In history, Grantham and its immediate neighbourhood are notable as having witnessed the rise of Oliver Cromwell. At the outbreak of hostilities in March 1643, the town was taken and its fortifications demolished by the Royalists, but was retaken shortly afterwards by the Parliamentary troops under a hitherto undistinguished Cornet of Horse, after some fighting at Gonerby. The rise of this cornet is picturesquely described by De Foe. “About this time,” he says, “it was that we began to hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud, rose out of the East, and spread first into the North, until it shed down a flood that overwhelmed the three kingdoms.” It was on May 22, 1643, that, with twelve troops, Cromwell defeated at Gonerby twenty-four troops of the opposing forces, and thus commenced this meteorological career.
The ascent of Gonerby Hill, where these events took place, is a part of the journey to the North. It begins at the distance of a mile and a quarter beyond Grantham, shortly before reaching the hundred and twelfth milestone from London. For this part of the world it is a remarkable eminence, but although a long continuous climb, it does not come up to the impressive old descriptions of it, and cannot compare with such hills as Reigate Hill, or with Boughton Hill on the Dover Road. The village of Great Gonerby, a poor, out-at-elbows kind of a place, stands on the crest of the hill, with its great spired church as a landmark, a wide, bare street, a little inn with the curious sign of the “Recruiting Sergeant,” and an old posting inn, the “Rutland Arms,” its principal features. Passing through the cutting by which the gradient of the northern side of the hill has been eased, a remarkable view is unfolded of that flat region, fertile as a land of promise, the Vale of Belvoir.
We shall hear presently what Sir Walter Scott has to say of Gonerby Hill, but in the meanwhile let us see how the view from it struck another traveller, the Reverend Thomas Twining, an amiable clergyman of Colchester, who in the eighteenth century was in the habit of taking holidays along the roads, mounted on his horse “Poppet,” and writing letters to his friends, describing what he saw. He was here in 1776.
“You have a view,” says he, “somewhat sublime and striking from its mere extent and suddenness but it is flat as a pancake. The road is through level, moorish, unpleasant ground from the bottom of that hill to Newark, but, as road, excellent.” No guide-book ever pictured a view so vividly as this description, which may stand unaltered to-day.
Gonerby Hill—“Gunnerby” is the correct pronunciation of the word—is something more to us in these pages than merely a hill. It is a place of literary eminence, whose terrors are enshrined in the pages of Scott and Ainsworth. Jeanie Deans, of all the romantic and historic characters that people this historic and romantic road the most prominent, is especially to be identified with this height. Historic she is because there is a substantial basis of truth in the character of Sir Walter Scott’s heroine, and of Effie and many another figure in the Heart of Midlothian. They have fictitious names, but some were real persons. Helen Walker, who died in 1791 and was buried in the churchyard of Irongray, near Dumfries, is the prototype of Jeanie. She had in 1737 walked to London and sought a pardon for her sister, Isabella, condemned to death by the ferocious Scots law on a presumption of having murdered her child. She actually did (as Scott’s heroine is described as having done) seek the Duke of Argyle and through his interest obtain the object of her journey; but Scott is responsible for the embroidery of this simple and affecting story; for he never saw Helen Walker, and she, with Scottish closeness, never described her adventures, being only too anxiously concerned that the story of her sister’s shame should be forgotten.
It is a curious and (admirable or not, as one may personally think it) unusual conscience that would hesitate to stretch a point in evidence when to do so would be to save the life of a loved sister; and more strange still to find so unbending a moralist enduring the toils and dangers of a four-hundred miles’ tramp with the bare possibility of preserving the life of the sinner in view at the end; but to understand the workings of the Scottish conscience is beyond the mental reach of any one who does not chance to be either a Scot or a Presbyterian.
And here let it be said that the Jeanie Deans of the novel is by no means so attractive a heroine as Scott wished to make her. There is heroism in her walk from Scotland to London, and we rejoice when she is fortunate enough to obtain a “cast in a wagon,” or pity her when she falls in with thieves and murderers at Gonerby Hill foot; but when we find her “conforming to the national (that is to say, the English) extravagance of wearing shoes and stockings for the whole day,” we can scarce subdue a snort of contempt at the very superior manner in which she thus yields to the popular prejudice in favour of this extravagance in shoe-leather. Nor is she a particularly lovable figure when she disputes theology with the rector of Willingham, with all the assurance of a Doctor of Divinity and all the narrow-minded bigotry of a Covenanter; coming in these things perilously near the ideal of the perfect prig.
We must here quote the landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” at Newark on Gonerby Hill. He spoke of it as though it were some beetling eminence, resembling at the very least a Snowdon or an Helvellyn. He called it a “high mountain,” and indeed Scott has in putting this phrase into mine host’s mouth made him characteristic of his age.
The year of Jeanie Deans’ romantic expedition was 1737, and then, and for long afterwards, travellers and all who had business with the roads magnified hills in this manner. They disliked hills, and so for that matter did most people, for the appreciation of scenery was not yet born. “When I was young,” said Wordsworth, many years later, “there were no lakes nor mountains,” and it was Thomas Gray, the author of the Elegy, who really was the first to discover beauty instead of terror and desolation in them.
Jeanie Deans, on the other hand, was pleased to hear of Gonerby Hill. Not, mark you, that she was educated up to an appreciation of the picturesque. We know, in fact, that she was not, because when she and the Duke of Argyle stood looking down upon the lovely expanse of woods, meads, and waters seen from Richmond Hill, all she could find to say was that “It’s braw feeding for the cows.” No, when she learned with pleasure of the “mountain” she was to cross, it was only for association’s sake: “I’m glad to hear there’s a hill, for baith my sight and my very feet are weary o’ sic tracts o’ level ground—it looks a’ the way between this and York as if a’ the land had been trenched and levelled, whilk is very wearisome to my Scotch een. When I lost sight of a muckle blue hill they ca’ Ingleboro’, I thought I hadna a friend left in this strange land.”
“As for the matter of that, young woman,” said mine host, “an you be so fond o’ hill, I carena an thou couldst carry Gunnerby away with thee in thy lap, for it’s a murder to post-horses. But here’s to thy journey, and mayst thou win well through it, for thou is a bold and a canny lass.”
Gonerby Hill was reputed the steepest bit between London and Edinburgh. It was, at the time when Scott wrote, a great deal steeper than nowadays, now that the road has been cut deeply through it, instead of climbing painfully over the crest. Then also, as he remarks, the open ground at its foot was unenclosed and covered with copses and swampy pools. Also, as Jeanie discovered, there was “bad company” where the “bonny hill lifted its brow to the moon.” But surely never did such odd company as Sir Walter has invented lurk in these recesses. The Heart of Midlothian, indeed, is a fantastic novel quite unworthy of the Wizard of the North, and its wildly improbable characters and marvellous rencounters are on a par with Harrison Ainsworth at his worst. Syston, two miles away to the right, is, they say, the original of the Willingham village in the novel, and Barkston, close by, is doubtless the “Barkston town-end” where Mother Murdockson was put in the stocks; but the references to them are of the haziest.
It was not inadvisedly that Ainsworth was just mentioned, for Gonerby Hill is named in Turpin’s Ride. Ainsworth always resorted to the gibbet when he wanted to make a point in the gruesome. Accordingly, when Turpin mounts the rise, what does he find but “two scarecrow objects covered with rags and rusty links of chain,” depending from “the tree.” “Will this be my lot, I wonder?” asks the hero with a shudder. We need only to be slightly acquainted with Ainsworth’s methods to know that a melodramatic answer was immediately forthcoming. Springing from the briars and tussocks of rank grass between the foot of the gallows and the road, a gaunt figure exclaimed, “Ay, marry will it!” These “gaunt figures” never failed the novelist; but the plain man wants to know what they were doing on these inclement spots, and by what unfailing instinct they were always there at the precise moment demanded in the interests of fiction.
The descent of Gonerby Hill accomplished, and the level reached, a singularly featureless and flat twelve miles leads into Newark, past Marston cross-roads, where a turnpike gate used to trouble travellers, past Foston, a forlorn village on a knoll, Long Bennington, a larger and still more forlorn village on the flat, and thence, with the graceful spire of Claypole far on the right, over the Shire Dyke, into Nottinghamshire, and through Balderton.
The approach to Newark is long and dull, by way of the suburban “London Road” and past the decaying Beaumond Cross, but this leads at length to the great open square of the Market-place, the most striking of all such centres of public resort to be found on the way to the North. Newark-“upon-Trent” is a misnomer, for neither the town nor the castle, which was once the “new work” that gave the place its name, are on that river, but only on a branch of it—the Devon—which falls into the Trent at Crankley Point, some miles below the town. The “new work” was only new some eight hundred years ago, when Edward the Confessor’s castle on the banks of the Devon was built, or when it was rebuilt or enlarged by Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, 1123–47. Bishops and other mighty castle-builders in those times not infrequently built their own prisons when piling up their grim fortresses, and so the Bishop of Lincoln found, when King Stephen seized him and kept him in durance within his own stronghold. A judiciously low diet of bread and water, and confinement in an unhealthy dungeon below the level of the river, soon broke the haughty Churchman’s spirit, and he transferred the castle to the Crown.
But Newark Castle has better claims to notice than as the dungeon of one of those old bloody-minded prelates. As the place where King John ended his evil life, we may well look upon its ruined walls with interest. His rebellious barons scattered on his approach in that year of 1216, and England seemed in danger of a long continuance of its troubles under the profligate king. But a surfeit of peaches brought that wicked life to a hasty conclusion, and here, on the banks of the sluggish Devon, one of the worst of English monarchs died. We need not regard peaches with apprehension because John is said to have died of them. We must consider whence they came; from the monks of Swineshead Abbey, where the king had stayed on his journey to Newark. Now, Holy Church had the very best of reasons for hating that monarch, and from hatred to murder was not a far cry in those days. So of peaches King John doubtless died; but of peaches subtly flavoured with poison, there is little doubt.
The castle was again seized by the barons, in the succeeding reign, but they surrendered, after a week’s siege, and by the gift of the king, the Bishops of Lincoln received their own again. Under Edward the Sixth it again became the property of the crown, and when James the First “progressed” through England to his throne, these walls sheltered him during a week of festivity.
A lawless and discourteous, as well as a weak-minded king, as we shall see. Crowds assembled during the festivities set apart by the corporation, and a fellow was caught in the act of pocket-picking. By order of the king, the unfortunate wretch was strung up, instanter, without the veriest semblance of a trial! There’s your lawlessness, and here follows the discourtesy.
There was a certain Dame Eleanor Disney, who, to do honour to this strange kind of king, came, splendidly dressed, with her husband, Sir Henry, to one of the receptions. James’s eye lighted upon all this finery, and his frugal mind was shocked. “Wha,” he asked, “be that lady wi’ a lairdship to her bock?”
But the most stirring of Newark’s historic days were yet to come. Newark to the last was loyal to Charles the First. Three times was the town besieged by the Parliament, and never taken. All the inhabitants armed and did excellent service, making sorties and capturing troops of Parliamentary horse; and had not the royal cause failed elsewhere, Newark must have emerged, triumphant, at the end. But at last all that remained were some few outlying garrisons throughout the country. Newark was especially commanded by the king to discontinue a hopeless resistance, and accordingly the town laid down its arms in 1646. It was then that the castle was ruined.
It is a highly picturesque ruin to-day, and lacking nothing in itself of grandeur, only needs a more effective site. As it stands, only slightly elevated above the river and the surrounding levels, this historic castle has not the advantages that belong to fortresses like Ludlow and Harlech, perched on their rocky heights. But it has done its duty and still serves to give a note of dignity to Newark town, as one approaches it by the long straight levels of the road from the north. It looks much the same to-day as when Rowlandson made his sketch of it, with the coach dashing over the bridge, more than a hundred years ago; the projecting Tudor oriel windows still looking forth upon the sullen tide from the more ancient walls, their crumbling stones scarce more decayed than then. The old wooden bridge, however, that formerly spanned the Devon, was pulled down and rebuilt in 1775.
The great glory of Newark is its beautiful church, with that soaring spire which is visible for miles away, before the town itself is glimpsed. Not so tall as Grantham spire, it is as beautiful in its simpler style, and the church is better placed in the town than that of Grantham. Especially striking is the view across the great market-place, the grey Early English and Decorated spire, with its numerous belfry-lights, and the fine windows and bold arcading of the tower forming a splendidly effective contrast with the seventeenth and eighteenth century red-brick houses facing the square. Newark and Grantham spires are really the products of an old-time rivalry between the two towns. Either town is satisfied that it possesses the best, and so the peace is kept throughout the ages.
A relic of old times is found in the custom at Newark known as “Ringing for Gofer.” On six successive Sunday evenings, beginning twelve Sundays before Christmas, the old parish church bells are rung for one hour, complying with the terms of a bequest left by a merchant named Gofer, over two centuries ago. He had on one occasion lost his way at night in Sherwood Forest, then infested by robbers of no very chivalrous instincts, who required, not “your money or your life,” but both. Just as he had given up hope, he heard these bells of Newark, and by their sound he made his way to safety. In memory of his deliverance he left a sum of money for this bell-ringing.
The market-square has always been the centre of Newark’s life. It is singularly like the great market-square of Nottingham, on a smaller scale, and, like it, is partly surrounded by houses with a colonnaded piazza. An empty void now, save on the weekly market-day, that occasion finds its broad, cobble-stoned space thickly covered with stalls, while groups of farmers throng the pavements, and with their samples of corn displayed in the palms of their hands sell and buy in immense quantities. In the old times this vast empty square was peopled every day with arriving or departing coaches, and its pavements beset with passengers mounting or alighting, for the celebrated inns of Newark were mostly situated here, and the chief of them are here, even now, on the opposite side from the church, and adjoining one another. Newark is said to have once had no fewer than fifty inns. The classical Town Hall, built in 1773, on the west side of the square, stands on the site of two of them, and many others have been converted to different uses. Here on the south side are the “Clinton Arms,” so called in honour of the Duke of Newcastle’s family, powerful in these parts; the “Saracen’s Head,” with a bust of an alleged (but very pallid and mild-looking) Saracen on its frontage; and the “White Hart,” most ancient of all these existing hostelries. An inn of this name is spoken of as existing here in 1113. A “Saracen’s Head” stood here, certainly as far back as 1341, but unhappily the existing house only dates from 1721. This house is the one mentioned by Sir Walter Scott, who says, “The travellers who have visited Newark more lately will not fail to remember the remarkably civil and gentlemanly manners of the person who now keeps the principal inn there, and may find some amusement in contrasting them with those of his more rough predecessor.”
Let us put on record the name of this remarkable person: William Thompson, landlord from 1784 to 1819. His “more rough predecessor” was perhaps the landlord who dispensed such open-handed and free hospitality to Jeanie Deans, when that somewhat priggish young woman stayed there, and on leaving asked for her “lawing.”
“Thy lawing!” exclaimed that “more rough” person; “Heaven help thee, wench! what ca’st thou that?”
“It is—I was wanting to ken what was to pay.”
“Pay? Lord help thee!—why, nought, woman—we hae drawn no liquor but a gill o’ beer, and the “Saracen’s Head” can spare a mouthful o’ meat to a stranger like thee, that cannot speak Christian language.”
Alas! whatever your language, the more smooth innkeepers of Newark, in our times, do not do business on this principle.
The “Clinton Arms” has seen many changes of name. It was originally the “Talbot,” and as such is mentioned in 1341. At a later date it became the “Kingston Arms.” Byron often stayed there, and writes from London in 1807, “The ‘Kingston Arms’ is my inn.” It was also the inn, during the election contest of 1832, of Mr. Gladstone, soliciting for the first time the suffrages of “free and independent” electors, who duly returned him, in the Tory interest. Newark thus gave him an opportunity in Parliament of defending his father as a slave-owner, and of whetting his youthful eloquence to a keen edge in extolling the principle of slave-owning. The Newarkers were long proud of having returned the “statesman” to the House, but history will perhaps deny him that title. It has been denied, and the term of “egotistical politician” found to fit better. He set a fashion in surrender, and his country reaped shame while he lived; but the bitterest harvest-home of his methods has come, after his death, in the red vintage of English blood. It was when standing for this pocket-borough of the Duke of Newcastle’s that Gladstone gave an early and characteristic specimen of his peculiarly Jesuitical ways of thought. He took the mail-coach on a Sunday from Newark for London, and beguiled the tedium of the journey and the Sabbath by discussing the question of Sunday travelling with a Tory companion. Not merely did he severely condemn the practice, but he also gave some tracts to his fellow-traveller! He gives the facts himself: it is no outsider’s satire. Thus, in one moment of confidence, he reveals not only what he is, but what he will be. He implicitly announces that he is a law unto himself and that those things are permitted to him which in others must be deadly sins. In the very moment of crime he can present an accomplice with a tract, and glow with all the fervour of one helped to save a lost soul.
Newark Castle (After Rowlandson)
The “Ram,” another old inn, is still standing, opposite the castle, on Beast Market Hill. George Eliot stayed here in September 1868, “seeing some charming quiet landscapes” along the Trent. Quiet, undoubtedly.
Ridge, the printer and bookseller, Byron’s first publisher, who issued his Hours of Idleness, carried on business in a fine old house still standing at a corner of the square, and the house-door and the brass knocker at which the new-fledged poet knocked exist to-day.
By Beast Market Hill, past the castle and over the bridge, one leaves Newark for the north. Level crossings of the railways now and again bedevil the way, which is flat so far as the eye can reach—and much farther, and the meadows on either side are intersected by runlets and marshes, the road carried over them by a succession of red-brick bridges. At a distance of one and a half miles, the true Trent is crossed by a wooden bridge, and South Muskham reached, where the level-crossing gates take the place of the old turnpike.
The act of looking backwards at this point is a more pleasing physical exercise than the mental retrospect is ever likely to be, anywhere. Sir Walter Scott perceived the beauty of the view, for he introduces it in Jeanie Deans’ journey south, and says, in a fine passage: “The hundred-armed Trent and the blackened ruins of Newark castle, demolished in the great Civil War, lay before her.”
“Hundred-armed” is a good and eloquent figure, although on a prosaic calculation likely to be found an exaggeration. Milton, indeed, writing a hundred and ninety years or so before, gives the Trent but thirty arms, on which, it must be allowed, Sir Walter’s computation is a great advance. But here is Milton’s version:—
“Trent, which like some earth-born giant spreads
His thirty arms along the indented meads.”
Even Drayton, in his Polyolbion, does not more nearly approach to Sir Walter’s computation, in the couplet:—
“The bounteous Trent, that in herself enseams,
Both thirty sorts of fish and thirty sundry streams.”
Shakespeare rather shirks the calculation, and contents himself with describing it as the “smug and silver Trent.” As for mere travellers, who did not happen to be poets or to be engaged in the exploitation of scenery, they regarded this stream merely with apprehension, and they did right so to look upon it, for Trent often overflowed its thirty or hundred arms, as the case might be, and converted the flats for miles around into the semblage of a vast lake. Then, indeed—if at no other time—Newark was “upon” Trent, if not actually “in” it, and all the many other towns and villages, which bear a similarly composite title, were in like case. Doubtless it was on one of these occasions in 1739, before the river was bridged here, that the Newcastle wagon was lost at the ford, when the driver and the horses all perished. Nearly thirty years later, on the 6th of June 1767, the poet Gray, writing from London, before starting on a journey in these parts, says:—“Pray that the Trent may not intercept us at Newark, for we have had infinite rain here.” Nor are floods infrequent, even now, and many a boating-party has voyaged down the Great North Road between Newark and Carlton-upon-Trent.
North and South Muskham lie off the road to the right, and are not remarkable, except perhaps for the fact that a centenarian, in the person of Thomas Seals of Grassthorpe, who died in 1802, age 106, lies in North Muskham churchyard. Cromwell, on the other hand, which now comes in sight, although now a commonplace roadside village of uninteresting, modern, red-brick cottages, with an old, but not remarkable, church, has a place in history. According to Carlyle, “the small parish of Cromwell, or Crumwell (the well of Crum, whatever that may be), not far from the left bank of the Trent, simple worshippers still doing in it some kind of divine service every Sunday,” was the original home of the Cromwell family, from which the great Protector sprang. “From this,” he adds, “without any ghost to teach us, we can understand that the Cromwell kindred all got their name.” But the hero-worshipper will look in vain for anything at Cromwell to connect the place with that family. Not even a tablet in the church; nothing, in fact, save the name itself survives.
Here is a blacksmith’s forge, with the design of a huge horseshoe encompasing the door, and this inscription:—
“F. NAYLOR
BlacksmithGentlemen, as you pass by,
Upon this shoe pray cast an eye.
I’ll make it wider,
I’ll ease the horse and please the rider.
If lame from shoeing, as they often are
You may have them eased with the greatest care.”
Hence to Carlton-upon-Trent, Sutton-upon-Trent, Scarthing Moor, and Tuxford is an easy transition of nearly eight miles, with little scenery or history on the way. An old posting-house, now retired into private life, the level-crossing of Crow Park, and an old roadside inn, the “Nag’s Head,” beside it are all the objects of interest at Carlton; while Sutton is scarce more than a name, so far as the traveller along the road is concerned.
Weston, a village at a bend and dip of the road, stands by what was once Scarthing Moor, whose famous inn, the “Black Lion,” is now, like the old-time festivities of Sutton-on-Trent, only a memory. The farmers and cottagers of Sutton-on-Trent long preserved the spring-time custom of welcoming the coaches, and freely feasting guards, coachmen, and passengers. It was an annual week’s merrymaking, and young and old united to keep it up. Coaches were compelled to stop in the village street, and every one was invited to partake of the good things spread out upon a tray covered with a beautiful damask napkin on which were attractively displayed plum-cakes, tartlets, gingerbread, exquisite home-made bread and biscuits, ale, currant and gooseberry wines, cherry-brandy, and sometimes spirits. These in old-fashioned glass jugs, embossed with figures, had a most pleasing effect. As to the contents, they were superlative. Such ale! such currant-wine! such cherry-brandy! Half a dozen damsels, all enchanting young people, neatly clad, rather shy, but courteously importunate plied the passengers.
“Eat and drink you must,” says one who partook of these al fresco hospitalities. “I tasted all. How could I resist the winning manners of the rustics, with rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes? My poor stomach, not used to such luxuries and extraordinaries at eleven o’clock in the morning, was, however, in fine agitation the remainder of the ride, fifty miles. Neither time nor entreaties can prevent their solicitations; they are issued to reward the men for trifling kindnesses occasionally granted.”
“Scarthing Moor” is a name of somewhat terrifying sound; but, as with all the “moors” met with on the Great North Road, enclosure and cultivation have entirely changed its character, and the “moor” is just a stretch of fields undistinguishable from the surrounding country. It leads presently to the little town of Tuxford-in-the-Clay, approached up a steep rise passing under the bridge of the Lincolnshire and East Coast Railway, and in view of Tuxford’s Great Northern Station, away on the right, perched on a windy and uncomfortable-looking ridge. A red rash of recent brick cottages has broken out at the foot of the rise, but Tuxford itself, on the crest of the hill, seems unchanged since coaching days, except that the traffic which then enlivened it has gone. It is a gaunt, lifeless place, in spite of its three railway stations, and stands where the roads cross on the height, and the church, the “Newcastle Arms,” another inn which arrogates the title of “The Hotel,” and the private houses and shops of the decayed town face a wide open street, and all shiver in company. But Tuxford has seen gorgeous sights in its time. Witness the gay and lengthy cavalcade that “lay” here in the July of 1503, when the Princess Margaret was on her way to her marriage with the king of Scotland. The princess stayed at the “Crown,” demolished in 1587 by one of the storms which hill-top Tuxford knows so well, and leaving us the poorer by one ancient hostelry. Not that it would have survived to this day had there been no storm, for the town itself was destroyed by fire at a much later date, in 1702.
The “Newcastle Arms” is one of those old houses built for the reception of many and wealthy travellers in the Augustan age of the road, and is by consequence many sizes too large for present needs, so that a portion of the house is set apart for offices quite unconnected with hotel business. Even the roomy old church away on the other side of the broad road seems on too large a scale for Tuxford, as it is, and the stone effigies of the Longvilliers and the mouldy hatchments of later families hanging on the walls of its bare chapels tell a tale of vanished greatness. There is a curious and clumsy carving in this church, representing the martyrdom of St. Lawrence. The Saint is shown on his gridiron (which resembles nothing so much as a ladder) and wears a pleased expression, as though he rather liked the process of being grilled, while one tormentor is turning him and another blowing up the fire with a pair of bellows.
After the church, the old red-brick grammar-school, founded by “Carolo Read” in 1669, is the most interesting building in Tuxford. “What God hath built, let no man destroy,” says the inscription over the entrance, placed there, no doubt, by the donor with a vivid recollection of the destruction wrought in the Civil War of some twenty years before.
The road leaves Tuxford steeply downhill and facing another hill. Descending this, the villages of East and West Markham are just visible, right and left; West Markham with a hideous church like a Greek temple, its green copper dome conspicuous for a long distance. At the foot of Cleveland Hill, as it is called, is, or was, Markham Moor, for it was enclosed in 1810, with the great “Markham Moor Inn,” now looking very forlorn and lonely, standing at the fall of the roads, where the turnpike gate used to be, and where the Worksop road goes off to the left, and a battered pillar of grey stone with a now illegible inscription stands. This may or may not be the “Rebel Stone,” spoken of in old county histories as standing by the wayside, bearing the inscription, “Here lieth the Body of a Rebel, 1746.”
Beyond this, again, is Gamston, a still decaying village, its red-brick houses ruined or empty, the wayside forge closed and the handsome old church on a hillock but sparsely attended; the whole a picture of the failure and neglect which descended upon the roadside villages fifty years ago. Many have found other vocations, but Gamston is not of them.
For some one hundred and fifty years the Great North Road has gone through Tuxford to East Retford and Barnby Moor; but this is not the original road. That has to be sought, half-deserted, away to the left. There is much romance on that old way, which is one of several derelict branching roads just here. The time seems to be approaching when this original road will be restored, to effect a relief to the heavy traffic through Retford.
We may branch off for the exploration of the old road either at Markham Moor or at Gamston. Either turning will bring us in two and a half miles to Jockey House, now a farmhouse, but once an inn at what were cross-roads. Two of these roads are grass tracks, but the old Great North Road on to Rushy Inn and Barnby Moor is quite good, although very little used.
A substantial stone pillar stands at the corner of the cross-roads opposite the Jockey House, inscribed:—
From
London 142
Miles
and a half
Coach Road
Work/op Mannor
Hou/e
7 Miles 3 qrs
176 —
The Keys
in the Jockey
House.
The “keys in the Jockey House” means that here was a turnpike-gate with no turnpike keeper. The taking of toll seems to have been conducted from the inn.
In the churchyard of Elkisley, a mile or so distant, there is a tombstone which refers to a tragedy in the Jockey House two hundred years ago. It reads:—
“Here lieth the body of
JOHN BARAGH,
gentleman, who was murdered by
Midford Hendry, officer of the Guards,
on the 24th day of June, 1721.
Age 29 years.”
Hendry, it seems, was in command of a company of Guards travelling south on the Great North Road. They had halted for refreshment at Jockey House, and Hendry got into a violent political discussion in the inn with Baragh, who was sitting there, a complete stranger to him. In the course of their high words, Hendry drew his sword and stabbed Baragh to the heart.
Retford, on the main road, is over three miles distant from Gamston, past the more cheerful-looking little hamlet of Eaton, and the outlying settlement by the “White House Inn,” at the beginning of the long approach to the town.
Retford is a town of varied industries, situated on either bank of the river Idle, and by it divided into East and West Retford. Engineering works, brick and tile making, and agricultural pursuits combine to render it prosperous, if not progressive, for when Retford built its elaborate Town Hall in 1867 it probably exhausted itself with the effort. In this Square, on a plinth, stands the “Bread Stone,” or “Broad Stone,” a seventeenth century Plague Stone with a hollow at that time filled with vinegar and water for the immersion of coins passing in the market against infection. The town centres in its Market Square, in which the old Town Hall stood. When that building was pulled down a great amount of additional room was obtained at the cost of a certain picturesqueness, to which quality the town can now scarcely lay claim. The “White Hart,” standing at this corner of the Market Square, is the only relic of old coaching days. Its modernised frontage does not give the house credit for the respectable age which it really owns, and it is only when we explore the stableyard, a picturesque and narrow passage, extending from the Market Square to Bridgegate, that we see the old-time importance of the “White Hart.” It is perhaps unique in one respect. Nowadays, the old innkeepers are, of course, all dead. In some instances their families carried on the business for a while, but soon afterwards all these old coaching-houses passed into other hands. Even the Percival family, innkeepers and coach-masters for some generations at Wansford and at Greetham, no longer have the “Haycock” or the “Greetham Inn,” but the “White Hart” is still in the Dennett family, and has been since 1818, when William Dennett took it over. He reigned here until 1848, and was succeeded by his son, Joseph Dennett, who, dying in 1890, was in his turn followed by Arthur Dennett, the present landlord. An old coaching-house—the coaching-house of Retford—it occupied a particularly favourable position on the main and cross-country coach-routes: those of Worksop and Chesterfield on the one hand, and Gainsborough, Market Rasen, and Boston on the other. Besides being in receipt of the local coaching business between Stamford and Doncaster, Joseph Dennett horsed a stage of the Doncaster and Stamford Amity Coach and the Stamford and Retford Auxiliary Mail, among others.
Although overshadowed by the neighbouring “Bell” on Barnby Moor, kept by the mighty George Clark, this house did a good posting business. For one thing, the story of the “White Hart” as a posting-house does not go back so far as that of the “Bell,” for when Clark came to Barnby Moor he found a fine business already developed, but the rise of the “White Hart” into prominence dates only from the coming of the Dennetts. Twelve post-horses and three boys formed its ordinary posting establishment, and among them the name of John Blagg is prominent. He left the “Bell” at an early period and entered the service of the “White Hart” in 1834, remaining for forty-five years, and dying, at the age of seventy-five, in October 1880. The old posting-books of the house still show one of his feats of endurance, the riding post from Retford to York and back in one day, a distance of a hundred and ten miles. When posting became a thing of the past, John Blagg was still in request, and his well-remembered figure, clad in the traditional postboy costume of white breeches, blue jacket, and white beaver hat, was seen almost to the last at weddings and other celebrations when riding postillion was considered indispensable. Here he is, portrayed from the life, a characteristic figure of a vanished era.
There are still some relics of that time at the “White Hart”: the old locker belonging to the Boston coach, in which the guard used to secure the valuables intrusted to him; and in the sunny old booking-office looking out upon the Market Square there are even now some old posting-saddles and postboys’ whips.
Leaving Retford by Bridgegate, the road rises at once to the long five-miles’ stretch of Barnby Moor, home of howling winds and whirling snow-wreaths in winter, and equally unprotected from the fierce glare of the midsummer sun. At the further end of this trying place, just past a huddled group of cottages at the bend of the road, stands the famous old “Blue Bell” inn. But no one was ever heard to talk of this old coaching hostelry as the “Blue Bell.” The “Bell,” Barnby Moor, was the title by which it was always known.
For the beginning of the well-earned fame of the “Bell” we must go back a long way. Not, indeed, to ancient times, for there was never a mediæval hostel here, but to very old coaching days. Already, in 1776, when the Rev. Thomas Twining was ambling about the country on “Poppet,” making picturesque notes, it was a “gentlemanlike, comfortable house,” and Sterne knew it well. “I am worn out,” says he in one of his letters, “but press on to Barnby Moor to-night.” Even the “worn-out” would make an effort, you see, to reach this hospitable roof-tree.
But a greater fame was earned by the “Bell” in its later days, when it was kept by George Clark, at once innkeeper, sportsman, and breeder of racehorses. He was famed for his anecdotal and conversational powers, and when free from gout was reputed “a tough customer over the mahogany,” in which testimony we may read, in the manner of that time, a crowning virtue. Something—nay, a great deal—more than the “red-nosed innkeepers” of whom Sir Walter Scott speaks, he was also a landed proprietor, and supplied his extensive establishment from his own farm. Peculiarly the man for this road, and especially for this portion of the road, his personality made the “Bell” inn—the word “hotel” was in those days an abomination and an offence—the especial resort of the sporting fraternity, and racing men generally contrived to make his house their halting-place.
Clark reigned at the “Bell” for forty years, from 1800, dying of gout in 1842, shortly after he had sold the house to a Mr. Inett. His was that famous mare, Lollypop, who gave birth to the yet more famous Sweetmeat. But Clark did not live to learn the quality of that foal, and Sweetmeat was sold at the dispersal of his stable for ten guineas. Three years later, when he had won the Somersetshire Stakes at Bath, Lord George Bentinck in vain offered four thousand guineas for him, and later in that year, 1845, he won the Doncaster Cup.
Clark was chiefly instrumental in bringing to justice two incendiaries, disciples of “Captain Swing,” who had fired a hayrick not far from the “Bell.” At that period—the early “thirties”—when the Reform agitation was embittering the relations between the squires and the peasantry, rick-burnings were prevalent all over the country. They went by the name of the “Swing Riots,” from the circumstance of the threatening letters and notices received being signed in the name of that entirely pseudonymous or mythical person. One night Clark was roused from his bed with the information that the rioters were at work close at hand. Hastily rising and dressing by the glare of his neighbour’s burning ricks, he told off fifty from his numerous staff of postboys and stable helpers to mount and to thoroughly explore the country within a circuit of ten miles, offering a reward of £5 to the one who would discover the miscreants, together with five shillings a head to all who took part in the chase. It was a successful foray; for, before morning dawned, two shivering “rioters” were brought to him. They had been found hiding in a ditch. Matches and other incriminating things were found on them, and, being committed to York Castle, they eventually were awarded fourteen years’ transportation.
The old “Bell” is still standing. A hundred and twenty horses for the road were kept here in those old times, but to-day, instead of horses, we have motor-cars.
Soon after railways had driven the coaches off the road, the “Bell” ceased to be an inn. Its circumstances were peculiar. Standing as it did, and still does, away from any town or village, its only trade was with coaching or posting travellers, and when they disappeared altogether there was nothing for it but to close down. And so for sixty years and more the “Bell” became a private residence, and it would have remained so had not a road-enthusiast taken it and re-opened the old house in 1906 as a hotel for touring motorists. The enthusiast took other hotels on this road. Took so many indeed that his resources as a private person were overstrained, and he went bankrupt. But the “Bell,” in this, its second time, flourishes exceedingly.
From hence the bleak hamlets of Torworth and Ranskill lead to Scrooby, set amidst the heathy vale of the winding Idle, which sends its silver threads in aimless fashion amidst the meadows. Here the road leaves Nottinghamshire and enters Yorkshire. Beside the road at the little rise called Scrooby Top, stands a farmhouse, once the old Scrooby Inn, kept by Thomas Fisher as a kind of half-way house between Bawtry and Barnby Moor, and calculated to intercept the posting business of the “Bell” and of the Bawtry inns. Competition was keen-edged on the roads in those times.
There seems to have once been a turnpike gate at Scrooby, for a murder was committed there in 1779, when John Spencer, a shepherd, calling up William Geadon, the turnpike man, one July night under the pretence of having some cattle to go through, knocked him down and killed him with a hedge-stake and then went upstairs and murdered the turnpike man’s mother. Spencer was hanged at Nottingham, and gibbeted on the scene of his crime. The stump of the gibbet was still visible in 1833.
This is the place whence came the chief among the “Pilgrim Fathers” who at last, in 1620, succeeded in leaving England in the Mayflower, for America. Scrooby is the place of origin of that Separatist Church which refused allegiance to the Church of England. Here lived William Brewster, son of the bailiff of Scrooby Manor, once a Palace of the Archbishops of York. In those times the Great North Road wandered, as a lane, down through Scrooby village, and all traffic went this way. William Brewster the elder, bailiff and postmaster, was a government servant who kept relays of horses primarily for the use of State messengers. His salary was “twenty pence a day”; the equivalent of about £300 per annum of our money. Although very definite regulations were laid down by the Board of Posts for the conduct of this service, they were not strictly observed, and a postmaster often traded for himself as well, keeping horses for hire and being an innkeeper as well.
At any rate, the Brewsters were considerable people; and William the elder could afford to send his son to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and later had sufficient influence to secure him service with one of Queen Elizabeth’s Secretaries of State in Holland. But the Secretary fell into disgrace, and young William’s diplomatic career ended at an early age.
He returned home to Scrooby, where he found employment with his father, and eventually succeeded him, in 1594, holding the position of postmaster for seventeen years.
Let us see, from one surviving record, what kind of business was his, and how prosperous he must have been apart from his official emoluments. One of his guests, as virtually an innkeeper, was Sir Timothy Hutton, in 1605. Sir Timothy paid him, for guide and conveyance to Tuxford, 10s., and for candle, supper and breakfast 7s. 6d. On his return journey he paid 8s. for horses to Doncaster, and a threepenny tip to the ostler.
Meanwhile, Brewster, nourished in that old nest of Archbishops, had imbibed distinctly anti-episcopal ideas, probably in Holland. His activities in founding the Separatist Church led to his resignation of the postmaster’s office in 1607. In that old Manor House where he lived assembled others of his ways of thought: the Revd. Mr. Clifton, rector of Babworth, near Retford, William Bradford of Austerfield, John Smyth, and other shining lights and painful and austere persons. William Bradford records how the congregation “met ordinarily at William Brewster’s house on the Lord’s Day; and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them, to his great charge.”
They would not attend services at the parish church; an offence then punishable by fine and imprisonment, and thus, persecuted, there was no ultimate course but to leave the country: itself not for some time permitted. “They were,” wrote William Bradford, “hunted and persecuted on every side. Some were taken and clapt up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched, night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations and the means of their livelihood.”
The Manor Farm, where these early developments of the Puritan movement took place, and where the Brewsters lived, remains in part, and bears an explanatory bronze tablet placed there by the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth, Massachusetts. And there, too, near the road, stands Scrooby church, rather dilapidated, with its stone spire, much the same as ever.
The Stables, Scrooby Manor House
Yorkshire, upon which we have now entered, is the largest shire or county in England. In one way it seems almost incredibly large, for it has more acres than there are letters (not words) in the Bible. There are 3,882,851 acres in Yorkshire, and 3,566,482 letters in the Bible. Yorkshire does not reveal its full beauty to the traveller along this road. Its abbeys and waterfalls, its river-gorges and romantic valleys, belong rather to the by-ways. Picturesqueness and romance spelt discomfort, and the uneventful road was the one the travellers of old preferred. Thus it is that those who pursue this route to the North, and know nothing else of Yorkshire, might deny this huge county, more than twice the size of Lincolnshire, the next largest, that variety and beauty which, in fact, we know it to possess. For eighty miles the Great North Road goes through Yorkshire with scarce a hill worthy the name, although towards the north the Hambleton Hills, away to the east, give the views from the road a sullen grandeur.
But if the highway and the scenery bordering it are characterless, this is a region of strongly marked character, so far as its inhabitants are concerned. Many wits have been to work on the Yorkshireman’s peculiarities. While they all agree to disregard his hospitality and his frank heartiness, they unite to satirise his shrewdness, and his clannish ways. The old Yorkshire toast is famous:—
“Here’s tiv us, all on us, me an’ all.
May we niver want nowt, noan on us,
Nor me nawther.”
And this other:—
“Our Native County: t’biggest,
t’bonniest, and t’best.”
The character of John Browdie is a very accurate exemplar of the Yorkshire yeoman, and you could not wish to meet a better fellow, but you would rather not have any dealings with the Yorkshireman of popular imagination, whose native wit goes beyond shrewdness and does not halt on the hither side of sharp practice. The Yorkshireman’s armorial bearings are wickedly said to be a flea, a fly, and a flitch of bacon; because a flea will suck any one’s blood, like a Yorkshireman; a fly will drink out of any one’s cup, and so will a Yorkshireman; and a flitch of bacon is no good until it is hung, and no more is a Yorkshireman! No native of the county can be expected to subscribe to this, but no one ever heard of a Yorkshireman objecting to be called a “tyke.”
A “Yorkshire tyke” is a familiar phrase. By it we understand a native of this immense shire to be named. No one knows whence this nickname arose, or whether it is complimentary or the reverse. To be sure, we call a dog a “tyke,” and to describe any one as a dog is not complimentary, unless qualifications are made. Thus, the man who is insulted by being called a dog rather takes it as a compliment to be dubbed a “sad dog” or a “sly dog,” and, like Bob Acres, lets you know, with a twinkle of the eye, that on occasion he can be a “devil of a fellow.”
By common consent, whatever its origin may have been, “tyke,” applied to a Yorkshireman, is taken in the complimentary sense. Indeed, the Yorkshireman’s good conceit of himself does not allow him to think that any other sense could possibly be intended. He generally prides himself, like Major Bagstock, on being “sly, devilish sly.” That he is so, too, those who have tried to overreach him, either in his native wilds or elsewhere, have generally discovered. “He’s a deep ’un,” says a character in one of Charles Reade’s novels, “but we are Yorkshire too, as the saying is.” When tyke meets tyke, then, if ever, comes the tug of war. “That’s Yorkshire,” is a saying which implies much, as in the story of the ostler from the county who had long been in service at a London inn. “How is it,” asked a guest, “that such a clever fellow as you, and a Yorkshireman, remains so long without becoming master of the house?” “Measter’s Yorkshire too,” answered the servant.
It is a sporting—more especially a horsey—county. “Shake a bridle over a Yorkshireman’s grave, and he will rise and steal a horse,” is a proverb which bears a sort of testimony to the fact.
Yorkshire and Yorkshiremen, their virtues and vices, bring us to Bawtry, where the High Sheriff and those in authority used to welcome kingly and queenly visitors to Yorkshire, or escort them over the border, on leaving; performing the latter office with the better heart, there can be little doubt, for royal progresses often left a trail of blood and ruin behind them in those “good” old times. Happy Bawtry! for little or no history attaches to the little town, and it lives in the memory only as the home of that saddler who, although famous as a proverb, has come down to us a nameless martyr to the Temperance Cause.
“The saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving his ale,” runs the Yorkshire saying; one eminently characteristic of this county of stingo and plurality of acres. The history of this particular saddler, or the crime for which he was condemned, are unknown either here or at York, but his end is a terrible warning to all Blue Ribbonites. It was in this wise that the artificer in pigskin lost his life. Led forth to the fatal tree, the procession halted on the way to present the condemned with the customary parting bowl of ale, an institution on the way to the gallows both in York and London. But the saddler would take none of their farewell courtesies, and refused the drink; whereupon the enraged mob strung him up, double quick. A few minutes later a reprieve arrived, and they cut him down; but he was already dead, a melancholy warning to all future generations of non-convivial souls.
Coaching days made Bawtry a busy townlet, for although the coaches and the postmasters generally made a long stage of fourteen miles between Doncaster and Barnby Moor, or else a nine and a half mile stage between Doncaster and Scrooby Top, the by-roads gave a good proportion of business to the “Angel” and the “Crown.” The “Crown” is still a prominent feature of Bawtry’s now empty street, a street whose width is a revelation of the space once considered necessary and now altogether superfluous; just as the long pillared range of stableyards beyond the old coach archway of the inn itself has now become.
Bawtry to-day is a great emptiness. Four-square red-brick houses of a certain modishness, being indeed built on the model of town houses, look across the void roadway, with a kind of patronising air, upon the peaked, timbered, or lath-and-plaster gabled cottages that border the opposite side of the street. Much older they are, those old cottages, and more akin to the country. They were built long centuries before the coaching age came, bringing a greater prosperity and consequent expansion to Bawtry, and for a time they were quite put out of countenance by the new-fangled brick houses, with their classic porticoes and brass knockers and impudent red faces. But a period of eighty or ninety years, at the most, saw the beginning and the end of this expansion, and this once fashionable air has altered to an aspect of old-world dignity. Both the gabled cottages and these Georgian houses would feel greatly degraded if confronted with examples of the way in which the small country builder runs up his tasteless structures nowadays, but happily Bawtry has nothing of this type to show, and the white stuccoed elevation of the “Crown” alone hints at a later phase in building fashion, typifying the dawn of the nineteenth century and the course of taste in its earlier years. This white-painted frontage marks the close of Bawtry’s busy days. Soon afterwards the place ceased to live a pulsing everyday life of business and activity, and began to merely exist. There are shops here—old bow-windowed, many-paned shops—which have long seen their best days go by. They came into existence under the influence of the beatific Law of Demand and Supply, when all the inns were full of travellers who wanted the thousand and one necessities of civilisation. They did a brave trade in those times, and continued it until the railway snuffed it out in 1842. Since then no one has come to buy, and their stock must contain many curiosities. Probably the stationer has still some of that goffered and perfumed pink notepaper on which the young ladies of sensibility wrote their love-letters in the long-ago, together with a goodly supply of the wafers with which they were sealed; and, doubtless, those who seek could find flint and steel and tinder-boxes elsewhere. Bawtry, in fine, is a monument to the Has Been.
Austerfield, where William Bradford was born in 1580, is a grim and unlovely village to the left of Bawtry. Here yet stands his birthplace, in its time a manor-house, but now occupied as two cottage-dwellings, it is not a romantic-looking relic to be the place of origin of one who became the first Governor of the Pilgrim colony in New England.
There was once a pond beside the road near Bawtry (where is it now, alas!) to which a history belonged, for into it used to drive the villainous postboys of lang syne, who were in the pay of the highwaymen. They would, as though by accident, whip suddenly into it, and when the occupants of the chaise let down the windows and looked out, to see what was the matter, they were confronted with the grinning muzzle of a pistol, and the dread alternative demand for their money or their lives.
Past this dread spot, and over the rise and dip in the road on leaving the town, the galloping stage is reached, a dead level by the palings of Rossington Park and on to Rossington Bridge, where the tollgate was, and now is not. The inn too, has, like many another, taken down its sign, and retired into private occupation. Off to the left is Rossington village, and in the churchyard, the grave, for those who like to turn aside to see it, of Charles Bosvile, “King of the Gipsies.” Here we are four miles and a half from Doncaster, or, as a Yorkshireman would say, four miles “and a way-bit.”
Ask a Yorkshireman how far it is to any place along the road, and he will most likely answer you, so many miles “and a way-bit.” This is probably his pronunciation of “wee bit.” It is often said that the “way-bit” is generally as long as the rest put together. This expression compares with the Scottish so many miles “and a bittock.”
From Rossington Bridge, a long pale rise, bordered by coppices of hazels and silver birches, leads past Cantley to Tophall, where one of the old road wagons was struck by lightning on the 22nd of May 1800. One of the seven horses drawing the wagon was killed, and four others were stunned; while the great lumbering conveyance and its load of woollen cloths, muslins, cottons, rabbit-down and a piano were almost entirely burnt. The disaster was a long-remembered event for miles round, and one of the Doncaster inns was renamed from it, the “Burning Waggon.” This house has long since been renamed the “Ship.”
Passing Tophall, and by a bridge over the railway cutting, Doncaster is seen, with its great church-tower, smoking chimney-stalks, and puffing locomotives, map-like, down below, three miles away. Two miles further, past Hawbush, or Lousybush, Green, on which unaristocratically named spot old-time tramps used to congregate, Doncaster racecourse is reached, on the old Town Moor.
Doncaster, all England over, stands for racing and the St. Leger, just as much as Epsom for the Derby, and racing has been in progress here certainly ever since 1600, and perhaps even before. The renowned St. Leger, which still draws its hundreds of thousands every September, was established in 1778 and named by the Marquis of Rockingham after Lieut.-Colonel Ashby St. Leger. All Yorkshire, and a large proportion of other shires, flocks to witness this classic race, greatly to the benefit of the town, which owns the racecourse and derives the handsome income of some £30,000 per annum from it. Doncaster, indeed, does exceedingly well out of racing, and the Town Council can well afford the £380 annually expended in stakes. But the St. Leger week is a terrible time for quiet folks, for all the brazen-throated blackguards of the Three Kingdoms are then let loose upon the town, and not even this sum of £30,000 in relief of the rates quite repays them for the infliction.
Robert Ridsdale, originally “Boots” at a Doncaster inn, rose to be owner of Merton Hall, about 1830. He was a bookmaker. Betting is a pursuit in which only the bookmakers secure the fortunes.
Dickens, who was here during the St. Leger week in 1857, in company with Wilkie Collins, and stayed at the still extant “Angel,” saw this side of horse-racing fully displayed. Looking down into the High Street from their window, the friends saw “a gathering of blackguards from all parts of the racing earth. Every bad face that had ever caught wickedness from an innocent horse had its representation in the streets,” and the next day after the great race every chemist’s shop in the town was full of penitent bacchanalians of the night before, roaring to the busy dispensers to “Give us soom sal-volatile or soom damned thing o’ that soort, in wather—my head’s bad!” Night was made hideous for all who sojourned at the “Angel” by the “groaning phantom” that lay in the doorway of one of the bedrooms and howled until the morning, like a lost soul; explanation by the landlord in the morning eliciting the fact that the fearsome sounds were caused by a gentleman who had lost £1,500 or £2,000 by backing a “wrong ’un,” and had accordingly drank himself into a delirium tremens.
Sir William Maxwell of Menreith, who won the St. Leger with Filho da Puta, in 1815, celebrated his success by thrusting his walking-stick through all the pier-glasses at the “Reindeer”; expressing his regret that there were no more to smash, as an adequate relief to his feelings.
Dean Pigou, once vicar of Doncaster, bears later testimony to the character of a large proportion of the race-crowds, and tells amusingly how the contingents of pickpockets who flock here on these occasions disguise themselves as clergymen, a fact well known to the police, and resulting in the arrest of a genuine cleric on one occasion. “You old rascal!” said the constable; “we’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
Doncaster, out of the season, is a singularly quiet and inoffensive town, and looks as innocent as its native butterscotch. Quiet, because the locomotive and carriage-works of the Great Northern Railway are a little way outside; inoffensive, because it is unpretending. At the same time it is just as singularly devoid of interest. Almost its oldest houses are those on Hall Cross Hill, as the traveller passes the elm-avenue by the racecourse and enters the town from the direction of London; and they are scarce older than the days of the Prince Regent. Very like the older part of Brighton, this southern end of Doncaster is the best the town has to show.
Hall Cross—originally called “Hob Cross”—was destroyed in the seventeenth-century troubles. It was a late Norman structure, and is copied in the existing Cross, set up by the Corporation, as an inscription informs the passer-by, in 1793. A weird structure it is, too, consisting of a stone pillar of five engaged shafts, reflecting credit on neither the original designer nor the restorers. But there it stands, elevated above the modern road, as evidence of a momentary aberration in favour of restoring antiquity of which the Corporation were guilty, a century or so ago. Doncastrians have purged themselves so thoroughly of that weakness in later years that they have left no other vestige of old times in their streets. The finest example of an old inn belonging to the town was destroyed in the pulling down of the “Old Angel” in 1846, in order to clear a site for the Guildhall. Others are left, but, if old-fashioned, they are scarcely picturesque: the “Angel,” “Ram,” “Elephant,” “Salutation,” and “Old George.”
Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse
In old newspaper files we find Richard Wood, of the “Reindeer” and “Ram” inns, High Street, advertising that his coaches were the best—“the horses keep good time—no racing”; from which we conclude that there had been some. It was Richard Wood, then the foremost coach-proprietor in Doncaster, who first gave employment to that celebrated painter of horses and coaches, John Frederick Herring, who, although a Londoner born, lived long and worked much at Doncaster. It was in 1814, when in his nineteenth year, that he first came to the town, the love of horses bringing him all the way. Seeing the “Royal Union” starting at eight o’clock in the morning with “Doncaster” displayed in large letters on its panels, on the inspiration of the moment he took a seat, and arrived in time to witness the horse “William” win the St. Leger.
There is a tale of his observing a man clumsily trying to paint a picture of the Duke of Wellington, seated on his charger, for the panel of a coach to be called after that hero of a hundred fights. He had, somehow, managed to worry through the figure of the Duke, and to secure a recognisable likeness of him—because, for this purpose, all that was necessary was the representation of an ascetic face and a large, beak-like nose—but he boggled at the horse. Herring offered to paint in the horse for him, and did it so well that he earned the thanks of the proprietor, who happened to appear on the scene and commissioned him to paint the insignia of the “Royal Forester,” Doncaster and Nottingham coach; a white lion on one door and a reindeer on the other. These he performed with equal credit, and taking a seat beside the proprietor in question, who, with others, mounted for a ride to “prove” the springs and christen the new coach, he at once offered himself as coachman. Mr. Wood, for it was he, was naturally surprised at the idea of a painter driving a coach, but consented to give him a trial the next day on the “Highflyer,” and to abide by the decision of the regular driver of that famous drag. The result was favourable, and Herring obtained the box-seat, not of the “Royal Forester,” but of the “Nelson,” Wakefield and Lincoln coach. He was, after two years, transferred to the Doncaster and Halifax road, and thence promoted to the “Highflyer,” painting in his leisure hours many of the signs of Doncaster’s old inns. It was when on this road that he attracted the attention of a local gentleman, who obtained him a commission for a picture which laid the foundation of his success.
Nearly all the local signs that Herring painted have disappeared. Some were taken down when he became famous, and added to private collections of pictures; while others were renewed from the effects of time and weather by being painted over by journeyman painters. Some landlords, however, knew the value of these signs well enough. There was, for instance, mine host of the “Doncaster Arms,” who, having come from cow-keeping to the inn-keeping business, determined to change the name of the house to the “Brown Cow.” He induced Herring to paint the new sign, which immediately attracted attention. According to one story, a gentleman posting north chanced to see it and stopped the postboy while he endeavoured to drive a bargain for the purchase. He offered twice as much as mine host had originally paid; ten times as much, but without avail. “Not for twenty times,” said that licensed victualler; and the connoisseur went without it.
The other version makes the traveller a very important man, travelling with four post-horses, and represents the landlord as being away, and the landlady as the obstinate holder. “I’s rare and glad, measter, my husband’s not at home,” she said, “for p’r’aps he’d ha’ let thee hae it; but I wain’t; for what it’s worth to thee it’s worth to me, so gang on.”
A list has been preserved of the signs painted by Herring at Doncaster, but they will be sought in vain to-day. They were—
The Labour in Vain |
Marsh Gate. |
The Sloop |
Marsh Gate. |
The Brown Cow |
French Gate. |
The Stag |
The Holmes. |
The Coach and Horses |
Scot Lane. |
The White Lion |
St. George Gate. |
The “Labour in Vain” represented the fruitless labour of attempting to wash a black man white.
The old sign of the “Salutation,” painted by a Dutchman in 1766, was touched up by Herring. Many years ago it was removed, but has now been replaced, and may be seen on the front of the house in Hall Cross. It is much weather-worn, and represents, in dim and uncertain fashion, two clumsy looking old gentlemen in the costume of a hundred and forty years ago, rheumatically saluting one another. The sign of the “Stag,” painted on plaster still remains, in a decaying condition.
Herring continued as a coachman for several years, and only left the box in 1830, when he went to reside in London. From that date until his death in 1865 he devoted himself entirely to painting.
Richard Wood, Herring’s first employer, was part-proprietor of the “Lord Nelson” coach, among others. Especial mention must be made of this particular conveyance, because if not the first, it must have been one of the earliest, of the coaches by which passengers were allowed to book through to or from London, and to break their journey where they pleased. To those who could not endure the long agonies of a winter’s journey except in small doses, this arrangement must have been a great boon. To this coach belongs the story of a Frenchman, still preserved by Doncaster gossips.
It was in the early part of the century that he wanted to travel from “Doncastare” to London. Inquiring at the booking-office for the best coach, the clerk mentioned the “Lord Nelson.”