By far the nearest way to Richmond from Leyburn is across the moor, a rough and desolate road, but preferable to the terrible long way by Catterick, more than double the distance (by rail it is four times the distance!). This is the prettiest village of any on the way (which is not saying much, be it said). The early fifteenth-century church has some good monuments and brasses, one of the latter to a lady who for many years before she died carried her winding-sheet about with her; and one would naturally suppose one with such gruesome ideas would still walk the earth for the edification of the timid, but she doesn't.
The entrance to Richmond by the nearest way is very charming. You come suddenly upon the castle perched up over the river, and as you wind down the hill the grouping of its towers is thrown into perspective, forming a delightful picture with the river and the bridge for a foreground. Three kings have been prisoners within these formidable Norman walls: two kings of Scotland, William and David Bruce, and after the lapse of three centuries, Charles I., who passed here on his way to Holdenby. The stalls and misericordes in the fine old church came from Easby Abbey. They are boldly carved, and one of them represents a sow playing a fiddle for the edification of her little pigs. There is a curious coloured mural monument, on the east side of the chancel, of Sir Timothy Hutton and his wife and children—twelve of them, including four babes, beneath two of which are these verses:
"As carefull mothers do to sleeping say,
Their babes that would too long the wanton play;
So to prevent my youths approaching crimes,
Nature my nurse had me to bed betimes."
The next is less involved:
"Into this world as strangers to an inn
This infant came, guest wise;
Where when 't had been and found no entertainment worth her stay,
She only broke her fast and went away."
Altogether it is a cheery tomb. Faith, Hope and Charity are there, one of whom acts as nurse to one of the babes. Her ladyship's expression is somewhat of the Aunt Sally type, but that was the sculptor's fault. The ancient church plate includes a chalice dated 1640. The registers are beautifully neat and clean, and full of curious matter, such as the banns being read by the market-cross.
Apropos of Yorkshire marriages, the odd custom prevails in some parts of emptying a kettle of boiling water, down—not the backs of the happy pair, but down the steps of the front door as they drive away, that the threshold may be "kept warm for another bride," we presume for another swain. The way also of ascertaining whether the future career of those united will be attended with happiness is simple and effective. All you have to do is, as the bride steps out of the carriage, to fling a plate containing small pieces of the wedding-cake out of a window upon the heads of the onlookers. If the crowd is a small one, and the plate arrives on the pavement and is smashed to pieces, all will go well; but if somebody's head intervenes, the augury is ominous; which, after all, is only natural, for is it not likely that one thus greeted would call at the house to bestow his blessing upon somebody? What a pity this pretty custom is not introduced into the fashionable marriages of St George's, Hanover Square. It would at least create a sensation.
For the rest of Richmond church, well—it was restored by Sir Gilbert Scott. It is regrettable to find the piscina on a level with the floor, beneath a pew seat!
The curfew still rings at Richmond, telling the good people when to go to bed; but whether they go or not is another matter. We are told it is, or was, also rung for them to get up again at six o'clock; and the aged official whose duty it was to ring the morning bell, like a wise man, did so at his leisure, lying in bed with the rope hanging from the ceiling.[35]
From the churchyard, Easby Abbey is seen in the distance in a romantic spot by the river: and the walk there is delightful, along the terrace above the Swale. Like the rest of these fine structures, it was destroyed by the vindictive Henry in 1535. The water close at hand, the old abbot's elm, and the little church and gatehouse beyond, altogether make this a spot in which to linger and ruminate. The church walls are covered with curious and very well preserved paintings of the twelfth century, giving a good idea of the costume of the period. The tempting serpent, too, is shown twisted in artistic coils around a very pre-Raphael looking tree; and in another scene the partakers of the fruit are doubled up with remorse, or dyspepsia.
So close at hand as is Bolton on Swale, to the east, it would be a pity not to mention Henry Jenkins, who died there in 1670, aged one hundred and sixty-nine!—a man in Charles II.'s reign who remembered the dissolution of the monasteries, and who recollected as a boy assisting in carrying arrows in a cart to the battle of Flodden field (where veteran soldiers remembered the accession of King Edward IV.), was a wonder compared with the feeble memory of our present-day centenarians, who rarely recollect anything worth recording. When we think how nearly we are linked with 1670 by the life of Mrs. William Stuart, who died in the late queen's reign, and who heard from the lips of her grandmother how she had been taken to Court in a black-draped Sedan when Whitehall was in mourning for the death of the king's sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans,—it would have been possible for the little girl to have spoken with old Jenkins, and thus with only three lives to have linked the early part of the reign of Henry VIII. with that of Victoria.