Part 9

A more darkling romance, however, broods upon the scene. Away on the western sky-line stands the conspicuous tower of Merrington church, and near it the farmhouse where, on January 28, 1685, Andrew Mills, a servant of the Brass family, who then farmed the adjacent land, murdered the three children in the absence of their parents. It is a story of whose shuddering horror nothing is lost in contemporary accounts, but we will leave it to the imagination. It is sufficient to say that the assassin, a lad of eighteen years of age, seems to have been half-witted, speaking of having been instigated to the deed by a demon who enjoined him to “Kill—kill.” To be more or less mad was no surety against punishment in those times, and so Andrew Mills was found guilty and hanged. Justice seems to have been devilish then, for he was cut down and hanged in chains, after the fashion of the time, beside the road. The peculiar devilry of the deed appears in the fact that he was not quite dead, and survived in his iron cage on the gibbet for days. His sweetheart brought him food, but he could not eat, for every movement of his jaw caused it to be pierced with an iron spike. So she brought milk instead, and so sustained the wretched creature for some time. Legends still recount how he lingered here in agony, his cries by day and night scaring the neighbouring cottagers from their homes, until the shrieks and groans at length ceased, and death came to put an end to his sufferings. The site of the gibbet was by the Thinford inn, near the head of the embankment. The gibbet-post lasted long. Known as “Andrew Mills’ Stob,” its wood was reputed of marvellous efficacy for toothache, rheumatism, heartburn, and indeed as wide a range of ailments as are cured by any one of the modern quack medicines that fill the advertisement columns of our newspapers in this enlightened age. It was a sad day for Ferryhill and the neighbourhood when the last splinter of Andrew Mills’ gibbet was used up, and what the warty, scrofulous, ulcerous, and rheumaticky inhabitants did then the imagination refuses to consider.

[Picture: Merrington Church]

XX

THE surrounding districts anciently possessed a prime horror (which has lost nothing in the accumulated legends of centuries) in the “Brawn of Brancepeth.” This terror of the countryside, resolved into plain matter of fact, seems to have been a wild boar. Boars were “brawns” in those days, and the adjacent “Brancepeth” is just “brawn’s path,” as Brandon is supposed to have been “brawn den.” This, to modern ideas, not very terrible wild animal, seems to have thoroughly alarmed half a county:—

He feared not ye loute with hys staffe, Nor yet for ye knyghte in hys mayle, He cared no more for ye monke with hys boke, Than the fyendis in depe Croix Dale.

It will be seen by the last line in this verse that the author was evidently prepared to back the devil and all his works against anything the Church could do. But that is a detail. The wild boar was eventually slain by Hodge of the Ferry, who ended him by the not very heroic process of digging a deep pit in the course of his usual path, and when the animal fell in, cutting his head off, doubtless from a safe point of vantage above. Divested of legendary trappings, we can readily picture the facts: the redoubtable Hodge hiding in the nearest and tallest tree until the wild boar came along and fell into the hole, when the champion descended and despatched him in safety. The traditional scene of this exploit is half a mile to the east of Ferryhill, at a farmstead called Cleve’s Cross.

Croixdale, or, as modern times have vulgarised its name, Croxdale, lies on our way to Durham, past the hills of High and Low Butcher Race. Now a shabby roadside village, with a railway station of that name on the main line of the North Eastern Railway, this neighbourhood has also had its romance. The road descends steeply to the river Wear, and in the vicinity is the dark hollow which mediæval superstition peopled with evil spirits, the “fyendis” who, as the ballad says, cared nothing for the monk with his book. To evict these hardy sprites a cross was erected, hence “Croixdale”; but with what result is not stated.

[Picture: Road, Rail, and River: Sunderland Bridge]

The cross roads here, too, have their story, for Andrew Tate, a highwayman, convicted of murdering and robbing seven persons near Sunderland Bridge, was hanged where they branch off, in 1602, and afterwards buried beneath the gallows. Now that no devils or highwaymen haunt the lovely woodland borders of the Wear at this spot, it is safe to linger by Sunderland Bridge, just below Croxdale, where the exceedingly picturesque old stone bridge of four arches carries the road over the river. Perhaps the distant railway viaduct may spoil the sylvan solitude of the place, but, on the other hand, it may help to emphasise it. Across that viaduct rush and roar the expresses to and from London and the North; while the fisherman plys his contemplative craft from the sandy beaches below the bridge. Many a wearied coach passenger, passing this spot in the old days on summer evenings, must have longingly drunk in the beauty of the scene. Other passengers by coach had a terrible experience here in 1822, when the mail was overturned on the bridge and two passengers killed.

Thoresby, in his _Diary_, under date of May 1703, describes one of his journeys with his usual inaccuracy as to the incidence of places, and mentions Sunderland Bridge, together with another, close by. This would be Browney Bridge, to which we come in a quarter of a mile nearer Durham; only Thoresby places it the other way, where, on the hillside, such a bridge would be impossible. He mentions seeing the legend, “Sockeld’s Leap, 1692,” inscribed on one of the coping-stones, and tells how two horsemen, racing on this road, jumped on the bridge together with such force that one of them, breaking down the battlements of the bridge, fell into the stream below, neither he nor his horse having any injury.

Ascending the steep rise beyond Browney Bridge, Farewell Hall on the left is passed, the place taking its name, according to the commonly received story, from the Earl of Derwentwater bidding farewell to his friends here when on his way, a captured rebel, to London and the scaffold, in 1715. Climbing one more ridge, the first view of Durham Cathedral is gained on coming down the corresponding descent, a long straight run into the outskirts of the city. Durham Cathedral appears, majestic against the sky, long before any sign of the city itself is noted; a huge bulk dominating the scene and dwarfing the church of St. Oswald at the foot of the hill, itself no inconsiderable building. To the right hand rises Nine Tree Hill, with the nine trees that stand sponsors to it still weirdly conspicuous on its crest, and down beneath it spread the grimy and unkempt works of the Old Elvet Colliery.

[Picture: Entrance to Durham]

XXI

THE traveller pursuing his northward way comes into Durham by the back door, as it were, for the suburb of Old Elvet through which the Great North Road conducts to the ancient city is one of the least prepossessing of entrances, and, besides being dirty and shabby, is endowed with a cobble-stoned road which, as if its native unevenness were not sufficient, may generally be found strewed with fragments of hoop-iron, clinkers, and other puncturing substances calculated to give tragical pauses to the exploring cyclist who essays to follow the route whose story is set forth in these pages. Old Elvet is in no sense a prepossessing suburb of Durham, but its steep and stony street is a true exemplar of the city’s other highways and byways, which are nothing if not breakneck and badly paved, as well as being badly kept. But facing Old Elvet’s long street is still to be found the “Three Tuns,” where coach passengers in the closing years of that era delighted to stay, and where, although the well-remembered hostess of the inn has been gathered to Abraham’s bosom, the guest on entering is still served in his bedroom with the welcoming glass of cherry-brandy which it has for the best part of a century been the pleasing custom of the house to present. No other such ambrosial cup as this, rare in itself and hallowed by old memories, greets the wayfarer along the roads nowadays.

From here, or other headquarters, let us set forth to explore the city, planted on a craggy site looking down upon the encompassing Wear that flows deep down between rocky banks clothed thickly with woods. To enter the city proper from “Old Elvet,” one must needs cross Elvet Bridge, still narrow, although the subject of a widening by which its width was doubled in 1805. How the earlier coaches crossed it is therefore something of a problem.

It has often been claimed for Durham that it is “the most picturesque city in England,” and if by that contention we are to understand the site of it to be meant, the claim must be allowed. Cities are not so many that there is much difficulty in estimating their comparative charms; and were it even a question of towns, few might be found to have footholds of such beauty.

The Wear and that rocky bluff which it renders all but an island, seemed to the distracted monks of Lindisfarne, worn out with a century’s wandering over the north of England in search of safety from the marauding heathen Danes who had laid waste the coast and their island cathedral, an ideal spot; and so to the harsh necessities of over nine hundred years ago we owe both this selection of a site and the building upon it of a cathedral which should be an outpost for the Lord in the turbulent North and a castle for the protection of his servants. It was in the year 995 that, after a hundred and twenty years of constant wandering, the successors of those monks who had fled from Lindisfarne with the body of their revered bishop, the famous Saint Cuthbert, came here, still bearing his hallowed remains. Their last journey had been from Ripon. Coming near this spot, the Saint, who though by this time dead for over three hundred years, was as masterful as he had been in life, manifested his approval of the neighbourhood by refusing to be carried any further. When the peripatetic bishop and monks found that his coffin remained immovable they fasted and prayed for three days, after which disciplinary exercise, one of their number had a vision wherein it was revealed to him that the Saint should be carried to Dunholme, where he was to be received into a place of rest. So, setting forth again, distressed in mind by not knowing where Dunholme lay, but hoping for a supernatural guidance, they came presently to “a place surrounded with rocks, where there was a river of rapid waves and fishes of various kinds mingling with the floods. Great forests grew there, and in deep valleys were wild animals of many sorts, and deer innumerable.” It was when they were come to this romantic place that they heard a milkmaid calling to her companion, and asking where her cow was. The answer, that “she was in Dunholme” was “an happy and heavenly sound to the distressed monks, who thereby had intelligence that their journey’s end was at hand, and the Saint’s body near its resting-place.” Pressing onward, they found the cow in Dunholme, and here, on the site of the present Cathedral, they raised their first “little Church of Wands and Branches.” The Cathedral and the Castle that they and their immediate successors raised have long since been replaced; but the great Norman piles of rugged fame and stern battlemented and loopholed fortress crowning the same rocky heights prove that those who kept the Church anchored here had need to watch as well as pray, to fight secular battles as well as wage war against the devil and all his works. It was this double necessity that made the bishops of Durham until our own time bishops-palatine; princes of the State as well as of the Church, and in the old days men of the sword as well as of the pastoral staff; and their cathedral shadows forth these conditions of their being in no uncertain way. There is no finer pile of Norman masonry in this country than this great edifice, whose central tower and east end are practically the only portions not in that style, and of these that grand and massive tower, although of the Perpendicular period, is akin to the earlier parts in feeling; nor is there another quite so impressive a tower in England as this, either for itself or in its situation, with the sole exception of “Boston Stump,” that beacon raised against the sky for many miles across the Lincolnshire levels.

[Picture: Durham Cathedral, from Prebend’s Bridge]

Woods and river still surround the Cathedral, as Turner shows in his exquisite view from the Prebend’s Bridge, one among many other glorious and unexpected glimpses which the rugged nature of Durham’s site provides from all points, but incomparably the best of all. It is here that, most appropriately, there has been placed a decorative tablet, carved in oak, and bearing the quotation from Sir Walter Scott, beginning—

Half House of God, half Castle; ’gainst the Scot;

a quotation that gains additional point from the circumstance of the battle of Neville’s Cross having been fought against the invading Scots, October 17th, 1346, within sight from the Cathedral roofs. This view is one of Turner’s infrequent topographically accurate works. Perhaps even he felt the impossibility of improving upon the beauty of the scene.

Still, annually, after evensong on May 29th, the lay clerks and choristers of the Cathedral ascend to the roof of the great central tower, in their cassocks and surplices, and sing anthems. The first, Farrant’s “Lord, for Thy tender mercies’ sake,” is a reference to the national crime of the execution of Charles the First, and is sung facing south. The second, “Therefore with angels and archangels,” by V. Novello, expressing the pious sentiment that the martyred king shall rest in Paradise, in company with those bright beings, is sung facing east; and the third, “Give Peace in our time, O Lord,” by W. H. Callcott, facing north.

The origin of this observance was the thanksgiving for the victory of Neville’s Cross, a famous and a complete success, when fifteen thousand Scots were slain and David the Second, the Scottish king and many of his nobles, captured. It was to the special intervention of St. Cuthbert, whose sacred banner was carried by Prior John Fossor to Maiden Bower, a spot overlooking the battlefield, that this signal destruction of the enemy was ascribed. The Prior prayed beside it, but his monks are said to have offered up their petitions from the more distant, and safer, vantage-point of the Cathedral towers. Perhaps they had a turn of agnosticism in their minds; but, at any rate, they took no risks.

The original tower-top _Te Deum_ afterwards sung on the anniversary seems to have been discontinued at the Reformation. The revival came after the King’s Restoration in 1660, when the day was altered to May 29th, to give the celebration the character of a rejoicing at the return of Charles the Second. This revival itself fell into disuse in the eighteenth century, being again restored in 1828, and continued ever since.

The battlefield of Neville’s Cross lies to the west of the Cathedral, so no singing takes place on the western side of the tower. The popular, but mistaken, idea in Durham is that this is because a choir-boy once overbalanced on that side and fell from the tower.

If you would see how Castle and Cathedral are situated with regard to the busy modern city, there is no such place as the railway station, whence they are seen dominating the mass of houses, among the smoke-wreaths of commerce, like the martyrs of old steadfast amidst their burning faggots. If again, reversing the order of precedence as seen in the view from Prebend’s Bridge, you would have the Castle in the forefront and the Cathedral behind, it is from the Framwellgate Bridge, carrying the Great North Road over the Wear, that another lovely glimpse is seen, ranging to Prebend’s Bridge itself.

XXII

BUT time grows short, and we have not long to linger at Durham. Much else might be said of the Cathedral; of Saint Cuthbert’s Shrine, and of the vandal Wyatt, who “restored” the Cathedral in 1775, cutting away, in the process, a depth of four inches from the stonework of much of the exterior. The work cost £30,000, and resulted in eleven hundred tons weight of stone chippings being removed from the building. If that “restorer” had had his way, he would have destroyed the beautiful Galilee Chapel that projects from the west front, and forms so uniquely interesting a feature of Late Norman work. His idea was to drive a carriage road round this way. The work of destruction had, indeed, already been begun when it was stopped by more reverent men.

[Picture: The Sanctuary Knocker]

A curious relic still remains upon the door of the Cathedral’s north porch, in the form of a huge knocker, dating back to Norman times. Cast in the shape of a grinning monster’s head, a ring hanging from its jaws, it is the identical sanctuary knocker of Saint Cuthbert’s Sanctuary, which was in use from the foundation of the Cathedral until 1524. All fugitives, whatever their crimes, who succeeded in escaping to Durham, and reaching the bounds of “Saint Cuthbert’s Peace,” were safe from molestation during thirty-seven days. A criminal, grasping the ring of this knocker, could not be torn from it by his pursuers, under pain of their being subjected to excommunication; and lest there should be bold spirits whom even this could not affright, there were always two monks stationed, day and night, in a room above the porch, to watch for fugitives. When admitted, the criminal confessed his crime, with every circumstance attending it, his confession being taken down in writing, in the presence of witnesses; a bell ringing in the Galilee tower all the while, giving notice that some one had fled to the protection of Saint Cuthbert. After these formalities, the fugitive was clothed with a black gown, bearing a yellow cross on the left shoulder: the badge of the Saint whose protection he had secured. After the days of grace had expired, and in the event of no pardon being obtained, ceremonies were gone through before the Shrine, in which the malefactor solemnly forswore his native land for ever. Then, safeguarded to the coast, he was shipped out of the kingdom by the first vessel sailing after his arrival.

[Picture: Durham Castle and Cathedral from below Framwellgate Bridge]

There must have been many an exciting chase along the roads in those times, and many a criminal who richly deserved punishment must have escaped it by the very skin of his teeth. Many another, no doubt, was seized and handed over to justice, or slain, on the threshold of safety. Other fugitives still—and here Saint Cuthbert appears in better guise—victims of hatred and oppression, private or political, claimed the saintly ægis, and so escaped the vengeance of their enemies. So, looking upon the ferociously grinning mask of the knocker, glaring with eyeless sockets upon Palace Green, we can reconstruct the olden times when, at his last gasp, the flying wretch seized the ring and so came into safety. By night, the scene was more impressive still, for there were crystals in those sockets then, and a lamp burning behind, so that the fugitive could see his haven from afar, and make for it.

To-day, Saint Cuthbert avails no man, as the county gaol and the assize courts sufficiently prove, and Durham city is essentially modern, from the coal-grit that powders its dirty streets to the awfully grotesque effigy of a Marquis of Londonderry that lends so diabolical an air to the Market-place, where the Statute Fair is held, and where he sits, a coal-black effigy across his coal-black horse, towering over the steam merry-go-rounds, like Satan amid the revelries of a Walpurgis Night. This bronze effigy is probably the most grotesque statue in the British Isles, and loses nothing of that quality in the noble Marquis being represented in a hussar uniform with flying dolman over his shoulders, and a busby, many sizes too large for him, on his head, in an attitude as though ferociously inviting the houses on the other side of the street to “come on.”

That diarising Scotswoman, Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness, travelling south in 1756, wrote:—

“We dined at Durhame, and I went to see the cathedrall; it is a prodigious bulky building. It was on Sunday betwixt services, and in the piazzas there were several boys playing at ball. I asked the girl that attended me, if it was the custome for the boys to play at ball on Sunday: she said, ‘they play on other days, as well as on Sundays.’ She called her mother to show me the Church; and I suppose, by my questions, the woman took me for a heathen, as I found she did not know of any other mode of worship but her own; so, that she might not think the Bishop’s chair defiled by my sitting down in it, I told her I was a Christian, though the way of worship in my country differed from hers. In particular, she stared when I asked what the things were that they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.”

[Picture: Framwellgate Bridge]

They were hassocks: articles apparently then not known to Presbyterians.

And so she continued southward:—

“Next day, the 7th, we dined none, but baited at different places, and betwixt Doncaster and Bautry a man rode about in an odd way, whom we suspected for a highwayman. Upon his coming near, John Rattray pretended to make a quarle with the post boy, and let him know that he keept good powder and ball to keep such folks as him in order; upon which the felow scampered off cross the common.”

The Great North Road leaves Durham over Framwellgate Bridge, built by Bishop Flambard in Norman times. Although altered and repaired in the fifteenth century and later, it is still substantially the same bridge. There was once a fortified gateway on it, but that was taken down in 1760. Bridge, River, Castle, and Cathedral here form a majestic picture.

XXIII

AND now to take the open road again. The chief features of the road between Durham and Newcastle are coal-pits, dismal pit villages, and coal-dust. Not at once, however, is the traveller introduced to these, and the ascent out of Durham, through the wooded banks of Dryburn, is very pretty. It is at Framwellgate Moor, a mile and a half from the city, that the presence of coal begins to make itself felt, in the rows of unlovely cottages, and in the odd figures of the pitmen, who may be seen returning from their work, with grimy faces and characteristic miner’s dress. Adjoining this village, and indistinguishable from it by the stranger, is the roadside collection of cottages known as “Pity Me,” taking its name from the hunted fox in the sign of the “Lambton Hounds” inn.