CHAPTER XIV

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CHESTER WITHIN.—PECULIARITIES OF BUILDING.—THE ROWS.—A SEA-CAPTAIN.—ROMANCING.—AN OLD INN.—OLD ENGLISH TOWN HOUSES.—TIMBER HOUSES.—CLAIMING AN INHERITANCE.—A COOK SHOP.—ONE OF THE ALLEYS.—BREAKING INTO THE CATHEDRAL.—EXPULSION.—THE CURFEW.

[Sidenote: _OLD STREET ARRANGEMENT._]

The four gates of the city are opposite, and about equally distant from each other. Four streets run from them, meeting in the centre and dividing it into four quarters. These principal streets are from one to three rods wide, and besides them there are only a few narrow alleys, in which carts can pass. But the whole city is honeycombed with by-ways, varying from two to five feet in width; sometimes open above, and sometimes built over; crooked and intricate, and if he cares where they lead him to, most puzzling to a stranger. Besides these courts, alleys, and foot-paths, there is another highway peculiarity in Chester, which it will be difficult to describe.

Imagine you have entered the gate with us after the walk about the wall. The second story of most the old houses is thrown forward, as you have seen it in the “old settler’s” houses at home. Sometimes it projects several feet, and is supported by posts in the sidewalk. Soon this becomes a frequent, and then a continuous arrangement; the posts are generally of stone, forming an arcade, and you walk behind them in the shade. Sometimes, instead of posts, a solid wall supports the upper house. You observe, as would be likely in an old city, that the surface is irregular; we are ascending a slight elevation. Notwithstanding the old structure overhead, and the well-worn, thick, old flagging under foot, we notice the shop fronts are finished with plate-glass, and all the brilliancy of the most modern commercial art and taste. Turning, to make the contrast more striking, by looking at the little windows and rude carvings of the houses opposite, we see a bannister or hand-rail separates the sidewalk from the carriage-way, and are astonished, in stepping out to it, to find the street is some ten feet below us. We are evidently in the second story of the houses. Finding steps leading down, we descend into the streets and discover another tier of shops, on the roofs of which we have been walking.

Going on, we shortly come to where the streets meet in the centre of the town. Passing over the ground where the _cross_, and the pillory, and other institutions of religion, and justice, and merry-making formerly stood, we ascend steps, and are again in one of those singular walks called by the inhabitants the Rows. There are no more stylish shop fronts, but dark doorways and old windows again, and on almost every door-post little black and red checkers, which hieroglyphics, if you are not sufficiently versed in Falstaffian lore to understand, you can find rendered in plain black and white queen’s English (or people’s English by our law), under some woman’s name, painted on the beam overhead—“Licensed to sell beer,” &c. Generally there will be an additional sign, naming the inn or tavern, always in letters and almost never in portraiture. I remember “The Crown and Castle,” “The Crown and Anchor,” “The Castle and Falcon,” “The King’s Head,” “The Black Bear,” “The Blue Boar,” “The Pied Bull,” “The Green Dragon,” “The White Lion,” “The Sun and Apple Tree,” “The Colliers’ Arms,” “The Arms of Man,” “The Malt Shovel,” etc., etc.

Instead of columns and a hand-rail, or a dead-wall on the street side of the row, it is now and then contracted by a room, which is sometimes occupied by a shop, and sometimes seems to be used as a vestibule and staircase to apartments overhead, for we see a brass plate with the resident’s name, and a bell-pull, to the door.

On the inner side are frequent entrances to the narrow passages that I mentioned, which may be long substitutes for streets, communicating, after a deal of turning and splitting into branches, with some distant alley or churchyard, or other main street, with the front doors of wealthy citizens’ houses opening upon them; or they may be merely alleys between two tenements leading to a common yard in the rear; or again, if you turn into one, it may turn out to be a private hall, and after one or two short turns end in a kitchen. Never mind—don’t retreat; put on a bold face, take a seat by the fire as if you were at home, and call for a mug of beer. Ten to one it will be all right. Every other housekeeper, at least, is a licensed taverner.

[Sidenote: _HOUSE HUNTING.—THE OLD SHIP-MASTER._]

We had great sport the first hour or two we were in town hunting for lodgings. We were disposed to sleep under the very oldest English architecture in which we could be comfortably accommodated. Many of the places at which we applied were merely houses of refreshment, and had no spare bedrooms. In one of these, “The Boot Inn,” we found an old sea-captain, who, some twenty years ago, had traded to New York, and enjoyed talking and making inquiries about persons he had met and places he had visited. Fortunately we knew some of them, and so were constrained to sit down to some bread and cheese and beer, and listen to some tough yarns of Yellow Jack and Barbary pirates. At one end of the kitchen was a table with benches on three sides of it, and a great arm-chair on the other. Over the chair hung a union-jack, and before it on the table was a strongly-bound book, which proved to be “The Record of the Boot Inn Birthday Club.” The bond entered into by each member on entering this association was, that he should treat the club to plenty of good malt liquor on his every future birthday. There was a constitution and many by-laws, the penalty for breaking which was always to be paid in “beer for the club.”

At other inns we would be shown, by delightfully steep, narrow, crooked, and every way possible inconvenient stairways, up through low, dark spaces of inclined plane, into long, steep-roofed, pigeon-house-like rooms, having an air as gloomy and mysterious as it was hot and close. Then, upon our declining to avail ourselves of such romantic and typhous accommodations, instead of being reconducted down by the tortuous path of our ascent, we would be shown, through a back door in the third story, out upon a passage that seemed to be also used as a public street (footway), doors opening from it which were evidently entrances to residences in the rear.

[Sidenote: _OLD ENGLISH INTERIOR._]

Finally we were suited; and now I am writing on an old oak table, with spiral legs, sitting in an old oak chair, with an Elizabethan carved back, my feet on an old oak floor (rather wavy), stout old oak beams over my head, and low walls of old oak wainscot all around me. Resting on an old oak bench by the window, is a young man with a broad-brimmed felt hat slouched half over his face. Across the street, so near we might jump into it if we were attacked from the rear, is a house with the most grotesquely-carved and acutely-pointed gable possible to be believed real, and not a pasteboard scene, with the date “1539” cut in awkward figures over the cockloft window, high in the apex. For fifteen minutes there has been a regular “_clink, clink_,” deadening all other sounds but the clash of sabres against spurs, and distant bugle-calls, as a body of horsemen are passing in compact columns through the narrow street, from the castle, out by the north gate, towards _Rowton Moor_.

To be sure, it is a California and not a Cavalier sombrero that shades my friend, and the men of war outside are but mild militiamen, carrying percussion-lock carbines indeed, but who have fought for nothing so valiantly as for the corn laws. But when shall I again get as near as this to _Prince_ Charlie and the Ironsides? and shall I not make the most of it? At least, there is no prompter’s bell, no carpenters in their shirt-sleeves rushing in and sliding off the scenery. That 1539 over the way is TRUE; I can see the sun shine into the figures. Away, then, with your 1850! I will drink only old wine—or better—_What ho! a cup of sack!_ Shall I not take it easy in mine inn?

The house is full of most unexplainable passages and unaccountable recesses, of great low rooms and little high rooms, with ceilings in various angles to the walls, and the floor of every one at a different elevation from every other, so that from the same landing you step up into one and down into another, and so on. Back of a little kitchen and big pantry, down stairs, we have another parlour. In it is a grand old chimney, and opposite the fireplace a window, the only one in the room. It is but three feet high, but, except the room occupied by a glass _buffet_ in one corner and a turned-up round-table in the other, reaches from wall to wall. To look out of it, you step on to a raised platform, about three feet broad, in front of it, and on this is an old, long, high-backed _settee_. I must confess that it is not the less pleasant in the evening for an unantique gas-light.

As I lay in bed last night, I counted against the moon seventy-five panes of glass in the single window of our sleeping apartment. The largest of them was four by three, and the smallest three by one inches. They are set in lead sashes, and the outer frame is of iron, opening horizontally on hinges.

[Illustration: OLD ENGLISH DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE (_Chester, 16th century_)]

[Sidenote: _OLD CARVINGS.—THE FATHER LAND._]

There are none but _timber houses_ all about us; the walls white or yellow, and the timbers black. The roofs are often as steep as forty-five degrees with the horizon, and the gables always front on the street. If the house is large there will be several gables, and each successive story juts out, overhanging the face of that below. There is no finical verge-board, or flimsy “drapery” in the gable, but the outermost rafter (a stout beam that you cannot expect to see warped off or blown away) is boldly projected, and your attention perhaps invited to it by ornamental carving. Porches, bow-windows, dormers, galleries (in the rows), and all the prominent features of the building are generally more or less rudely carved. One house near us is completely covered with figures. C. says they represent Bible scenes. There is one compartment which he supposes a tableau of the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham being represented, according to his _exegesis_, by a bearded figure dressed in long flapped waistcoat and knee-breeches.

Another house has these words cut in the principal horizontal beam: _God’s Providence is mine Inheritance_—1652. It is said the family residing in it was the only one in the city that entirely escaped the great plague of that year.

You may imagine how intensely interesting all this is. We cannot keep still, but run about with a real boyish excitement. We feel indeed like children that have come back to visit the paternal house, and who are rummaging about in the garret among their father’s playthings, ever and anon shouting, “See what I’ve found! see what I’ve found!” If we had been brought here blindfolded from America, and were now, after two days’ visit, sent back again, we should feel well repaid for the long sea-passage. If we were to stay here a month, we should scarcely enjoy less than we now do, rambling about among these relics of our old England.[11]

[11] Some months later than this we were at a supper party, after some old English ballads and songs had been sung, when one of the company apologized for it, saying, “We forget our American friends. It is selfish in us to sing only these national songs in which we are peculiarly interested. Have you nothing American, now?” “Excuse me, sir,” I replied, “those are our national songs as much as yours. You forget that we are also countrymen of Will Shakspeare, and Robin Hood, and Richard the Lion-hearted. Our mothers danced with your fathers under that same ‘green-wood,’ and around the ‘May-pole.’ Our fathers fought for their right in this land against Turk, Frenchman, Spaniard, and Pretender. We have as much pride in Old England, gentlemen, as any of you. We claim the right to make ourselves _at home_ on that ground with you. You must not treat us as strangers.” “You are right; you are welcome. Give us your hand. The old blood will tell!” And the whole table rose with a hurrah, shaking our hands with a warmth that only patriotic pride will excuse among Englishmen.

Going into a cook-shop for supper, the first afternoon we were in Chester, we were shown through three apartments into a kitchen, and from that into a long, narrow, irregularly-shaped room, with one little window high above our heads, and twenty-seven old wood engravings in frames about the walls. We had a very tolerable supper given us, and were served by a six-foot-high Welsh girl that could understand but little of our English. When we were ready to leave, a back door was opened, and we were told that the first opening to the left would bring us to the street. We found ourselves in one of the narrow covered ways, and instead of turning off to the street as directed, kept on in it to go where it should happen to lead. Sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, running first, as it appeared, between a man’s kitchen and his dining-room; then into a dust-yard; then suddenly narrowed, and turned one side by a stable; then opening into a yard, across which a woman over a wash-tub was scolding her husband, sitting with a baby and smoking at a window; then through a blacksmith’s shop into a long, dark, crooked, passage, like the gallery of a mine, at the other end of which we found ourselves on a paved street not far from the cathedral.

[Sidenote: _THE CURFEW BELL._]

We entered the burying-ground, and seeing that a small door, that is cut in the large door of the cathedral, was ajar, pushed it open and went in. It was dark, silent, and chill. We felt strangely as we groped our way over the unobstructed stone floor, and could make nothing of it until our eyes, becoming adapted to the dimness, we discovered gilded organ-pipes, and were going towards them, when a small door in front of us was opened, and a man came out, saying impatiently, “Who _are_ you? what do you want? Take off your hats.”

“We are strangers, looking at the cathedral.”

“Can’t see it, now; can’t see it, now. Service every day at four and ten o’clock.”

As we were going out, a great bell began to toll. “What is that, sir?” said I.

“What?”

“That bell tolling—what is it for?”

“Why, that’s the cuffew,” and he closed and bolted the door, while we stood still without; and as the long waving boom of the bell pulsed through us, looked wonderingly at each other, as if America and the nineteenth century were a fading dream, slowly repeating, “The curfew; the curfew.”

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