Part 12

It is not a prepossessing entrance, this narrow street of old and grimy, but not ancient, houses and third-rate shops, that leads up into the town, but many surprises await the explorer who, primed with armchair knowledge, sets out upon the road to correct his reading by his own observation. Such an one would find that only strangers speak of “Northampton” as spelled, giving full value to the “North.” To the townspeople it is “N’Thampton.” Each style seems quaint to those who favour the other.

The stranger would expect to find Northampton, as a factory town, a place of squalor and grime; but coming here, and emerging into the market-place from the not very pleasing entrance, his expectations are utterly shattered. There are few towns of the size of Northampton—whose population is now considerably over 89,000—that are so bright and clean, and prosperous-looking, as this; and the stranger, to whom its Radical politics are familiar, and to whom its choice for many years of such Parliamentary representatives as Mr. Henry Labouchere and Bradlaugh argued (reasonably or not I will not declare) brutality and atheism, is pleasurably surprised at not finding the ancient and beautiful churches of the town become “temples of Reason,” lecture-halls, or other things in the secular way. Nor does he perceive, as he had half-anticipated, scowling Radical-Atheists engaged in violence, or shouting insults after the clergy and every person with a good coat upon his back. The picture thus drawn seems farcical, but it does by no means belie the ideas of a great many people who have never been in Northampton and instinctively form a picture of it from tales of its ancient election turbulence and from its choice of representatives in modern times. Northampton is nothing like that: dignity and beauty characterise its chief streets, and municipal effort so long ago as 1864 sought to beautify the town with a splendid Guildhall. Poetry springs—albeit unconsciously—even in the breasts of its Town Councillors and Poor Law Guardians: where none would seek it. Sir William Gilbert makes Bunthorne suspect, in _Patience_, that

Nature, in all thy works Something poetic lurks, Even in colocynth and calomel

[Sidenote: _POETRY_]

How true that is! Even in the prosaic person of a Poor Law Guardian, the fount of true poesy may be bubbling, all unknown; as in that of a member of the Board of Guardians at Northampton, who, in January 1907, challenged the workhouse master’s expenditure of £6 10s. on marking-ink. Said he (he bore the great name of Dickens), lisping in numbers:

I want to speak to you and the Board very plain; I trust my appeal will not be in vain; I hope you will pause and seriously think Before ordering any more marking-ink.

It does not quite scan, but to a man who speaks poetry unawares, inspired by such a domestic detail as marking-ink, a little practice should make perfect. To what heights might he not rise on the subject (say) of baths or drains!

The Guildhall, already referred to, is a building of extremely ornate character, designed by Godwin, with a florid, many-niched and canopied front, furnished with statues of the chief makers of Northampton’s history, and with even the capitals of its columned vestibule carved after the mediæval manner with groups of tiny figures. But in 1864 architectural sculptors had but begun to recover the forgotten arts of the mediæval craftsman, and the execution of the designs is at once coarse and feeble. The interior, except the light and very fine, but barbarically coloured great hall, is of a truly Gothic gloom.

We first find mention of “Hamtune,” as it was originally styled, in the Saxon Chronicle, when the Middle Angles occupied this district of the kingdom of Mercia. Then the Danes, who came first to ravage, settled in this part of the country, and the history of the town, which even then was a considerable place, for very many years remained one of fighting, and the victories of first one and then another. So often as it was burned, it was again rebuilt: no difficult matter then, when the houses were chiefly of timber. In 1065, the year before the coming of the Conqueror, it was again burnt, in the jealous struggles between the Saxon rulers; and there can be little doubt that, wearied of being ground to powder between the upper and the nether millstones of these ambitions, the people of Hampton were not altogether averse from being ruled by a stronger hand, in whose time a little peace might be assured.

Certain it is that Northampton flourished under Norman rule, perhaps more than any other provincial town. The great castle then built has utterly disappeared, but other signs of great expansion remain, in the ancient Norman churches; and history tells us how favourite a place this was with the Norman and the Plantagenet sovereigns, who hunted in the vast surrounding forests, and held council in the great hall of the castle. The most famous of these councils was that of 1164, when Becket’s ultimate fate was foreshadowed. The fierce contest for the supremacy of the Church, or of its subordination to the State in the person of the monarch, had for some time past been in progress. A number of charges had been preferred against the Archbishop, and he was summoned to Northampton to meet them. He arrived and was refused the ceremonial kiss of peace by the King: his bishops renounced his authority, and when he marched to the hall of the castle, carrying his own archiepiscopal cross, the King and court withdrew, leaving him and a few faithful attendants alone. Dwell upon the scene for a moment, and picture the ominous and dramatic grandeur of it. Becket, already threatened with exile or death, fled to the coast and expatriated himself for six years; returning at last to his martyrdom at Canterbury.

[Sidenote: _HISTORY_]

The battles of Northampton in after years carried on the early warlike associations of the town: the first in 1264, when the revolting barons shut themselves up here, and the town and castle were besieged and taken by Prince Edward; the second in 1460, when the Yorkists defeated the Lancastrians with great slaughter, in the Delapré meadows outside the town, and captured the person of Henry VI. himself. By all historic precedents Northampton should have been the scene of a contest in the long struggle between King Charles and his Parliament; but, fortunately for the burgesses, who were commercial folk and not greatly interested, the castle was too far gone in decay to be useful to either side, and the great Northamptonshire battle of Naseby was fought twelve miles away.

Boots and shoes were Northampton’s chief interest, and whoso would might fight for King or Parliament, so only the business of the town were let alone; but in 1648 the town supplied Cromwell’s army with fifteen hundred pairs. The beginnings of this ancient trade go deep down into history. King John bought a pair of boots described as “single-soled.” The transaction is recorded in Latin—“pro 1 pari botarum singularum,” and the price was twelve pence, probably for cash, for no one who could possibly help himself would have thought of giving credit to so shabby a fellow as King John.

And so throughout the centuries. Scarce a war happened but Northampton benefited by the increased demand for shoe-leather. Old Fuller in the long ago declared that it “may be said to stand chiefly on other men’s legs,” and there is probably a deep-seated conviction in the minds of the townsfolk that the state of the boot-and-shoe trade is a more sure index of the prosperity of the nation than that of the iron and shipbuilding trades, usually regarded as the chief indicators of the national welfare.

This conviction of the prime importance of foot-gear has in its time led to some quaint doings; notably when Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort came through the town in 1844, when the Mayor gave the Prince—who did not want them—a pair of boots. I suspect there have been many thousands of wayfarers through the town who _did_ sorely want a pair, and never had the offer.

Thousands of pairs of mud-boots were despatched hence to the Army in the Crimea; but whence came the brown paper and cardboard boots supplied by contractors to our poor fellows in that mismanaged campaign? Not from Northampton, I trust.

[Sidenote: “_VOTE EARLY, AND OFTEN_”]

Of the Northampton Parliamentary elections, famed in the long ago for the bitterness with which they were fought, none are more celebrated than the “great spendthrift election,” waged in 1761 between my lords Northampton, Spencer, and Halifax, for the privilege of nominating a member. The enormous expenses incurred were not the most remarkable thing about this contest, although they were unprecedented; nor was the fourteen days’ duration of the poll a thing unheard of. The really startling feature was the heaviness of that poll. Northampton had not only voted its full strength of 930 electors, but 217 over. A petition followed, and was settled, in the sporting manner of the age, by a toss. Lord Spencer won, and nominated his man—who resided in India.

The old churches of Northampton are very fine, and highly interesting in their several ways. There are four of them: St. Peter’s, St. Giles’s, Holy Sepulchre, and All Saints’. It seems strange, considering how ancient is the distinctive trade, that there is no church dedicated to St. Crispin, the patron saint of bootmakers and cobblers. Of all these churches that of the Holy Sepulchre is the most archæologically interesting; but to most people it is the great church of All Saints, in the Market Square, that stands for Northampton. And rightly so, for it is not merely in the centre of the town, but in a most striking and emphatic position; it is also the church selected by the Corporation for its state attendance of Divine worship, as the fine Mayor’s Chair in it—inscribed “Anno Majoratus 2ᵈᵒ Ricardi White, Anno Dom. 1680”—proves; and its curious architectural appearance gives to Northampton a distinct personality among English towns. This is in its present form no mediæval building, but a very remarkable structure of the time of Charles the Second, as we may readily perceive from the statue of him, clad in flowing wig and Roman toga, that surmounts the pillared west front.

Along the entablature above the imposing Ionic colonnade runs the insertion: “This statue was erected in memory of King Charles II., who gave a thousand tun of timber toward the rebuilding of this church and to this town.” The circumstance that made the rebuilding necessary and prompted the gift of timber (which came from the neighbouring Forest of Whittlebury) was the almost complete destruction of the old building in the great fire of 1675, when six hundred houses were also burnt. The tall tower, cased, bell-turreted, and balustraded, is a relic of the incinerated church.

[Sidenote: _THE TEMPLARS’ CHURCHES_]

St. Sepulchre’s—properly the “Church of the Holy Sepulchre”—generally known as “Pulker’s Church,” or “St. Pulker’s,” one of the four round churches in England—or five if we may include the round chapel in Ludlow Castle—is ascribed to the influence of the Templars, whose churches were avowedly built on the model of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Like the Temple Church and others, it is the nave portion of the building that is circular; the choir and presbytery branching eastwards from it. It is in a massive and gloomy Transitional Norman style, the eight huge pillars surmounted by pointed arches. It is magnificent in its austerity and in the warm golden-brown hue of the stone.

St. Giles’s, of nearly all styles from Norman to Perpendicular, and St. Peter’s, a fine late Norman work, built about 1160, complete the ancient churches of the town, with the exception of the mouldering old St. John’s Hospital, now used as a French Catholic church.

XIX

The electric tramways, without which no town nowadays considers itself fully furnished, run far out to the north, through the extended boundaries of “Greater Northampton” to the village of Kingsthorpe: the prosperity of the town certified to every beholder in the long lines of newly completed streets butting on to the fields, and in the new boot and shoe factories, from which you do not indeed hear the noise of the lapstones—such things being obsolete in these days of machinery—but the purr and the humming of wheels.

Just outside the borough boundaries are even more factories, built there for the frugal purpose of avoiding the borough rates; and so, in one way and another, Kingsthorpe, which was not so long since a rural village, with quiet village green, has now been invaded by the restless spirit of the age. Even the village inn has been rebuilt by the inevitable Phipps & Co., and might now, to all appearance, save for the sign of it, be a Jacobean mansion, renovated.

[Sidenote: _A PUZZLING MONUMENT_]

The apparent prodigality of the highway authorities at Kingsthorpe, in the matter of milestones, is a standing wonder to all wayfarers, for there, side by side, are two cast-iron “stones,” each giving sixty-seven miles to London, with distances to other places. The explanation of this singularity is that here, in the old days, the Kingsthorpe and Welford Trust and the Northampton and Market Harborough Trust met. The “stone” erected by the first gives thirteen miles to Welford, twenty-nine to Leicester, and one to Northampton: the other indicates sixteen miles to Market Harborough and one to Northampton.

To the right of the road on to Brixworth rises among a group of trees on the skyline a tall obelisk that piques curiosity. Traversing muddy lanes to the base of it, the explorer afflicted with an inquiring mind discovers, to his disgust, that it bears no inscription, and local inquiries result only in vague rustic talk of its being a monument to the great Duke of Wellington. Research proves it to be to a Duke of Devonshire; but although the rustics are thus proved to be wrong, the attitude of mind that leads them astray is, it will be allowed, entirely in order. From father to son the story has been handed down that it is in memory of a Duke: what other Duke, therefore, should be possible than the great warrior who still bulks so large in their imagination? They rightly cannot conceive that a Duke who has merely succeeded to a dukedom, and just existed in that state, has a claim to such recognition. But the thing is not without its sardonic irony. Built to keep alive the memory of an obscure dead Duke, it is known in all the countryside as a monument to one whose fame will not die, and needs no such memorial.

This monument that has missed its mark stands at the parish of Boughton (locally pronounced “Bowghton”), famous, together with the adjoining Boughton Green, for the exploits of “Captain Slash.” There was once a church, dedicated to St. John Baptist, at Boughton Green, but the tower and spire fell in 1785, and the district becoming gradually depopulated, the body of the church has long been a roofless ruin. The green is nowadays, except for one annual occasion, merely a desolate common. In former days, however, it was bordered by the cottages of more or less virtuous and contented peasantry, who did so excellently well during the old three-days’ horse-fair held here in June that they lived in comfort all the rest of the year. To the old horse-fair resorted horsey blackguards from many a shire, who swindled the innocent and each other, and fought and got drunk and slept in the ditches, whereupon the simple rustics, recognising that it was harvest-time, promptly went over their pockets. But the good old days are done. The police established a lock-up on the ground for the drunken and for other offenders, and then by degrees the fair itself decayed, until to-day it is but a one-day ghost of itself. The brick hut used as a lock-up still stands on the green.

[Sidenote: “_CAPTAIN SLASH_”]

But we must not forget “Captain Slash,” whose real name was George Catherall, a desperado of the highwayman type, who did a little rick-burning and general rural outraging in the ’20’s of the nineteenth century, and brought his lawless career to a dramatic close in 1826. He attempted, with the gang he captained, to let loose the lions in the menagerie on the fairground, hoping in the confusion to make away with a rich haul; but this desperate proposal was defeated on the eve of accomplishment. Very ancient gaffers at Boughton still tell the tale of dread as they heard it in their youthful days: how “Haaron Gardner ‘it’n auver th’ yed with a nedge stake,” and so brought about his capture, and how “Slash” was sentenced to death, and on July 21st was duly executed at Northampton Gaol, and the land had peace. It was certainly very late in the day for outlaws, but not too late for superstition, for newspaper reports of the execution tell how “a number of females immediately ascended the drop and had their wens rubbed.”

And so, passing the site of the old “Bowden” or Boughton Inn of coaching days, to Brixworth, meeting, possibly, on the way, a straining field of the Pytchley Hunt, in whose country we now are. You must be careful how you enunciate “Pytchley.” John Bright once mentioned it in the House of Commons. He called it the “Pitchley,” and stood aghast at the howl of derision which arose from the assembled fox-hunters masquerading as legislators. It was a fox-hunting House then, and “Labour” (_i.e._ well-paid agitators acting the part) was not dreamt of. P_y_tchley is your only way, although to be sure there are heretics who call it the “Patchley.” But they are worse barbarians than Bright, who knew no better.

Brixworth is an old, old place, truly “old arnshunt,” as the rustics say; but the latter-day discovery that it is profitable to work the ironstone beds situated here is just beginning to hustle the grey Roman and Saxon antiquity of it, with a fringe of red-brick cottages. Red brick in a country where building stone is of the plentifullest!

Many evidences of the presence here of the Romans have been discovered, and the great grim church of Brixworth, built largely of Roman brick and tile, has been thought by antiquaries to be, in fact, a Roman basilica. Roman coins have also been found in fairly large numbers; but history tells of no camp or town of that people here; and this is no Roman road. The church, locally said to be the “oldest in England,” appears to have been built or adapted by the Saxons so far back as A.D. 690, and thus “Briclesworde,” as it is styled in Domesday Book, was of a hoary antiquity even when that genuine antique, William the Conqueror, “came over.” The church was then a dependency of the great monastery of Medehamsted—the “Peterborough” of to-day—and until the vicarage was rebuilt, some fifty years since, remains of a monastic house were visible in its cellars.

[Sidenote: _BRIXWORTH_]

The exterior and interior of the church are alike very striking, and the curious staircase tower added to the west side of the original tower is of particular interest, having been built on to the early Saxon tower in later and unsettled times, for the purpose of putting the church in a defensible condition against the forays of the Danish rovers then laying waste the country. The entrance was formerly by a door in the western face of the tower, but this semi-circular addition abolished all access that way. The upper stages and the spire are, of course, very much later, having in fact been built in the Decorated style of the fourteenth century. Rude masonry and irregularly disposed herring-bone patterns of Roman tile form the walls.

The interior, as of most other Saxon churches, is more curious than beautiful, however archæologically rare it may be. It consists nowadays of nave, chancel, semi-circular apse, and south chapel; but there were formerly narrow north and south aisles, as the walled-in nave arcades show. At what period these were destroyed does not appear. The apse is a modern rebuilding of the original, destroyed about 1460, but the ambulatory around it was not rebuilt. Large Gothic windows at various periods replaced the original Saxon small round-headed windows of the nave, but they have been abolished, and replicas of the Saxon work placed in their stead; which, however pleasing to sticklers for uniformity in matters architectural, was archæologically a crime demanding the penalty of _peine forte et dure_, or something especially excruciating. To destroy a genuine Decorated or Perpendicular window for the purpose of inserting a modern “Saxon” one—probably framed in with specially made “Roman” tiles—is distinctly Grimthorpian, and not playing the game according to the rules understood by the most enlightened. Recent excavations have brought to light the bases of Roman columns in the churchyard and in the church itself, and in short, ever since about a century ago, when people grow curious about antiquities, the building has been a kind of archæological lucky-bag. You scrape the plaster off a pier and discover a stone sculptured with a Roman eagle; disregarding spiders and immemorial dust, you thrust a hand into an ancient hole in the nave wall, and lo, out comes a reliquary containing the “Adam’s apple” that once waggled in the holy throat of Bishop Boniface. In fact, anything is possible at Brixworth:

More broken pans, more gods, more mugs, Old snivel-bottles, jordans, and old jugs,

as Peter Pindar might say; while many intimate anatomical belongings of the saints are doubtless even yet secreted on the premises.

[Sidenote: _WATER FLOWS UNWANTED_]

The road in the centre of Brixworth street dips down steeply in a tree-shaded hollow, and is very narrow, with stone walls on either side. In one of these may still be seen, recessed slightly, the spring representing “Bartlet’s Well,” opened in 1631 by Margaret Bartlet “for the use of travellers.” But although the spring is in going order, I observe that the travellers who pass this way prefer the tipple kept at the inn, hard by.

Two miles and a half ahead, and then less than a quarter of a mile to the right hand, lies Lamport, but so hidden that none would suspect its existence. The wayside “Swan” inn, opposite the by-road, derives its sign from the Swan crest of the Ishams, the ancient owners of Lamport (whose name, by the way, is pronounced I-sham, not Ish-am). Lamport is a village of whose kind there are still, happily, many hundreds in England, in spite of the hurry and fever of the age. It is small, it is beautiful in a mild way, it is quiet, and no celebrated or merely notorious person has ever done it the honour to be born within its bounds. A little more beauty, a slight connection with history, and it would become a place of resort. I suspect that this something less than a quarter of a mile remove from the road must in these latter days be a profound source of congratulation to the inhabitants, who live, by virtue of it, “the world forgetting and by the world forgot,” or at least by those undesirables who thunder along the main road in motor-cars, enveloped, and enveloping others, in clouds of dust. Such an one passed me on the road, equipped with some damnable new contrivance in place of the usual horn: a shrieking something like a soul in torment. As the yelling abomination died away and the dust began to settle down, and the trees could again be seen and the birds heard, I wondered why such things could be permitted to exist.