Part 7

For the third time King William marched north to York; and this time he determined on vengeance. ‘Par splendeur Dex,’ he swore that he would utterly root out the Northumbrian people; and in fulfilment of his oath he carried out that ‘Wasting of the North’ which changed the fertile Plain of York into a desolate waste. For sixty miles north of York every town and village was sacked and burnt, every inhabitant slain or driven out, all farming-stock and farming-implements destroyed, and nothing spared save only what belonged to St. John of Beverley. Then, having wreaked his revenge, William caused himself to be re-crowned at York, and there he kept his Christmas feast.

* * * * *

The system followed out by William the Conqueror after his subjugation of a district was everywhere the same. Lands were taken from their English owners and given to the King’s Norman followers, while strong castles were built to afford protection to the Norman lords.

Thus Drogo de Bevrere, a Flemish knight who had married the King’s niece, was rewarded for his services with the _Isle of Holderness_, and built himself a castle at Skipsea, where the earthworks of a long-dead chieftain were still standing. No remains of Drogo’s castle now exist, nor have we in the East Riding the remains of any Norman castle such as those existing at Knaresborough, Helmsley, Pontefract, Scarborough, York, and elsewhere in the other Ridings of Yorkshire.

With this parcelling out of the land among William’s Norman followers there became fixed two principles on which the whole ‘Feudal System’ was based:—

(1) All land belonged to the King by virtue of his conquest of the country;

(2) All land was held in return for services rendered.

Under the Feudal System the King would make a large grant of land to one of his followers, who thus became a _tenant-in-chief_ of the King. This tenant-in-chief would sub-divide his land among his particular followers, each of whom might sub-divide his portion. Thus Drogo de Bevrere was a tenant-in-chief, and one of his tenants was a certain Lanbert, who held lands at Sutton ‘two miles long and a half a mile broad.’ Drogo, Earl of Holderness, was a vassal of the King; Lanbert, a vassal of Drogo.

For these lands no regular rent was paid. Instead, there was the obligation of military service, each holder of land being bound to serve the King in war for forty days every year as his services were required. This service had to be performed at the vassal’s own cost, and with proper equipment. By this means the King could always be assured of an army equipped at short notice, and at no cost to himself.

In addition to this military service there were money payments to be made at certain irregular intervals. An _aid_ was due from a vassal to his overlord on each of three occasions:—

(1) The knighting of the lord’s eldest son; (2) The marrying of his eldest daughter; (3) The ransoming of his own person.

Of these occasions the first and second would, as a rule, occur only once in a vassal’s life-time, while the third might not occur at all. For all tenants-in-chief it did occur when King Richard I. had to be ransomed from his enemy, the Emperor Henry VI., into whose hands he had happened to fall. The monks of the Abbey of Meaux, being tenants-in-chief, then found themselves called upon to pay, as their share of the total ransom of 150,000 marks, the sum of 300 marks; to raise which they were compelled to sell their stock of wool and their church plate.

On the death of a vassal and the succession of his heir, another money payment became due to the vassal’s overlord. This was known as a _relief_. Again, if on a vassal’s death his heir or heiress had not yet come of age, his estate passed for the time being into the hands of the overlord, who managed it and took the profits. This right was known as _wardship_, and it might be rather dangerous for the ward.

Thus, in the early years of the thirteenth century, Thomas, the parson of Routh, held certain lands under William de Stuteville, the lord of the manor. Thomas died, and the lord of the manor claimed wardship over his young daughter Agnes. But before Agnes had come of age, William de Stuteville died also, and the wardship passed into the hands of his widow Cecilia. Unfortunately for Agnes her new guardian was not overburdened with principles of honour; for, having two daughters of her own—who were, we may suppose, not sufficiently good-looking to find husbands readily—she offered with them as dowry the lands of Agnes. Thus two lucky bridegrooms, Stephen of Pokthorpe and Henry of Hutton, were enriched by Dame Cecilia, each with one-half of the lands of Agnes, the parson’s daughter. And poor Agnes never succeeded in getting her lands back, though she tried her best.

* * * * *

The various money payments due to a vassal’s overlord depended as to their amount on the value of the estate held. Therefore, in order that the King should know exactly what sums were due to him from his tenants-in-chief, he caused a great survey of England to be made. The vastness of the undertaking may be gauged by the fact that each estate in all the counties of England except Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, and Monmouth—which last was then reckoned as a Welsh county—was to be reported on by the King’s officers, who were instructed to make enquiries as to its value and to record the result of their enquiries.

These officers were to set down the area of each estate, great or small, the area of that part of it which was ploughed land, the area of that part which was grass land, the name of its holder, the name of its holder in the last year of the reign of King Edward the Confessor, the amount of stock and of farming-implements on it, the number and condition of the people living on it, its annual value in the time of King Edward, and its annual value at the time of the investigation—the last two items being the most important of all.

In this manner was constructed what is known as THE DOMESDAY BOOK—the book by which a judgment could be made as to the amount of the money payments due to the King from each of his tenants-in-chief. The work was planned at the Witena-gemōt held at Christmas 1085, and was carried out during the following year.

* * * * *

The Domesday Book is one of the most valuable historical records possessed by the nation, and much information as to the England of 1086 has been gleaned from its parchment leaves. The entries in it are of course in Latin, and the following translation of the portion dealing with the manor of Patrington will serve as an example of the facts recorded in it.

LANDS IN HOLDERNESS.

LAND OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK.

In _Patrictone_ with the four berewicks _Wistede_, _Halsam_, _Torp_, _Toruelestorp_, there are thirty-five carucates and a half, and two oxgangs and two parts of an oxgang to be taxed. There is land to thirty-five ploughs.

This manor was, and is, belonging to the Archbishop of York.

There are now in the demesne two ploughs and eight villeins and sixty-three bordars, having thirteen ploughs. There are six sokemen with two villeins and twenty bordars, having five ploughs and a half. There are thirty-two acres of meadow there. Two knights have six carucates of the land of this manor; and two clerks two carucates and three oxgangs, and the third part of an oxgang. They have there four sokemen and five villeins, and three bordars with five ploughs.

In the time of King Edward the value was thirty pounds, at present ten pounds and five shillings.

Arable land three miles long and one mile and a half broad.

All this reads very strangely to us living in the twentieth century. Put into present-day language it would read something like the following:—

The manor of Patrington, with the neighbouring hamlets of Winestead, Halsham, [Welwick] Thorp, and Tharlesthorp,[22] measures 4300 acres,[23] and its thorough cultivation would provide work for thirty-five teams of oxen, reckoning eight oxen to each team.

Footnote 22:

Tharlesthorp is one of the ‘lost towns of the Humber.’ Its probable site is marked on the map on the opposite page.

Footnote 23:

A ‘carucate’ was the amount of land that a team of eight oxen could plough each year. It varied in size according to the nature of the soil, but may be roughly taken as being equal to 120 acres. An oxgang was one-eighth of this.

It belonged to the Archbishop of York in the reign of King Edward the Confessor, and is still held by him.

Attached to the lands of the manor-house there are eight serfs who have among them sixteen oxen, and sixty-three cottagers, who own 104 oxen. There are also six small farmers who have under them two serfs and twenty cottagers, and work forty-four oxen. Parts of the manor lands are held by two knights and two parsons. The former are tenants of 720 acres, the latter of 290 acres. On their lands there are four small farmers, three cottagers and five serfs, possessing among them forty oxen.

The land on which wheat, barley and oats are grown measures three miles by one and a half miles, and there are thirty-two acres of meadow land.

In King Edward’s time the annual value of the manor was £600, but is now only £205.[24]

Footnote 24:

The value of money was in 1086 approximately twenty times its value at the present day. The Domesday ‘pound’ meant, not a coin, but a pound weight of silver.

The value of the manor of Patrington was, in 1086, only just over one-third of its value twenty-five years earlier. This is one example of the results of the ‘Wasting of the North.’ Others are to be found in the records given of the manors of Burstwick and Kilnsea, each of which had been worth fifty-six pounds, but was then worth only ten pounds. The manors of Withernsea and Hornsea had similarly decreased in value from fifty-six pounds to six pounds. All these belonged in 1086 to Drogo de Bevrere, Lord of Holderness. The manor of Beeford had experienced a still greater decrease in value; for it had sunk from twenty pounds to ten shillings. Others again, such as estates at Barmston, Drypool, Routh, and Sigglesthorne are recorded by the ominous word ‘waste.’ Such entries tell a very sure tale of the effects of King William’s vengeance.

On the map on page 93 are shown most of the manors and a few of the hamlets recorded in that part of the Domesday Book which deals with the Holderness division of Yorkshire. In many cases the spelling is very quaint; but most of the names are recognisable if we remember that U and V are different forms of the same letter, and that our letter W was then what, according to its name, it ought still to be. We must remember also that the men who took down the records were Frenchmen, who found it difficult in many cases to pronounce the names they heard the English witnesses use, and who had to spell these names as best they could according to their sound.

* * * * *

For more than nine hundred years the Domesday Survey remained the only survey made of English lands as a whole, and not till 1910 was an attempt made to compile the second Domesday Book. In that year commissioners started on the same task as was performed by the King’s officers in the year 1086; and the task has been undertaken for the same purpose—to enable the King’s taxes to be gathered in correctly.

XII. HOW OUR ANCIENT PARISH CHURCHES WERE BUILT.

In these days of bicycles most of us have experienced the pleasure of seeing, over the tree-tops in the distance, the spire or the square-capped tower of one of our village churches. For us on that occasion, perhaps, it marked the goal of a long journey, and we therefore hailed it gladly. Then probably we thought no more about it.

Yet that village church was worth a few minutes of our thoughts. To one who knows how to see it was worth walking round, and worth also looking into. For it had a tale to tell—a tale that stretches back into the centuries long past, a tale of the joys and sorrows of the people whose places we now fill, a tale which ought to make us realise that we of the twentieth century are not the only clever people who have lived in the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Let us learn how to read the tale aright. In the first place we must know the names of the different parts of a church. If it is small, it will be simply a rectangular building, running east and west, and divided by an open arch or by a woodwork screen into two parts, a _nave_ and a _chancel_. The former is, on service days, occupied by the congregation of worshippers, the latter by the clergy and the choir. At the east end of the chancel is the _altar_ or _communion-table_, at the east end of the nave are the _lectern_ and _pulpit_, at the west end of the nave is the _font_.

If the church boasts a _tower_, this will be at the west end, where also will probably be the main entrance door. This may, however, be on the south of the nave near the west end. On the south of the chancel may be another smaller door, once the _priests’ door_; and by it in the wall may be the _sedilia_, or priests’ seats, three in number. Close to these may be the _piscina_, or drain, at which the holy vessels were once washed; and in the wall on the opposite side may be the _aumbry_, or cupboard, in which the holy vessels once stood.

But such small churches are not common. Generally the nave has along each side what is called an _aisle_, in which case its central roof is supported on a double row of pillars. Possibly the chancel also has aisles. The walls above the lines of pillars may be pierced with windows, which thus look out above the roofs of the aisles. These windows are known as _clerestory_ windows.

In cathedrals and very large churches there is a story which runs along each side of the nave and chancel, between the capitals of the pillars and the clerestory. This is called the _triforium_. Beverley Minster has a triforium, but there is no passage round it, and it is really a blind story. A portion of it can be seen in the photograph of the Percy Tomb on page 230. Bridlington Priory Church has a triforium on the north side only.

In churches of large size the building is not simply a rectangular one with or without aisles, but is formed of two rectangular buildings crossing each other at right angles. The nave and chancel have added to them a _north transept_ and a _south transept_, and above the crossing-place rises a _central tower_ on four huge _piers_.

These transepts, as well as the nave and chancel, may have aisles. But this is customary only in cathedrals. Holy Trinity Church, Hull, the third largest church in Britain,[25] has aisles only to the nave and chancel; Patrington Church—the ‘Queen of Holderness’—has aisles to the nave and to each transept; and Hedon Church—the ‘King of Holderness’—now has aisles only to its nave, though its transepts formerly had an aisle on the east.

Footnote 25:

The following are the _internal areas_ of the three largest churches in Britain:—

St. Nicholas’, Great Yarmouth 25,023 sq. ft. St. Michael’s, Coventry 24,015 " Holy Trinity, Hull 21,756 "

* * * * *

Many were the difficulties that the builders of our ancient churches had to overcome. In the East Riding one difficulty was the obtaining of suitable building-material. Stone blocks were costly, for these had to be brought by water from the quarries of the West Riding. So usually the builders had to make the best use they could of the materials they obtained locally—boulders from the cliffs of the sea-shore, blocks of chalk from the Wolds, or clay bricks from the low-lying bank of the Humber.[26]

Footnote 26:

The brickwork of the chancel and transepts of Holy Trinity, Hull, is probably the ‘earliest existing example of mediæval brickwork in England.’ These portions of the church were built during the first quarter of the fourteenth century.

Another difficulty was sometimes encountered in obtaining suitable foundations. The clay soil on which the church of Holy Trinity, Hull, is built was not of sufficient depth to afford foundations for the heavy central tower which it was intended to build.

Twentieth-century builders would drive piles down into the clay to make a firm foundation; the fourteenth-century builders solved the problem by constructing four huge rafts of trimmed oak trunks, each consisting of two rows of trunks crossing at right angles. On these rafts they raised the piers for their tower; and when, in 1906, it became necessary to take out the tree-trunks and replace them with steel girders and cement, many of the trunks were found to be as sound as on the day that they were placed in position six hundred years ago.

* * * * *

The greatest charm of our ancient churches lies in the fact that, except in a very few instances, a church is not built in the same style throughout. It is quite evident, if we have a seeing eye, that additions and alterations have been made at different times. The nave and the chancel were plainly not designed by the same architect; the north side of the church differs from the south; here has been added a new door, there a new window; the roof has been taken off, the worn ends of the rafters sawn away, and the rafters used again, so that the roof has to be of less slope than it was before.

All these are the signs of life and growth. If we wish, we can read by them how our forefathers prospered in their worldly business, and how they gave thanks to God for their prosperity; or how the coming of the Plague brought them poverty and distress, and perhaps put a stop to their building operations, which were not completed till many years afterwards, and then in a style quite different from that in which they had been begun.

Often these alterations and rebuildings were put on record, and some of the records remain to our day. Thus John Skinner, of Westgate, Hedon, by his will made in 1428, left the sum of forty shillings towards the building of the new tower of St. Augustine’s Church. On the south face of the tower of Aughton Church is an inscription which is now illegible, but which once told in the Anglo-French language that Christopher Aske, the second son of Sir Robert Aske, rebuilt the tower in 1536.

Cut into the stone of the same tower is in two places the likeness of an _aske_ or newt, a punning allusion to the name of the builder. In the same way, the tower of Hemingbrough Church is ornamented with a row of ‘dolly-tubs’ or ‘weshing-tuns’—an allusion to the name of Prior Wessington, in whose period of rule the tower was rebuilt.

Most interesting of all such records are the inscriptions on the pillars of the north side of the nave in St. Mary’s, Beverley. They show that when the tower fell in 1520 and destroyed that side of the nave, the destruction was repaired by a combined effort on the part of the parishioners. A family named Crosslay provided the wherewithal for rebuilding the half pillar at the west end, and the two pillars next to it towards the east; the ‘good wives’ of the parish rebuilt the next two pillars; and, as will be shown later, the remaining pillar was rebuilt by the Gild of Minstrels.[27]

Footnote 27:

See page 185.

Hence the inscriptions which we may read to-day high up on the pillars:—

XLAY AND HIS WYF TO PYLLORS FE MADE THES AND A HALFFE

THYS TO PYLLO WYFFYS GOD RS MADE GVD REWARD THAYM

But though no written or inscribed record may exist, it is yet possible to tell approximately the date at which either a church was built, or some particular portion of it was rebuilt. This is so because men built in different styles at different times—the fashionable mode of building changed as the centuries went on. Let us see how we can recognise these styles.

* * * * *

When the Normans came to England, they brought with them great zeal for church-building, and many churches built by them remain to our day on the Wolds of the East Riding.

The NORMAN style of building was one of round-headed arches and of narrow round-headed windows with the sides widely splayed, so that the window-opening inside is very much larger than the narrow slit which appears on the outside of the wall. The walls were very thick, the masonry was rough, the joints between the stones were very clumsy, and the buttresses, if used at all, did not project more than a few inches from the walls. The early Norman churches had very plain chancel or tower arches, such as we see at Speeton, Reighton, and Rudston; but those built later had arches magnificently carved with zigzags or _chevrons_, and with animal forms. Good examples of these may be seen at North Newbald, Kirkburn, Nunburnholme, Etton, and Garton-on-the-Wolds.

The Norman style of building lasted from 1066 to 1190. Then came a change. Instead of using a semi-circular or one-centred arch, architects found out the advantages of a two-centred arch. They also made the discovery that the walls need not be so thick, if the thickness of the buttresses was increased. Thus came about what we call the EARLY ENGLISH or LANCET style of building, which was fashionable for the ninety years from 1190 to 1280. Beautiful examples of this style can be seen in the churches of Filey, Hedon, Middleton-on-the-Wolds, and Kirk Ella.

Again came a change, a growth of ideas. Men grew tired of the simple form of _Lancet_ window, which we to-day consider so beautiful because of its simplicity. First they experimented by piercing an ornamental hole through the stonework above a group of lancets. This gave what we call _Plate Tracery_, examples of which are not numerous in our Riding.

Then a further experiment was made. Instead of building the head of a group of lancets in solid stone, some architect-builder hit upon the idea of making a pattern of shaped bars of stone, and of filling in the pattern with glass cut to fit the spaces. This at once proved popular, and an entirely new fashion in window designs set in.

At first the patterns made in stone were simple _Geometrical_ ones, such as those in the chancel windows at Rudston. But gradually, as one set of builders vied with another in building the most beautiful church, the patterns became more complicated and _Curvilinear_ in form. These last two styles together made up what is usually known as the DECORATED style of building, and were in fashion from 1280 to 1380.