent State, neither in England nor Scotland, laws and ordinances affecting Great Britain and Ireland could not legally be said to have been extended to Berwick without the especial mention of “our town.” A state whose boundaries north and south were Lamberton Toll and the Tweed, a distance of not more than four miles, with a corresponding extent from east to west, it was thus on a par with many a petty German principality. Nearly three-quarters of the land comprised within “Berwick Bounds” is the property of the Corporation, having been granted by James the First when, overjoyed at his good fortune in succeeding to the English crown and thus uniting those of the two countries, he entered upon his heritage. Lucky Berwick! Its freehold property brings in a revenue of £18,000 a year, in relief of rates.

If the streets of Berwick are disappointing in so historic a place, then let the pilgrim make the circuit of the town on the ramparts. These, at least, tell of martial times, as also do the fragmentary towers of the old castle, the few poor relics left of that stronghold by the modern railway station overhanging a deep cleft. Then, away in advance of the ramparts, still thrusting its tubby, telescopic, three-storied form forward, is the old Bell Tower, where, in this advanced post, the vigilant garrison kept eyes upon the north, whence sudden Scottish raids might be developed at any time.

Grass covers the ramparts and sprouts in tufts upon the gun-platforms contrived in early Victorian days upon them, and almost every variety of obsolete cannon, short of the demi-culverins with which Drake searched the Spanish Main, go to make up what—Heaven help them and us!—War Office officials call batteries. Guns bristle thickly upon the waterside batteries overlooking the harbour, but not one of them is modern. All are muzzle-loading pieces, fit for an artillerist’s museum, and their carriages—where they are mounted at all—are in bewildering variety, principally, however, of rotting wood. The most recent piece, an Armstrong gun not less than fifty years old, lies derelict in the long grass, and children amuse themselves by filling its hungry-looking maw with clods. Pot-bellied like all the old Armstrongs, it has a look as though it had grown fat and lazy with that diet and lain down in the long grass to sleep. Perhaps to guard its slumbers, a War Office notice beside the prostrate gun vainly forbids trespassing!

Down in a ditch of the fortifications a soldier in his shirt sleeves, his braces dangling about his legs, is tending early peas with all the tenderness of a mother for an invalid child; for, look you, early peas in these latitudes have a hard fight for it; and the fight of those vegetables for existence against the nipping blasts that sweep from off the North Sea is the only sign of warfare the place has to show. Taken as a whole, and looked at whichever way you will, the “defences” of Berwick-upon-Tweed show a trustfulness in Providence and in the astounding luck of the British Empire which argues much for the piety or the folly of our rulers. And so, with the varied reflections these things call forth, let us away up the High Street, and, passing under the archway of the Scotch Gate, spanning its northern extremity, leave Berwick on the way to Scotland.

XXX

“SEEING Scotland, Madam,” said Dr. Johnson, in answer to Mrs. Thrale’s expressed wish to visit that country, “is only seeing a worse England. It is seeing the flower gradually fade away to the naked stalk.” This bitter saying of the Doctor’s comes vividly to mind when leaving Berwick on the way to Edinburgh. Passing the outskirts of the town at a point marked on the Ordnance map with the unexplained name of “Conundrum,” the country grows bare and treeless on approaching the sea, and at Lamberton Toll, three miles north, where “Berwick Bounds” are reached and Scotland entered, the scene is desolate in the extreme. The cottage to the left of the road at this point, formerly the toll-house of the turnpike-gate that stood here, is a famous place, rivalling Gretna Green for the runaway matches, legalised at the gate until 1856, when changes in the law rendered a part of the once-familiar notice in the window out-of-date. It ran, “Ginger-beer sold here, and marriages performed on the most reasonable terms”; an announcement which for combination of the trivial and the tremendous it would be difficult to beat.

Geographically in Scotland when across the Tweed, we are not politically in that country until past this cottage. Then indeed we are, in many ways, in a foreign country.

[Picture: Lamberton Toll]

Scots law is a fearful and wonderful variant from English. Even its terminology is strange to the English ear, which finds—hey, presto!—on passing Berwick Bounds, a barrister changed into an “advocate,” a solicitor converted into a “Writer to the Signet,” and a prosecutor masquerading under the thrilling and descriptive alias of “pursuer.” It was the laxity of Scots law that made, not only Gretna Green, but any other place over the Border from England, a resort of those about to marry and impatient of constraints, legal or family, at any period between 1753 and 1856. Gretna Green and its neighbour, Springfield, in especial, and in no small degree Lamberton Toll, were the scenes of much hasty marrying during that space of time. Marrying, _bien entendu_, and not giving in marriage, for these were runaway matches, and those whose position it was to give, and who withheld their consent, generally came posting up to the toll-gate in pursuit just in time to hear the last words of the simple but effective ritual of the toll-keeper who had witnessed the declaration of the truants that, “This is my wife,” and “This is my husband,” a simple form of words which, uttered in the presence of a witness, was all that the beneficent legal system of Scotland required as marriage ceremony. This form completed, and for satisfaction’s sake a rough register subscribed, the indignant parent, who possibly had been battering on the outside of the door, was admitted and introduced to his son-in-law.

It was a century of licence (not marriage licence), that prevailed on the Border from the passing of Lord Hardwicke’s Clandestine Marriage Act in 1753 until that of Lord Brougham in 1856, which put a stop to this “over the Border” marrying by rendering unions illegal on the part of those not domiciled in Scotland, which had not been preceded by a residence in that kingdom of not less than twenty-one days by one or other of the contracting parties.

There was no special virtue in the first place across the Border-line at any point, nor did it matter who “officiated,” the person who “performed the ceremony” being only a witness and in no sense a clergyman; but it was obviously, with these legal facilities, the prime object of runaway couples pressed for time, and with hurrying parents and guardians after them, to seize their opportunity at the first place, and at the hands of the first person in that liberal minded land. Not that the Kirk looked benevolently upon this. It fined them, for discipline’s sake, and the happy couples cheerfully paid, for by doing so they acquired the last touch of validity, which, on the face of it, could not be called into dispute.

One of this long line of Hymen’s secular priesthood at Lamberton Toll had, early in the nineteenth century, an unhappy time of it, owing to an error of judgment and an ignorance of the law scarcely credible. Joseph Atkinson, the toll-keeper, was away one day at Berwick when a runaway pair arrived at the gate. His wife, or another, sent them after him, and in Berwick the ceremony, such as it was, was performed. Now Berwick is a county of itself, and the inhabitants boast, or used to, that their town belongs to neither England nor Scotland. It is hinted (by those who do not belong to Berwick) that it belongs instead to the devil, which possibly is a reminiscence of the townsfolk’s smuggling days, on the part of those who duly render unto Cæsar. This by the way. Unhappily for Mr. Joseph Atkinson, Berwick owes allegiance to English law, as he found when his ceremony was declared null and void, and he was duly sentenced to seven years transportation for having contravened the Marriage Act of 1753.

[Picture: Off to the Border]