Part 15

Leicester became a boot and shoe manufacturing town in 1859. The trade began in a small way, but now employs close upon 40,000 people. Boots and shoes for women and children, and canvas shoes, are the kinds specially made. Fancy hosiery also is an important trade, and when jerseys were the fashion, about 1879, Leicester did very well. The blouse has probably come to stay, and Leicester rejoices in the prospect, for it has busy factories engaged in the production of them. In addition to these, and a host of minor industries, the stout tapestry fabrics used in upholstery, and particularly in the cushions of railway carriages, are made almost exclusively here.

And lastly, it was at Leicester in 1841 that the idea of railway excursions first occurred to Thomas Cook; and from Leicester to Loughborough, a distance of 10-3/4 miles, the first excursion train and the first Cook’s tourists set out, on July 15, 1841. The double journey cost a shilling and 670 excursionists took tickets.

[Sidenote: _CARDINAL WOLSEY_]

The site of the great Abbey of Leicester, the place where Cardinal Wolsey died in 1530, on his way from York to London, where he would undoubtedly have been executed had he survived the journey, lies beside the river Soar—own brother to the Saar in Alsace, and the Suir in Ireland—which skirts the western and north-western sides of the town, and has always rendered it subject to floods.

You come to the site of Leicester Abbey by way of many hosiery factories, whence emerge the warm oily smells of wools and worsteds and the click-clack of machinery; and thence by Frog Island. The Abbey of St. Mary de Pratis, _i.e._ “St. Mary of the Meadows,” stood, as its name indicates, by the water-meadows of this sluggish river. The site, with merely the old surrounding precinct wall, is alone left, and even the first secular mansion built there stands a roofless ruin.

Wolsey was under arrest, and worn with illness and misfortune, when he came here. In the words of Shakespeare:

At last with easy roads he came to Leicester, Lodged in the abbey; where the reverend abbot, With all his convent, honourably received him; To whom he gave these words—“O Father Abbot, An old man, broken with the storms of state, Is come to lay his weary bones among ye; Give him a little earth, for charity.”

He died the third day of his arrival, in the sixtieth year of his age. On the second day, observing his custodian, the Lieutenant of the Tower, in the room, he said, “Master Kyngston, I pray you have me commended to His Majesty. Had I but served God as I have served him, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is my just reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but only my duty to my prince.”

And thus died the proud Cardinal, before whom all in the land, except his Sovereign, had earlier abased themselves. They buried him in the Lady Chapel, but in another seven years the Abbey itself was dissolved, its lands seized, and the buildings themselves destroyed; and no man knows what became of the body of Wolsey. Like that of Richard the Third, it was obscurely dispersed with others, and hence these two great historic characters have no known resting-place and no monument. The site was granted to a Mr. Cavendish, and on it in another thirty years was built the mansion whose ruins are now to be seen.

This way ran the old original road out of Leicester to the north, instead of the existing road through Belgrave. The change, like that in the southern approach to the town, was due to the dread with which wayfarers in the early years of the seventeenth century regarded the place, sore stricken with the plague. They sought the byways and unfrequented paths outside the walls, and were careful not to enter the town itself. Traffic has ever been conservative, and when all fear of infection had at last died out, the new routes thus struck out were retained.

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Climbing steeply up out of the seething hollow where Leicester’s busy population strives, the road in a mile and a half comes to the hundredth mile from London. It is quiet and solitary, the village of Wanlip, near by, not revealing its existence. But the neighbourhood of Rothley—_i.e._ Roth-ley, the red field—on the left hand is presently seen by the disgusting deshabille of the allotments. However economically and socially desirable they may be, allotment gardens have ever a squalid note. Rothley is growing vast and growing ugly, with cheap, flimsy buildings and a hard-working population of stockingers and quarrymen; and the march of the little hutches of provincial suburbia is advancing on Rothley Temple, that historic house in its beautiful park of stately trees where Thomas Babington Macaulay was born, October 25th, 1800, “in a room panelled from floor to ceiling, like every corner of the ancient mansion, with oak almost black with age.” It had been in the time of Queen Elizabeth the home of that Anthony Babington who in 1586 was executed for a wild and foolish plot to murder the Queen and to release the Queen of Scots: a conspiracy that not only failed, but sealed the fate also of the Scottish queen.

The name “Temple” indicates that this was formerly the site of a Preceptory of the Knights Templars, and adjoining the house is still a chapel including some remains of the Templars’ church and an effigy of some unknown Crusader.

[Sidenote: _MACAULAY_]

When raised to the Peerage in 1857 as Baron Macaulay, the historian sentimentally added “of Rothley,” although, to be sure, he owned no property here. In 1859 he was dead. The place is thus doubly associated with the man who made history a romance, beside whose enthralling pages the novels of the day when his History of England was new were flat and stale. Latter-day destructive critics have fallen foul of his style and reduced what they term “Macaulayese” to a formula in which the use of antithesis takes a prominent and mechanical part. Macaulay’s style, however, remains the most brilliant exemplar of the oratorico-narrative method, and is not likely to suffer greatly at the hands of the unsympathetic.

Still, there is an extravagant note in the epitaph over his grave in Westminster Abbey: “His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth for evermore.” Such language would be almost extravagant if employed upon Shakespeare himself, and is fitting only for a Nelson or a Wellington.

The river Soar, lending its name to a number of neighbouring villages, is responsible for that of Mountsorrel, a lovely name; but the district is full of the most impressive place-names. What a fine mouthful is “Ratcliffe-on-the-Wreake.” It must be a satisfaction to date one’s correspondence from a place like that. “Thrumpton,” too: is that not fine? Walton-on-the-Wolds has its merits, while there is an air of distinction about Groby, recognised centuries ago, when Lord Grey was “Lord Grey of Groby.” But “Barrow-on-Soar” is not nice.

The great rock of Mountsorrel, a bold craggy height of syenite, or exceptionally hard granite, largely quarried for millstones and road-metal, gives its name to the village nestling beneath the crag. A castle once frowned upon the crest of it, but has long been a thing of the past. Even in Camden’s day it was but a heap of rubbish. In remote times a stronghold of the Earls of Leicester, and afterwards of Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, its history is obscure, but it seems early to have been abandoned by those dignified nobles and occupied by bands of outlaws who levied toll upon wayfarers, and behaved so outrageously that at last the countryside was roused. “In the year 1217,” according to Camden, “the inhabitants of these parts pulled it down to the ground, as a nest of the devil, and a den of thieves and robbers.”

[Sidenote: _MOUNTSORRELL_]

An ancient legend told how the devil, on his way to Leicester, essayed the journey in three leaps. At Mountsorrel he mounted his sorrel horse, and made one leap to Wanlip: not an altogether insignificant performance, for the distance is three miles. Thence he sprang a mile further, to Birstall, where horse and rider were both burst with the force of their descent; but with his remaining strength he sprang another mile, to Belgrave, where, a mile short of Leicester, he was buried: and that is how Belgrave got its name. So now we know.

Let no one, charmed with the name of Mountsorrel, come to the place with high expectations of finding a picturesqueness to match. The romantic scenery of rugged rock looking down upon the pleasant valley of the Soar has been since 1845 the scene of quarry operations, and atrocious raw scars seam the mount on all sides; and beneath it, and for close upon a mile along the road, runs an abject townlet of the out-at-elbows, down-at-heel variety, with rows upon rows of mean cottages where many of the seven hundred quarrymen and their families dwell. That is modern Mountsorrel. Enfolded in midst of all these later developments, you still see vestiges of the Mountsorrel of from a hundred to three hundred years ago, when it was a village dependent for its existence solely upon the road. Still stands the “Black Swan”; although, to be sure, it now does little else but stand, being empty and forlorn. Even yet, relics of a happier day, the emblematic bunches of grapes hang from its eighteenth-century red-brick frontage, telling of the generous wine once dispensed within. The “White Swan,” itself a house contemporary with its black brother, is more fortunate, and appears still to thrive.

Mountsorrel is precisely as described above, but it is a charming subject for a sketch. Standing on the cobblestoned footwalk by the “White Swan,” you look across to the granite crag, to a group of old houses, and to the singular, temple-like market-cross that replaces the beautifully shafted Gothic cross removed in 1793. Sir John Danvers of Swithland, a neighbouring squire, afterwards Lord Lanesborough, coveted the cross for his park and offered to erect the existing building in exchange for it; and, the people of Mountsorrel agreeing, the thing was done.

Quorndon succeeds to Mountsorrel, at the interval of a mile and a half. Nowadays, and for many a year past, it has been docked of half its name, and is now “Quorn”; the seal having been set upon the practice by the style adopted for the Great Central Railway’s station, “Quorn and Woodhouse.” And thus are place-names debased. If the name of Quorndon were translated from the ancient Saxon whence it is derived, this would then be called Mill Hill, the “Quorn” coming from “quern,” in the Middle Ages a hand-mill, but originally a mill of any kind. The original Quorndon must therefore have been a mill on the adjoining uplands.

Woodhouse itself lies away back in Charnwood Forest, with the parish of Woodhouse Eaves adjoining; the “Eaves” in the name referring to its ancient situation on the edge, or “eaves,” of the Forest; although there have been those who derived it from the remarkable cavern, over whose roof the modern church is built.

[Sidenote: _QUORNDON_]

The village of Quorndon, once and for long years the home of the famous Quorn Hunt, has since 1905 lost that distinction. The old kennels were then relinquished, and new built two miles away, at Barrow-on-Soar, a busy place of lime-works, with a church remarkable for a number of eccentric epitaphs on the Cave family, of which here below is an example:

Herein this Grave there lyes a Cave, We call a Cave a Grave— If Cave be Grave, and Grave be Cave, Then, reader! judge, I crave, Whether doth Cave here lye in Grave, Or Grave here lye in Cave? If Grave in Cave here buried lye, Then ‘Grave where is thy victorie?’ Go, reader, and report, here lyes a Cave Who conquers Death and buries his own Grave.

One is curious to know what kind of men they were who wrote this sort of thing. Nothing seems to have been sacred to these funeral funny fellows and mortuary wags, who would start a conceit on false premisses, pursue it to its own death, and then worry it into rags.

It was about 1750 that Hugo Meynell, the “Father of Fox-hunting,” purchased Quorn Hall and established the hounds, and he hunted and he halloed for forty-eight years over a huge stretch of country from Market Harborough to the Trent—more than thirty miles across—so that there was scarce a bullfinch whose rails his horses’ hoofs had not scraped in all this hunting territory. He knew the muddy bottom of many a ditch and had been soused in every stream before his hunting days were done and his son succeeded him as Master for a brief two years. Meynell not only established the Hunt, but made it pre-eminent, and Quorn was then—what with the lavish hospitality he dispensed at the Hall, and with the many hunting men who took up their quarters here—what Melton Mowbray is now, the metropolis of hunting. The village—or little town that it was for gaiety—was in fact too lively and too expensive for some, and it was this too great success that led to Melton arising in its stead: an old-time sportsman discovering the then unknown sleepy old market-town and establishing himself there, for quiet and economy. Hunting men who have ridden to hounds in Leicestershire any time during the last sixty years or more will smile at the association of Melton with cheapness. Our exploratory sportsman of long ago had, however, made a great discovery. He found that Quorndon being in the centre of the Quorn Hunt, you must hunt, unless you be exceptionally energetic, almost exclusively with that pack; whereas from Melton, that town standing in the marches of other hunts, you might be loyal to your old love and yet take the field, day in and day out, with the Belvoir and the Cottesmore as well. And thus the fame and fortune of Melton grew.

[Sidenote: _THE QUORN HUNT_]

This is no place to tell of the glories of the Quorn Hunt under Assheton-Smith, or Osbaldiston—“The Squire,” as every one loved to call him; or the further splendours under Sir Richard Sutton, who, when asked why he hunted seven days a week, replied, “Because I can’t hunt eight.” The annals of the Hunt are extensive and the gossip endless, ranging through the whole gamut of sentiment: rising to Homeric laughter and sinking to the depths of mysticism, as when the older villagers tell you of the story, elderly when even they were young, of how Dick Burton, the huntsman, died and was buried in Quorndon churchyard, and how the hounds killed a fox on his grave at the close of the next hunting day.

The interior of Quorndon church is beautiful and exquisitely kept, particularly the Farnham Chapel, the property of the ancient Farnham family, seated at Quorndon for many centuries past, and still here. The chapel, only to be entered by favour, is filled with the elaborate monuments of bygone Farnhams, of which the most notable is that to John Farnham, Gentleman Pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, who died in 1587. He lies in life-sized effigy beside Dorothy his wife, and is habited in armour, with a representation by his side of the axe carried by the honourable corps of which he was a member, whose duties were to form a bodyguard to the Sovereign on public occasions. “Pensioner” appears to be a misleading term, the membership being honorary and entailing expense, rather than bringing payment.

John Farnham appears to have been also a kind of captain of free-lances, warring in the pay of foreign princes on the Continent. An alabaster bas-relief on the wall of the chapel (like the tomb itself, recently restored) shows him leading his men on to the siege of a castle. A quaint epitaph in verse tells us something of what he was:

John Farnham here within this tombe enterred doth remaine, whose life resigned up to God, the heavens his soul containe; and if you do desire to knowe his well deserved praise, go aske in court what life he ledd, and how he spent his days, where princes great he truly served with whõ he stood in grace, for good conceit and pleasaunt wit favour’d in every place. Beloved of the noblest sorte, well liked of the rest, unto his friend a faithfull friend, and fellowe to the best, In warres he spent his youth, for youth the best expense of dais, and did transfer from field to Court his just rewarde of praise. Descended of an antient house, with honour ledd his life only with one daughter blest, and with a vertuous wife. God gave him here on earth to live twise fortie years and odd, with life well spent he liveth now for aye with God.

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[Sidenote: “_GREAT PAUL_”]

Loughborough, standing among ecclesiologists for bells, succeeds to Quorndon. The bell-founding firm of John Taylor & Sons, established here in 1840, is the birthplace of many of these instruments of the barbarous practice of bell-ringing that has survived into an otherwise civilised age, and here in 1881 was cast the monster bell of St. Paul’s Cathedral, “Great Paul,” whose hoarse growl—like a bell with bronchitis—is heard daily at one o’clock in the City of London. It is the largest bell in England, weighing 17-1/2 tons, and one of the most useless, being practically little else than the City man’s luncheon bell. “Great Paul,” being too big for the railway bridges, was brought to London by road.

But there are other industries beside bell-founding at Loughborough. The ancient trade of bobbin-net making is still carried on, together with the hosiery and weaving and stocking-knitting that so thoroughly pervade Leicestershire and a good deal of Notts; and there are dye-works and engineering-shops too, a whole basketful of unromantic but useful and mutually dependent trades: the extensive coal-trade of the town ministering to the engineering and other power-using factories, and the big breweries subsisting upon the magnificent thirsts produced by coal-grit and the heat of furnaces. It will be guessed from the foregoing that Lovely Loughborough is not a phrase by which the place can rightly be known. Only the narrow main street, where the old “Bull’s Head” inn still exhibits a gallows sign stretching from side to side overhead, is at all removed from commonplace, and the broad market-place is lined with modern buildings in which many of the great number of Loughborough’s flashily rebuilt inns that call themselves “hotels,” and are really nothing but drinking shops, are situated.

[Sidenote: _LOUGHBOROUGH_]

One commonly finds that Loughborough enjoys—or perhaps that is not quite the right word; let us say endures—some of the coldest weather that the Meteorological Office reports in the winter. When a cold snap makes the whole country shiver, it will generally be found that, of all places in England, Loughborough is the coldest. But _per contra_, the townsfolk say that it is also extremely hot in summer, and the parish register records in the summer of 1808 an exceptional _heat_:

“Wednesday, _July_ 13th; the heat was so intense that in consequence thereof many People died, especially they that were at work in the fields, also a great number of Horses, particularly coach-horses, drawing stage-coaches. The thermometer as high as 92.”

The great, empty-looking parish church, an example of the depths of commonplace to which the Perpendicular style can descend, has nothing of interest, partly, no doubt, because Sir Gilbert Scott was had in during 1863-4 to “restore” it, at a cost of £9,000, and partly because it is designed in a monotonous repetition of window for window, and moulding for moulding, from end to end. It is, in short, tedious and tiresome to a degree, and contains a very nasty effigy of “Joana Wallis,” dated 1675.

A depressing influence seems to prevade the district between Loughborough and the Trent. The scenery is of no striking quality and the villages seem to have experienced their best days. Hathern is an uninteresting village of framework knitters, and Kegworth—in Domesday Book “Cogesworde”—that comes next after it, makes hosiery, brews beer, manufactures plaster, and carries on a variety of useful industries, but looks as grim as a person responsible for thousands who has but a penny in his pocket. It is a gaunt townlet, with large and equally gaunt church of the Decorated period, standing in a commanding position in the centre of the unlovely place. Both alike look ragged and poverty-stricken, and although a large sum has been spent on restoring the building, it still looks as though no care had been taken of it for centuries. A bell still rings curfew at 8 p.m. in the winter months. The Vestry was formerly the residence of a “domus inclusus,” or hermit.

Tom Moore, that merry Irishman, found it possible to write poetry at Kegworth, but he performed some marvellous things. Tommy dearly loved a lord, and was here in 1811 for the express purpose of being near his friend, Lord Moira, whose park at Donington is near by. When my lord went to India, the poet removed to Mayfield, and thence to Sloperton Cottage, near Devizes, to be near Lord Lansdowne.

Three miles away to the right of the road and across the Soar, into Nottinghamshire, is Gotham, a place so famed in legend that the impulse to visit it is irresistible. The way lies by Kingston-on-Soar, where there is a beautiful little church with wonderfully elaborate monument to the Babington family, bearing their punning rebus of the “Babe in Tun.”

The “Wise Men of Gotham” is an ironical saying, for the Gothamites are proverbial for stupidity; but, like the fatuous behaviour of the Wiltshire “moonrakers” of Bishop’s Cannings, the childish simplicity of the original Gotham wiseacres was merely assumed. Their great exploit was to plant a hedge round a cuckoo perched on a bush, in order to keep him in; and on a hill one mile distant may to this day be found the “Cuckoo Bush,” pointed out as the scene of their efforts. It is an ivy-grown circular bank in a plantation enclosing a group of trees.

[Sidenote: _THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM_]

But for the most circumstantial account of the doings of these rude forefathers of the hamlet, we must have recourse to the legend preserved by Thoroton, in the pages of his history of Nottinghamshire.

It seems, then, that King John, passing through Gotham towards Nottingham, and intending to go through the meadows, was prevented by the villagers, who imagined that the ground once travelled by a king would for ever become a public road. The King, furious at their proceedings—and the tantrums of a Norman sovereign were something fearful—sent some of his retinue to learn the reason of this strange, not to say highly temerarious, conduct; but during the interval the men of Gotham had been able to reflect, and had come to the conclusion that something terrible in the way of punishment awaited them, unless they could prove themselves exceptional fools.

Accordingly, when the messengers arrived, they found the villagers engaged in all manner of fantastic employments. Some were endeavouring to drown an eel; others were occupied in dragging carts on to the roof of a barn, to shade the wood from the sun; yet others were tumbling their cheeses downhill, to find their way to Nottingham market; and some were busily engaged in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched itself upon an old bush. In short, they were all busy in some foolish way or another; and their folly was duly reported to the King; who, however, shrewdly remarked that “we ween there be more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.”