Part 14

The Clock Tower, the centre of modern Leicester, is what the Forum was to ancient Rome. Everything centres around it. Dr. Johnson said that the tide of London life ran most strongly at Charing Cross, and even more justly it may be said that the tide of Leicester’s busy days eddies with greatest force at the Clock Tower. This is a particularly fine stone structure with spire, standing in the centre of the road where the five great thoroughfares of Gallowtree Gate, Belgrave Gate, Church Gate, Humberstone Gate, and High Street meet. It was built in 1868, as a tribute to the memory of four Leicester worthies: Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester; William of Wyggeston, the founder, in the early part of the sixteenth century, of the Wyggeston Hospital, whose money now also supports the Wyggeston Schools; Sir Thomas White, and Gabriel Newton, benefactors of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Roman Leicester centred around the site of the mediæval castle, some distance away, the Clock Tower standing outside the East Gate.

[Sidenote: _RATÆ_]

The antiquity of Leicester is indeed undoubted. Not only are the remains of the Romans numerous, and continually discovered in the course of building operations, but it is well known to have been the station of _Ratæ Coritanorum_, and here the Fosse Way and the so-called “Via Devana” meet. The Jewry Wall, so named from this quarter having been that part of the mediæval town where the Jewish community lived, marks the western limit of _Ratæ_. It is a mass of brickwork, with a number of arched recesses, and remains to-day the chief visible relic of old Rome. The best-received opinions hold that this is a portion of the Roman West Gate, with fragments of a temple to Janus.

_Ratæ_, to have been so carefully and massively walled, must have been a populous and a wealthy place, facts that seem additionally evident in the many fine tesselated pavements discovered at various times. There is an example on its original site here. They call it, on a notice-board, “the most beautiful tesselated pavement in the world,” and charge you 2_d._ to see it, but that is an _ex parte_ statement, and there is a better than the best a little way off, for which the appropriately higher charge of 3_d._ is made. Where the supremely bestest is to be seen, and at what cost, this chronicler dares not presume to say. The twopenny pavement is a private show, and the superlative example belongs, or did belong, to the Corporation. A curious modern history belongs to it. Discovered in 1832, in digging foundations for a house, it formed for many years the floor of a cellar. In 1890, the house was purchased by the Corporation, and then in 1896 came the Great Central Railway to Leicester, on its extension to London, with its embankment and arches, and abolished many things, among others a Quaker burial ground. The Quakers, therefore, lie nowadays very much deeper than those who laid them there ever contemplated; and at the same time the house with the Roman pavement was levelled. To move the pavement would have been to injure it, and in the end arrangements were made by which the railway company constructed a special room, lined with glazed white bricks; and there in this species of shrine it rests, while the trains roll overhead.

But to return to the Jewry Wall, hard by the Norman church of St. Nicholas. It is grimy with modern filth, but reverend in its age of some 2,000 years, and of giant strength, so that you cannot but smile at sight of the recent flimsy pillars of brick that “support” it, and are already themselves decrepit.

[Sidenote: _THE ROMAN MILESTONE_]

But the most interesting of all Leicester’s relics of Roman Britain is stored in the Museum. This is the milestone discovered so long ago as 1771, on the Fosse Way, near Thurmastone, two miles from the town; on its original site, as the inscription on it proves. It is a cylindrical block of sandstone, rudely incised with a long, highly characteristic statement in a shockingly abbreviated and ill-spaced form, which, translated, runs, “During the Emperorship of the Divine, August, Most Great and Noble Cæsar, Hadrian, son of the Divine, August, Most Great and Noble Trajan, Conqueror of Parthia, in the Fourth Year of his Tribunal Power: thrice Consul. To Ratæ, Two Miles.”

I cannot withhold my astonishment, either at the miracles of condensed information displayed in this inscription, which outvies Pitman’s, or any other, shorthand system; or at the diabolic cleverness of whoever first solved the problem it must have presented. It must have puzzled even a good many Roman travellers, and to-day looks very like a “Bill / Stumps his mark” order of monument. The Romans evidently did not understand the first function of a milestone: to present clear and concise information. A modern milestone made in like manner, and inscribed: “During the Kingship of His Most Gracious Majesty Edward the Seventh, son of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, Conqueror of the Boer Republics, in the seventh year of his reign, Emperor of India. To Leicester, Two Miles”—would, it may be suspected, be the subject of unfavourable criticism.

It is not a little wonderful that this relic of an earlier civilisation has survived the rough usage that followed its discovery. It was removed to a garden close at hand, and would have been converted into a garden-roller, had it not been for the timeous intervention of Dr. Percy. A little later it narrowly escaped a worse fate, for it was claimed by one of the road commissioners, who would have had it broken up for road metal, had not public interest become aroused; with the odd result that this hoary relic was placed on a pedestal in midst of the town, crowned with a conical-shaped stone, and surmounted by—of all things—a lamp-post! Thus it remained until 1844, when, having been nearly ruined by exposure to the elements, and to wanton mischief, it was removed to its present home.

[Sidenote: _DESTRUCTION OF RATÆ_]

_Ratæ_ suffered under fire and sword when the protection of the Romans was withdrawn, and lay, the charred funeral pyre of its inhabitants, for long years, the Saxons, after their custom, settling outside the ruined place, alike for sanitary and superstitious reasons. They called their settlement Leir-ceastre, after the original British name, Caer Leir, and thus the name of _Ratæ_ disappeared, save in historical records; becoming the “Leicester” of our day; the “Less-ess-tare” of French visitors, who cannot reconcile the spelling of the name with its pronunciation of “Lester.”

The claim of Leicester having been the home of King Lear is based merely on the phonetic likeness of his name to that of the British town.

The place had a new era of troubles when, in their turn, the Anglo-Saxons decayed and a more virile race invaded the land. Then Leicester fell a prey to the Danes, whose settlements may be traced at this day in the characteristic ending of Leicestershire place-names in the syllable “by,” peculiar to places of Danish origin: Oadby, Rearsby, Dalby, Sileby, and many others.

The old churches of Leicester are fairly numerous, and very interesting. St. Nicholas’ was built in Saxon and early Norman times, chiefly from the materials of the Roman wall, by whose remains it stands. Here Leicester is seen in its latest development, the neighbourhood having been cut up and largely rebuilt since the advent of the Great Central Railway. There remained until that event a curious street at the side of St. Nicholas, known as “Holy Bones,” but in the great clearances “Holy Bones” disappeared, and only gaunt remains of houses and factories mark the site of it. The name arose from a great find of bones here, supposed to be relics of sacrifices made in the Temple of Janus. Their sanctity, seeing that they are thought to be the bones of oxen, has been challenged.

St. Mary de Castro, whose spire is one of the most prominent landmarks of the town, is unquestionably the finest church, but extraordinarily dark. It is Norman, Early English, and Decorated, and has two naves. But an architectural account of St. Mary’s would occupy many pages. I like to think how here, in this very building, Henry the Sixth, at the time only five years of age, but already four years a king, passed the midnight vigil that formed part of a new knight’s probation. With him, forty others were received into the ranks of chivalry. How many of them survived the bloody Wars of the Roses that raged in after years around the person of that unhappy King?

[Sidenote: “_SMOKE FARTHING_”]

St. Margaret’s, down in the low-lying, soggy Church Gate, is not, in its present form, the oldest church, having been rebuilt in the Perpendicular period, but it is the successor and representative of the mother-church of the town, built about A.D. 600, when Leicester was the seat of a Saxon bishop. It stands not so far from the site of Leicester Abbey, and the street of “Sanvey Gate,” at the corner, indeed derives its name from “Sancta Via,” having been the way by which the mediæval religions processions came and went. The great imposing tower, built from the proceeds of a tax of “Smoke Farthing,” levied on the domestic hearths of the parish, is now a very weathered and crumbling mass, but all the more venerable-looking; and when the proposed restoration has taken place, it is to be feared that much of the majesty of it, will have vanished until such time as the surrounding factories have deposited more soot. But that will take a considerable time, for Leicester is not a sooty place.

For an example of thorough and unsparing restoration we must turn to St. Martin’s. Strangers, gazing at the exterior and the tall broach spire, imagine they have before them a new structure, but it is chiefly an Early English building, and, as the interior proves, a very fine one, and built on the site of a Roman temple to Diana. An epitaph of strange human interest is seen by the south porch:—

“Enquiring mortal, whoe’er thou art, ponder here on an incident which highly concerns the whole progeny of Adam. Near this place lieth the body of John Fenton, who fell by violence May 17th, 1778, and remains a sad example of the incompetency of judicial institutions to punish a Murderer. He left to mourn his untimely fate a mother, a widow, and two children. These, but these alone, are greatly injured: personal security received a mortal wound when vengeance was averted from his assassin by the sophistical refiners of natural justice.”

The man who slew Fenton was one François Soulés, a French officer then prisoner-of-war at Leicester, who was at the time a guest in Fenton’s house. The affair took place in a quarrel over a game of billiards. Soulés was condemned to death, but the sentence was revised, and he was in the end acquitted.

All Saints’ is chiefly interesting from the curious clock over the south porch, originally set up about 1610, removed in 1875, and in 1900 restored and replaced. So not all restoration is to be reprobated. Time, _edax rerum_, is represented on it, with his scythe, and above, in two little tabernacles, are a couple of miniature Jacks-smite-the-Clock, in the costume of James the First’s time, who strike the quarters.

[Sidenote: _TRINITY HOSPITAL_]

The Collegiate Church of St. Mary, in the Newarke, founded in 1331 by Henry, Earl of Lancaster, in conjunction with his magnificent Hospital of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity, has utterly disappeared, and with it, by all accounts, the grandest architectural work Leicester ever possessed. “Knights and Squires commended it as being the most fairest they had ever seen.” I like that old phrasing: by “most fairest” something supremely fair must surely have stood here. But the old Knights and Squires had not, it may be supposed, seen everything, and their testimony is not conclusive. Every one who has read ancient accounts of fine churches knows that each one was the finest, and makes allowances accordingly.

But it _was_ very fine. The Reformation did well in many ways, but it did not so in the destruction of St. Mary’s, whose only fragments may now be seen in a cellar.

Henry, Earl of Lancaster, ancestor of Henry the Fourth, founded church and Hospital in the four acres of ground adjoining the Castle. He surrounded them with a wall and a defensible gateway—the “Magazine Gateway,” as it is now called. By Hospital, of course, we understand almshouse. It was designed, oddly enough, for fifty infirm old men, and five women as nurses. The Hospital, “restored” in 1776, was again restored, and very largely rebuilt, in 1902; the work excellently well done. Interesting relics of ancient days are preserved in the hall. There stands the so-called “Duke of Lancaster’s Porridge-pot,” a fine bell-metal cauldron of sixty-one gallons capacity, whence the Hospitallers were helped. What a capacity for porridge! Others more or less resembling it are found in England, notably the Nuns’ Cauldron at Laycock Abbey, Wiltshire.

In the hall is also to be seen “Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket Piece,” a salt-box or nutmeg-grater dated 1579, inscribed “This belongeth to the Olde Ospitall”; and with the moral maxims: “Thinke ° wel ° and ° say ° wel ° bvtrather ° do ° wel”; and “Flee ° idilness ° and ° be ° wel ° occupied.”

[Sidenote: _THE TOWN WATCH_]

In the chapel is the finely robed effigy of Mary de Bohun, mother of Henry the Fifth. Seven morions and a number of breastplates, with a group of halberds disposed upon the walls, once belonged to the Town Watch, and are relics of the way in which Leicester was policed in Good Queen Bess’s glorious days.

The Newarke is changing, like all else. A sign of the times is the new Technical School on the site of St. Mary’s. But that is a striking view as you enter by Wyggeston’s Chantry House, and see the spire of St. Mary de Castro behind one of the old Castle arches. The Castle is a mere memory now, and where the Keep stood is at this time a bowling-green; but the Great Hall remains, where Parliaments met in 1414, 1426, and 1450; in those days when the Legislature was a more or less perambulating body, following the King to heel, like a dog. Faced nowadays with brick, none would suspect the antiquity of the Great Hall, now used as an Assize Court.

The natural pendant to the Assize Court is, of course, the Gaol; but that is removed by the length of a long street from the place of judgment. In it is stored the Leicester gibbet, last used in 1832, when one Cook, a bookbinder, who carried on business in a yard off Wellington Street, was hanged for a peculiarly revolting murder. A Mr. Paas, of London, a manufacturer of brass ornaments used in the bookbinding trade, had been accustomed to call upon him, and Cook, expecting his visit, had evidently prepared to murder him for sake of the gold he carried. The unfortunate man put up at the “Stag and Pheasant” inn, and, saying he would soon return, made his call upon Cook the last of the day. He was never again seen alive. Cook appears to have killed him with the iron handle of his press, afterwards hacking his body in pieces and burning it on an immense fire. His story of a quarrel, and of accidentally killing Mr. Paas, was, in view of the preparations he had made—of laying in an unusual quantity of coal, having a hatchet re-ground, and giving his errand-boy a holiday—not believed; and eventually he pleaded guilty and posed as a contrite sinner. After he had been duly hanged, his body was gibbeted in Saffron Lane, on the outskirts of the town. The spectacle seems to have been popular, according to the following testimony:

[Sidenote: _THE GIBBET_]

“LEICESTER, _Aug._ 12.—Our town is like a fair to-day, with the people who are come to see Cook hanging in chains. He was put up yesterday afternoon, at four o’clock, when all the market people flocked in thousands to see the sight, and continued going all the night. To-day they are coming from the villages all round; some have walked as far as fourteen miles. Last night there were ginger-bread and other stalls at the place, but the mayor has put a stop to all that. It is not far from our new county gaol, which perhaps you remember. His brother says his body shall not hang long, but it would be no easy matter to remove it. It hangs about 35 feet from the ground, and is dressed in the same clothes as when he was hanged. We hear his bowels have been taken out, to try the experiment of burning them. It is currently reported his father has died to-day of a broken heart. I think it is very likely to be true, as he was very ill last week. The Ranters have been preaching under the gibbet this morning, before breakfast, and will again to-night. It is thought there were 40,000 people to see him hanged, but there will be many more to see him now hanging, if they continue to come as they do to-day.”

Riots followed, and the body was speedily removed. Two years later, the custom of gibbeting, or hanging in chains, was abolished by statute, chiefly owing to the disgraceful scenes enacted here.

XXII

Richard III., “as every schoolboy knows,” marched out from Leicester to defeat and death at Bosworth, but he did not march forth from the Castle, even then dilapidated. He slept—or, as Shakespeare would have it, his guilty conscience refused to let him sleep—the night before the battle at the “Blue Boar” inn.

Two days later, his body, flung ignominiously across the back of a horse, was brought back, and exposed publicly to view in the Hall of the Guild of Corpus Christi, and was then buried without any ceremony in the Greyfriars Church. There it remained for fifty years, until the destruction of the religious houses caused the remains of all who lay there to be cast away. Bow Bridge, crossing the river Soar near by, was replaced by the present iron bridge in 1862, and on it may be seen the inscription, “Near this spot lie the remains of Richard III., the last of the Plantagenets.”

The Corporation of Leicester has an ancient and honourable history, and has included in the many centuries of its existence a number of public-spirited men. “Many centuries” truly it is that the Corporation has existed, for the time is not known, since Leicester was Leicester, when there was not a Corporation. There was, however, no Mayor, so-styled, until 1251.

[Sidenote: _THE OLD TOWN HALL_]

The Town Hall that served the purpose from 1563 until 1876, when the great modern building was completed, still stands, hard by St. Martin’s Church, with which in fact it was closely associated, having been originally the home of a religious fraternity—the Corpus Christi Guild. The Mayor’s Parlour, built in the time of Charles the First, panelled with bog oak, remains, as also does the public hall, with timber roof, like a boat reversed. The building was self-contained to the minutest particulars, for adjoining the Parlour where the Worshipful the Mayor took his ease, was, and is, the cell where petty malefactors found what ease they might until justice, as then understood, dealt with them. A very full and complete account might be written of the old Town Hall, for the records concerning it are full and precise, but they lack confirmation of the tradition that Shakespeare himself acted with Richard Burbage’s company of players here. Mayor, aldermen, and common councillors were not averse from merry-making, and we have accounts of the mafficking that took place here to celebrate the defeat of the Armada, when the Town Waits were had into the gallery and discoursed on pipe and tabor, and the town went wild with joy, and fell on each other’s necks and wept, by which it seems that the glories of Mafeking Night in the twentieth century had their counterpart in the sixteenth. And a good thing, too; for when we cease to rejoice in victory we shall be a pitiful folk indeed. What the pro-Spaniards thought of it all is not recorded.

The old town library, adjoining, in what was once the Chantry House belonging to the Guild of Corpus Christi, was founded in 1632, chiefly from books until then belonging to St. Martin’s Church, and remains practically a museum of ancient devotional manuscripts and early printed works.

The modern Town Hall, eminently characteristic of the architecture that came into so extraordinary a vogue in the ’seventies and was completed in 1876, is of course in the style called “Queen Anne,” and largely in red brick. So greatly has the municipal business of Leicester grown that it is already much too small; but it is one of the most tasteful buildings of the kind in the country, and designed more with a view to excellence of detail than of the flamboyant eccentricity that has later prevailed. The design of the Crown Court is especially beautiful, in the restrained way, and even in the detail of the finely imagined decorative iron railings of the gardens in Town Hall Square this rare artistic quality is seen.

[Sidenote: _RADICAL LEICESTER_]

It will be judged from all the foregoing that Leicester is a large and busy place. It now numbers 215,000 inhabitants, engaged chiefly in the making of boots and shoes and hosiery. With a well-deserved Radical reputation—Leicester ever was Radical, even before it made boots—the Corporation now owns the Water, Gas, Electricity, and Tramways undertakings and makes them all pay a profit in relief of rates. Indeed, they do things on a business footing. In the public libraries of other towns where the betting news in the newspapers is discouraged, it is simply blacked out, but here it is neatly pasted over with local advertisements, and from them the Library garners in a modest income of between £20 and £30.

In every way this is very different from what John Evelyn, writing in 1654, calls “the old and ragged Citty of Leicester.” In his time it was “large and pleasantly seated, but despicably built, the chimney-flues like so many smiths’ forges.” But it is within the last decade that Leicester has suddenly rebuilt itself. It had grown enormously, but the ancient central streets were until then obviously ancient. Now they are Twentieth Century streets, in all—in the way of gigantic and highly ornate frontages with show-shops—that the expression indicates.

The growth of industrialism has wrought this marvellous change. History—a fine stirring history—the town has, but towns cannot live on the memory of times past. For the first small beginnings of modern Leicester you must trace back to 1680, when one Alsop began—not brewing—but stocking-weaving, in a small way. He prospered, and his success attracted others, and thus the “ragged old Citty” that Evelyn saw was first set upon its march to modern greatness. But I do not see, anywhere, a statue to that original stockinger. In a century from that time the trade of town and shire in hose was the largest in the world. The total population of Leicester was then only 14,000, and of these 6,000 were stocking-weavers.

[Sidenote: “_JEMIMAS_”]

In recent times Leicester had a reputation for cheap cotton hose and “side-springs.” All the “Jemimas” in the kingdom came from Leicester, and the prototypes of Arthur Sketchley’s porky “Mrs. Brown at the Seaside,” and at half a hundred other places, and the fat old women pictured in the comic prints of 1860-1870, with their legs encased in white cotton stockings bulging over their “side-spring” boots, were fully furnished, as to coverings of legs and feet, from here. “Jemimas”—that is to say, “side-spring” boots—are no longer worn, but elastic webbing for other purposes continues to be a staple product.