Part 7

To relieve the sufferings Of animals labouring in our service The steep ascent of this hill Was lowered At the expense of Mary and Margaret Cross of Myerscough, A.D. 1869. This deed of mercy appeals to every Passer-by, that he too show Mercy to The creatures God has put under his hand

Garstang, that stands rather finely on the road, with its old “Royal Oak” inn and ancient market-cross, hinting, not remotely to those who care for these things, of better days, was in fact once a market-town. But Garstang has outlived its ancient importance. Time was when it owned a Mayor and Corporation, who proudly dated back to 1314. Even in 1680 it was sufficiently important to win a renewal of its ancient charter of incorporation, but it has long lost any relics of its old state. The interfering besoms of the Local Government Board swept away the Mayor and his subordinates in 1883, and presented Garstang instead with a nice new Town Trust. It all sounds very improving and wonderful, but the plain man suspects only the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee in all this; with, of course, the inevitable legal charges for making the wonderful change.

In the days when Garstang did a large cattle trade, that singular seventeenth-century character, Richard Braithwaite, who styled himself “Drunken Barnaby,” came staggering through, with his usual skinful, on his way from Lancaster.

Thence to Garstang, pray you hark it, Ent’ring there a great beast market; As I jogged along the street ’Twas my fortune for to meet A young heifer, who before her Took me up, and threw me o’er her.

There are two jokes belonging to Garstang. One is the parish church, situated a mile and a half away, in a lonely situation, and the other is the railway that here crosses the road. To-day, those of the inhabitants upon whose hands time hangs heavily haunt the street with fell intent to inflict the Great Railway Joke upon the unsuspecting stranger who, maybe, halts to examine the cross. They fix him, as did the Ancient Mariner the Wedding Guest, with their glittering, or rheumy, eye, as the case may be, and with hoarse voice and pointing finger ask him if he sees that railway. Assured that he does, comes then the answer, with weird chuckles: “the longest railway in England, the ‘Garstang and Not End.’” Now the “Garstang and Knott End Railway” is probably the very shortest, being not quite seven miles in length: hence this stupendous funniment. Where it does end, however, is at Pilling. Some day, when the long-projected five-miles’ extension to Fleetwood, and a junction with the railway there, is accomplished, the joke will be extinct and the humour of Garstang dowsed in blackest night.

[Sidenote: “_BAY HORSE_”]

Beyond Garstang, the Bleasdale Fells appear, away to the right. The old importance of the road, before the railway that now runs so swift and frequent a service, is seen in the various inns on the way. There are the “New Holly,” “Middle Holly,” and “Old Holly,” or “Hamilton Arms,” inns. The “New Holly,” at Forton, replaces an older house of the same name, still standing, at Hollins Hill, on the left, on the old road that went out of use in 1825. Even the wayside “Bay Horse” railway station takes its name from an inn that was once a change-house for the coaches. In 1825 the “Bay Horse” inn was closed, and re-opened in 1892.

Galgate and Scotforth demand no notice, except that the former is thought to have obtained its name from “Gael-gaet,” a passage for the Gaels, or Scots, and that the name of Scotforth carries a similar meaning. For we are come now within hail of the land that was in the old times always seething in Border raids: the district that Lancaster Castle, at the easy passage of the Lune, was built to defend.

XV

Lancaster is a fine name, if it is but pronounced as it should be; but the traveller who may chance to be something of a connoisseur in fine old place-names is a little shocked to find the town locally known as “Lankystir” and the county as “Lankyshire.” The old stirring history of the place wilts and droops in that horrible pronunciation.

There is, after all, a very great deal in a name. A “Lancashire man” has a commercial sound: you detect the chink of coin in it, and it has, in truth, a modern appropriateness, for Lancashire is nowadays nothing if not commercial. Call him, however, a “Lancastrian,” and he becomes at once to the imagination an embattled warrior worthy of figuring, with all the circumstances of chivalry, in the Wars of the Roses.

[Sidenote: _THE NORMAN WAY_]

There are still some few traces of the Roman antiquity of Lancaster, in the castle—the castle on the river Lune, that gave the place its name—but it is in Norman and mediæval circumstances that it chiefly figures. The castle, the very beginning and origin of Lancaster, stands on a bold hill rising above the Lune in so convenient a situation for defence that Nature might almost have thoughtfully provided it for the purpose, and represents the stronghold built by Roger of Poictou, who held all Lancashire from William the Conqueror. Exactly how much of the once formidable Roman castrum he found here cannot be known, for the Normans were more intent upon conquering and securing their military successes with fortresses, than upon preserving antiquities. The cult of the antique was, in fact, not yet born; and when, about 1094, the great Roger began to build the grim keep that still remains the chief feature of Lancaster Castle, he spared nothing in the way of Roman altars and sculptured relics that might in any way serve his turn. To him and his builders they were relics of old, forgotten things, already dead and damned with Paganism and the Roman rule, some, six hundred years: as remote a period, for example, as from our day backwards to that of Edward the Second, which seems to ourselves no inconsiderable space of time.

So into the foundations of his immensely thick castle walls, and into the rubble core of them went many Roman inscribed stones that antiquaries would now dearly prize. Adrian’s Tower, with the Well Tower, was built originally in Roman times: the first so early as A.D. 125, and the Well Tower in A.D. 305, by Constantius Chlorus. Roger, the Norman, seems to have repaired and added to these. In Roman times the basement of Adrian’s Tower was a place where the corn for the garrison was ground. Later it became a bakery, and has since 1892 been a museum. In the excavations of 1890, an old floor and a considerable deal of rubbish were removed, to a depth of eight and a half feet, revealing the original level. In the course of these works a portion of the Roman millstone for grinding corn was discovered, and here it remains, in company with such diverse objects as a Roman altar, found in the foundations of the Shire Hall in 1797; some pikes captured from the Scottish rebels of 1715, forbidding festoons of fetters, and a “madman’s chair,” fitted with bolts and chains, as used at the time when the dark lower chambers of the keep served the purpose of county lunatic asylum, and, together with the fearful treatment accorded the lunatics, served only to confirm them in their lunacy. There are indeed some very fearful things in this old fortress, place of judgment, and prison of Lancaster Castle, which has been everything, from the home of kings down to debtors’ prison and county gaol.

As Shire Hall, Sessions House, Assize Courts, and gaol it still remains. Prominent among the gruesome sights of the castle are the dungeons in the Well Tower, one below the other, in the basement, where prisoners lay in darkness, secured to the floor by the iron rings that still remain. The roof of the upper dungeon bears witness to the method of its construction. The earth having been first spread with a strongly made layer of wattled osiers, liquid cement was then run over them, and in drying formed a compact mass.

The earth was then easily excavated beneath the ingeniously constructed roof. Some few of the osiers still remain in it.

[Sidenote: _MALEFACTOR-BRANDING_]

More modern resources of justice are seen in the Drop Room, and in the Crown Court itself, where, at the back of the dock, may yet be seen the “Holdfast” and the branding-iron once used in branding malefactors with an M on the brawn of the left thumb. The operation was performed in Court and the success of it announced by the Head Gaoler in the formula, “A fair mark, my Lord!”

The tragical memories of Lancaster Castle range from mediæval deeds of blood down to the executions of prisoners taken in the Jacobite rebellions, and to the merely sordid executions since it has been a gaol. From 1799 to 1889, when the castle ceased to be a gaol for the whole of Lancashire, no fewer than 228 criminals were hanged here.

He is a fortunate visitor who comes to Lancaster at the opening of Assize (unless he comes for trial), for old times live again in the pageant of the Judges’ reception by the Javelin-men, in their costume of blue and yellow, who escort them to their lodgings, and stand attendant in Court at the opening of the commission of Oyer and Terminer.

The impressive approach to Lancaster Castle is by way of John o’ Gaunt’s gateway, one of the many works added by that historic personage, Shakespeare’s “time-honoured Lancaster,” when his father, Edward the Third, created him Duke of Lancaster and raised Lancashire in consequence to the condition of County Palatine. The “time-honoured” one himself stands in effigy in a niche over the door-way. One would like to think the statue contemporary with him, but the guide-books, from which no derogatory secrets are hid, tell the disappointing tale that it dates only from 1822.

[Sidenote: “_HORSESHOE CORNER_”]

John o’ Gaunt is not to be avoided in Lancaster, castle or town. He is, indeed, to be found pretty well all over the country, for he was not merely Duke of Lancaster (although that was no small matter), but owned manors in almost every part of England. Moreover, from him sprang the House of Lancaster, the Red Rose, whose struggles with the Yorkist White Rose form so long and bloody a series of chapters in English history. Here, in Lancaster, from “John o’ Gaunt’s Chair,” the topmost turret of the castle keep, down to Horseshoe Corner, the great Duke is everywhere, and figures on picture-postcards, china, and silver spoons with a fine impartiality. Horseshoe Corner is an otherwise commonplace crossing of streets where, in the middle of the roadway, a horseshoe is inserted. It is the representative, at this long interval of time, of a shoe cast by John o’ Gaunt’s horse on the spot, and is renewed every seven years.

St. Mary’s Church, adjoining the castle, and separated from it only by that sad spot on the terrace where criminals were hanged in the times of public executions, is a fine bold structure of Perpendicular character, and possibly a good deal might be said of it in the architectural way; but it interests me chiefly as containing a memorial brass, now very much the worse for wear, to Thomas Covell, Governor of the castle forty-eight years, Coroner forty-six years, and six times Mayor of Lancaster. He died in 1639, aged seventy-eight, and is the subject of the following encomiastic verse:

Cease, cease to mourne, all teares are vaine to aide, Hee’s fledd, not dead; dissolved, not destroy’d. In Heaven his soule doth rest, his bodie heere Sleepes in this dust, and his fame everie where Triumphs; the towne, the country farther forth, The land throughout proclaimes his noble worth. Speake of a man soe kinde, soe courteous, So free and every waie magnanimous, That storie told at large heere doe you see, Epitomiz’d in briefe: Covell was hee.

He is represented standing, with hands clasped in prayer; a long robe, open in front, disclosing his tall military jack-boots.

[Sidenote: _A GOOD-FELLOW GAOLER_]

No merrier fellow than the good Covell ever presided over dungeon and little-ease. Prisoners who were fortunate enough to be consigned to Lancaster Castle used it as a country house; and, so that they fairly gave their parole to return, went and came very much as they pleased. Some of them, that is to say. Popish recusants were sure of the best attention, and the Bishop of Carlisle, writing with some heat upon the subject, declared “they have liberty to go when and whither they list; to hunt, hawk, and go to horse-races.” Enjoying life himself, Covell was kindly disposed to others of like temperament. To Burton, however, one of the Puritans who was sent to Lancaster Castle to have his ears cropped, this high-spirited Governor was a “beastly man.”

“Drunken Barnaby” was not of that opinion. Doubtless the two drank many a noggin together; Barnaby writing him down—

A Jaylor ripe and mellow The world hath not suche a fellow.

John Taylor, the so-called “Water Poet,” who on his “Pennyless Pilgrimage” to Edinburgh and back levied toll on many men’s hospitable tables, tells how

The Iayler kept an Inne, good beds, good cheere, Where, paying nothing, I found nothing deere;

and in short he was very much, in the amateur way, what his brother was professionally, who kept the “George” inn, in the town; and, strange to say, his wife was no less hospitable than himself.

We are not accustomed to think of Lancaster as a seaport, but it was once much more important in that way than Liverpool itself. To be sure, that was long ago, but not so very, very long: no further back, indeed, than the time of Charles the First, who, in levying what has been called the “objectionable” tax—but what tax is not, to the taxee?—of Ship Money, assessed Lancaster at £30, Liverpool at £25, and Preston at £20. What Manchester has laboriously and expensively done in its Ship Canal might more easily and cheaply be effected by Preston and Lancaster, lying nearer the sea: and doubtless a time will come—but with that we have no concern. Meanwhile there are salmon in the Lune, as wanderers along the riverside by Crook o’ Lune may discover, and Lancaster as yet knows nothing of great commercial docks. With modern developments, however, the Town Council has felt the need of a borough motto. “Time-honoured Lancaster” was suggested, but the Heralds’ College, sticklers for accuracy, pointing out that this referred to John o’ Gaunt and not to the town, suggested “Luck to Loyne” instead; and accordingly, “Luck to Loyne” it is.

The finest view of Lancaster is from the Skerton Bridge crossing the river Lune at a point where the castle and the old church of St. Mary group finely on the castle hill, and rightly form the most prominent objects, historical as they are. Unfortunately for the view, railway developments have done a good deal to destroy its majestic simplicity. A railway bridge of the most atrocious lattice-girder type, crossing from the point known by the curious name of “Green Ayre,” cuts the finest picture in half, and a number of sidings have abolished the verdant banks of the Lune for a good distance and form undesirable neighbours to the embowered beauty of Ladies’ Walk.

Skerton Bridge, which takes the road out of Lancaster to Carlisle, in 1900 replaced the old Lune Bridge built in 1788, which itself replaced a much older structure.

[Sidenote: _OILCLOTH_]

But the commercial spirit has seized historic Lancaster, and factories of various kinds thrust their chimneys into the sky. Oilcloth-making by hand was started in a small way many years ago, in an old shed rented by a journeyman house-painter, Williamson by name. The enterprise quickly prospered and grew into a wealth-producing wholesale business. The journeyman painter’s son is now Baron Ashton, much to the dissatisfaction of many jealous folk who gave his father a job in the days of small things. It is a romance of industry, and has helped to change the appearance of Lancaster, the quiet, grave country-town of yore. There was until recent years a bleak and barren upland known as Lancaster Moor, overlooking the town: it is now transformed, with trees and shrubs, as the “Williamson Park.” A huge new Town Hall is also a Williamson product, and overlooking all Lancaster and dwarfing the importance of the old castle itself, a mammoth bugbear of a thing called the “Ashton Memorial” arrests the eye from far and near, like a St. Paul’s dome on the hilltop. Entering Lancaster from the north, you can no more miss seeing it than you could miss seeing St. Paul’s from Ludgate Hill. American tourists ask, in their picturesque way, “Who in thunder built it?” and they are told that it is built to the honour and glory of the Williamson family. It arouses terrible thoughts of what may yet be in store for the historic places of Old England, when each ennobled maker of wall-papers, drain-pipes, and the like shall feel that the merits of his race demand advertising as prominently as his wares.

XVI

The suburb of Skerton, on the north side of Skerton Bridge, leads to the hamlet of Slyne, perched on a hill overlooking Morecambe Bay. The place-name “Slyne” looks as unpleasant in print as do the personal names of Silas, Matthias, or Jabez, and the meaning of it, as of the similar place-names “Slindon” and “Slinfold,” in Sussex, seems to have escaped research. A quaint old manor-house, now a farm, with an odd doorway inscribed

G C M 1681,

stands facing the road, and with the old “Cross Keys” inn, dated 1727, comprises nearly all there is of Slyne. Here comes the left-hand turning to Hest Bank, on the shore of Morecambe Bay, whence old travellers, greatly daring, took a short cut across the treacherous quicksands at low water, to Grange and Cartmel, instead of going the roundabout way of Carnforth and Milnthorpe. Lancashire is here cleft into two separate and distinct portions, Lonsdale south of the sands, and Lonsdale north; a great wedge of Westmorland coming in between.

[Sidenote: _LAKELAND_]

The geography of the district surrounding Lancaster is by no means simple. It is a country bordering upon the sea, which here and there advances into the land, in the shapes of great sandy bays and long, tongue-like estuaries of short but turbulent rivers that, taking their origin as mountain-torrents amid the gloomy heights of the eternal hills and mountains of Lakeland, have their sudden moods, dictated by the melting of the snows, and by rain-storms. The distant landscape in the neighbourhood of Lancaster is always closed in by mountain heights, and the flat shores of Morecambe Bay look the more flat, and the far-off fells appear the more rugged, in these several contrasts.

A considerable number of these little rivers come pouring down from the Lakes to the sea: the Lune, the Kent, the Keer, the Winster, the Leven, the Crake, and the Duddon. The road on to Kendal and Carlisle avoids all the estuaries, and goes uneventfully onwards; but travellers who wished to pass expeditiously between Lancaster, Furness, and Ulverston had no choice but to make their perilous way “Over Sands,” across the inner bight of Morecambe Bay, at low tide. The alternative was the unwelcome, and anciently the dangerous, one of going the extravagantly long way round by Milnthorpe, Crosthwaite, and Newby Bridge, under Whitbarrow, where the treacherous Mosses, almost as dangerous as the sands of the seashore, spread, and where the lawless and desperate cattle-reivers lurked. Confronted with these problems, old-time wayfarers generally chose the sands.

[Sidenote: “_OVER-SANDS_”]

The story of “Lancaster Sands,” as they are often called, is romantic and melancholy. The hazardous crossing was made between Hest Bank and Kent’s Bank, a distance of eleven miles, over a wet sandy waste that is twelve feet deep in sea-water, at high tide. In these days of railway travel, and since 1864, when the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway was opened, the Over-Sands route is less frequently used, and principally by farmers’ carts and by inquisitive tourists; but in all the earlier centuries it was necessary, and great pains were taken to ensure, so far as might humanly be, the safety of travellers across.

The sands are first mentioned by Tacitus, in his history of the second campaign waged by Agricola against the Western Brigantes, the tribes inhabiting Furness and the northern detached district of Lancashire now known as North Lonsdale. The Romans, with their usual combined thoroughness and prudence, appear to have made causeways crossing the estuaries of the Kent, the Leven, and the Duddon, considerably inshore from the exposed Over-Sands route and somewhat on the route of the present railway bridges; but traces of their handiwork are now very few.

The next historical reference is not met with until 1325, when the Abbot of Furness petitioned the King that his jurisdiction might be extended in this district, to comprehend the Leven Sands, which were so dangerous that many travellers, sixteen on one occasion, and six on another, had been overtaken by the tide, and drowned. His petition was granted, and the Abbot established, on an island half-way across the estuary, a little chapel in which the monks prayed all round the twenty-four hours for the safety, or for the souls, as the case might be, of those who sought to cross. It is, however, scarce to be supposed that the Abbey privileges would have been thus extended had the aid to travellers been merely that of prayers. A more practical note was the addition of a lighthouse, or beacon tower, to the chapel, combined with the readiness of the monks to guide strangers. Since 1820, the guide across Leven Sands has received an annual salary of £22 from the Duchy of Lancaster, with a grant of three acres of land. He enjoys, in addition, under the provisions of the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway Act of 1851, a further £20 a year, in compensation for loss of fees caused by the opening of the railway; for although he is a public official, he commonly received gifts and free-will fees from those he guided across in pre-railway days.

The more lengthy journey, from Hest Bank to Kent’s Bank, was under the especial care of the Priory of Cartmel, which from an early period maintained an official guide who was paid out of a grant made to the Priory from Peter’s Pence for the especial purpose of performing this public service. Travellers here also had the benefit of the monks’ prayers, which in truth they often needed.

This very necessary office of guide did by no means fall into decay with the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry the Eighth. Provision was made by the expenses being charged to the Duchy of Lancaster: “the Carter over the Kent,” as the guide was called, being paid £20 per annum by the Receiver-General, and the guide across the shorter passage of the Keer being paid £10. The Carter no doubt performed his duty, but the Sands every now and then claimed their victims. Thus, in the registers of Cartmel may be read the following tragical entries:

[Sidenote: _TRAGEDY_]

“_1576, Sept. 12._ One young man buryed, which was drowned in the brodwater.”

“_1582, Aug. 1_, was buryed a son of Leonard Rollinson, of Furness Fell, drowned at the Grainge, the 28th daye of July.”

“_1610, Feb. 4_, John ffell, son of Augustine, of Birkbie, drowned on Conysed Sands.”

“_1630, Aug. 10_, Wm. Best, gent., drowned on Melthorp Sands.”

The registers of Cartmel alone testify to over 120 persons having lost their lives while crossing the channels of these treacherous shores.

The race of secular guides across the Kent began, after the surrender of Cartmel Priory, with Thomas Tempest. Son succeeded father in the office, but they seem soon afterwards to have become Carters; probably having adopted the name from their official title.