Part 14

William Hanbury, born 1725, died 1778, rector of East Langton early in the time of George III., was a forceful person. He became rector in 1753, his father, a wealthy man, having purchased the advowson; but he had already, two years earlier, begun his huge planting operations in the neighbourhood. He introduced plants and seeds from all parts of the world, but was particularly enthusiastic in the cultivation of fruit-trees, and the neighbourhood is still, as a result of his labours, and the example he set, exceptional in fruit-growing. In 1758 he wrote and published “An Essay on Planting, and a Scheme for Making it Conducive to the Glory of God and the Advantage of Society.” He was a man of ideas that grew steadily larger and more impracticable. The first proposal, to annually dispose of the produce of the fruit-trees and thus to create a fund of £1,500, of which the interest was to provide for the decoration of the church, developed into a plan for amassing a £4,000 fund for the building of a hospital and schools, and this in its turn became a grandiose scheme for a series of Church Musical Festivals to be held in the surrounding districts. The income from all these sources was to accumulate until it reached a total sum sufficient to produce an income of £10,000 or £12,000, which was to be expended in founding a minster, a choral establishment, a public library, picture-galleries, a hospital, schools, a printing office, and many other things. The minster was to be in relation to all other cathedrals what cathedrals are to chapels. A central tower was to rise to a height of 493 feet, and its other dimensions were to be in proportion: the western towers themselves to be 399 feet high. No other cathedral that ever was, or would be, should rival this. St. Paul’s? Pooh! The most magnificent buildings yet known were to be squalid beside its walls, floors, and columns of marble, and the porphyry and jasper that were to decorate its choir.

[Sidenote: _A GRAND PROJECT_]

A city, so this odd projector anticipated, would spring up around these institutions, and included in it were to be, in his own words, “two pompous inns.” If any difficulty were experienced in the carriage of building materials, a canal from quarries in the neighbourhood of Stamford was to be dug to Market Harborough, and if possible the quarries of Ketton and Weldon were to be purchased.

When he anticipated all these things would come to pass does not appear. A capital sum of at least a quarter of a million sterling would be required, to yield the income he considered sufficient: and you could not, even with £12,000 per annum, make much headway with such a cathedral, to say nothing of these expensive sideshows.

In 1770, the income of the trust was £190 17_s._; and by 1863 it had risen to £900, when the trustees successfully applied to the Court of Chancery to vary the trust deed, for the purpose of expending a sum of £5,000 upon necessary repairs to the three Langton churches, and of applying a further sum to school purposes.

The church of Church Langton is a massive Early English structure on a large scale, containing monuments of this singular projector and successors of his kin. It has been very thoroughly renovated from the funds released by sanction of the Court. Hanburys still preside here.

There is a good deal of interest in the immediately surrounding country. Away across the meadows on the other side of the road are Foxton Locks, on the Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Union Canal. Every visitor to Harbro hears of Foxton Locks, and is bidden go see them; and indeed they are remarkable achievements in modern engineering, putting those of the old canal engineers to the blush. They are visible quite a long way off, looking like the gear at the mouth of a colliery, and consist of an elevated engine-house installed with powerful machinery that raises or lowers the modern lock—practically a large tank—with barges floating in it. This replaces the remarkable old series of ten locks that scale the hill like some Jacob’s ladder, and are now discarded. The new lock, completed in 1898 at a cost of £37,000, was undertaken for the purpose of saving water, wasted in large quantities in the old order of things, but a great deal of time is also incidentally saved by the new methods.

Proceeding again along the road, the church tower of Kibworth appears among clustered woods on a height above the railway station of that name. The Midland Railway and other moderns call the place “Kibworth” merely, but it is properly Kibworth Beauchamp, while adjoining is the infinitely more handsome twin-village of Kibworth Harcourt, which, however, has no church of its own.

[Sidenote: “_A PLAGUE O’ BOTH YOUR HOUSES_”]

A quaint memorandum in the register of Kibworth Beauchamp, under date of 1641, seems to have been made by the parson as the readiest means of absolving himself from blame for not properly keeping his books. It runs:

“Know all men that the reason why little or nothing is registered from this year 1641 until the year 1649, was the Civil Wars between Charles and his Parliament, which put all into a confusion till then; and neither minister nor people could quietly stay at home for one party or the other.”

There is a suspicion, in the wording of this, that the parson was heartily sick of both sides.

The Rev. James Beresford was presented to the living by Merton College, and held it for very many years, dying in 1840, aged seventy-seven. He was author of a book on the “Miseries of Human Life,” published in 1826, which, in spite of its doleful title, is not the work of one who has surveyed existence and found all to be vanity; but is cast in a humorous form, as humour was then understood. He possessed a pretty wit, and a quaint sarcastic manner, showing prominently in the story told of him and some junior fellows of Merton whom he observed prospecting over his garden wall, in view of his possible decease, and the living falling vacant.

He went out to them and politely said, “Walk in, gentlemen, walk in and take stock, not only of the parsonage, but of the present incumbent. Most happy at all times to do anything to oblige you—except die.”

An epitaph in the churchyard to “Mr. Lewis Powel Williams, Surgeon,” who died in 1771, aged forty, declares “He was the first that Introduced into Practice; Inoculation without Preparation.” A similar claim is made at Worth Matravers, in Dorset, for Benjamin Jesty in 1774, but with the careful proviso that he was the first “known” to have practised it.

Glen Magna, three miles onward, more commonly known by the English form, “Great Glen,” is said by the villagers (of neighbouring villages) to contain “more dogs than honest men.” The sting of this saying is supposed to reside in the alleged fact that Great Glen has ever been singularly deficient in dogs. And so it remains to this day; and, so far as the observation of the present writer goes, the deficiency extends to houses and inhabitants as well. Great Glen, in short, is one of those many places that are great in name and ludicrously small in fact. The wayside church is almost all the wayfarer sees. It has a Norman south porch with carvings of weird horses whose tails stand erect over their backs, like Scotch pines: a kind of horse not known outside the region of nightmare.

[Sidenote: _THE “LONDON WAYE”_]

At Oadby, in another two miles, the influence of the great and still rapidly growing town of Leicester begins to be felt. The old church stands in the centre of the village, and narrows the road almost into the semblance of a lane. The east window of the north aisle, looking upon the road, is of the Decorated period of Gothic and is enriched with the comparatively rare “ballflower” moulding. An epitaph on three brothers and three sisters Davenport, “who lived together in a state of Celibacy in the same House 54 years, deservedly esteemed for their suitable demeanour and punctual integrity,” and died in the years 1820-7, seems to show that their “race suicide” was more approved then than it would be now apostles of increase are raising their voices.

XXI

The electric tramways run far out from Leicester, and in the town itself form a maze of lines that only the Leicester people themselves can readily understand. The long approach by the London road, composed as it is of the residential quarters of the wealthier classes, is the best of all the entrances, just as Belgrave, on the north, is the worst; but in the olden days this was “Gallowtree Gate,” leading uphill from the hollow in which the town stands, to the place of execution. Here you pass the Victoria Park, and so come at length to the centre of the busy place, at the Clock Tower. But in 1600 the “London Waye,” as Speed on his map of that date describes it, was the Welford Road, on the left hand, which, branching from our road at Northampton, and avoiding Harborough, came into Leicester in a mile and a half less. It led through the town by way of Highcross Street, North Bridge, and Frog Island. But Ogilby, in his _Britannia_, of seventy years later, gives the London road as now used.

The Clock Tower, the centre of modern Leicester, is what the Forum was to ancient Rome. Everything centres around it. Dr. Johnson said that the tide of London life ran most strongly at Charing Cross, and even more justly it may be said that the tide of Leicester’s busy days eddies with greatest force at the Clock Tower. This is a particularly fine stone structure with spire, standing in the centre of the road where the five great thoroughfares of Gallowtree Gate, Belgrave Gate, Church Gate, Humberstone Gate, and High Street meet. It was built in 1868, as a tribute to the memory of four Leicester worthies: Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester; William of Wyggeston, the founder, in the early part of the sixteenth century, of the Wyggeston Hospital, whose money now also supports the Wyggeston Schools; Sir Thomas White, and Gabriel Newton, benefactors of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Roman Leicester centred around the site of the mediæval castle, some distance away, the Clock Tower standing outside the East Gate.

[Sidenote: _RATÆ_]

The antiquity of Leicester is indeed undoubted. Not only are the remains of the Romans numerous, and continually discovered in the course of building operations, but it is well known to have been the station of _Ratæ Coritanorum_, and here the Fosse Way and the so-called “Via Devana” meet. The Jewry Wall, so named from this quarter having been that part of the mediæval town where the Jewish community lived, marks the western limit of _Ratæ_. It is a mass of brickwork, with a number of arched recesses, and remains to-day the chief visible relic of old Rome. The best-received opinions hold that this is a portion of the Roman West Gate, with fragments of a temple to Janus.

[Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS AND THE ROMAN WALL.]

_Ratæ_, to have been so carefully and massively walled, must have been a populous and a wealthy place, facts that seem additionally evident in the many fine tesselated pavements discovered at various times. There is an example on its original site here. They call it, on a notice-board, “the most beautiful tesselated pavement in the world,” and charge you 2_d._ to see it, but that is an _ex parte_ statement, and there is a better than the best a little way off, for which the appropriately higher charge of 3_d._ is made. Where the supremely bestest is to be seen, and at what cost, this chronicler dares not presume to say. The twopenny pavement is a private show, and the superlative example belongs, or did belong, to the Corporation. A curious modern history belongs to it. Discovered in 1832, in digging foundations for a house, it formed for many years the floor of a cellar. In 1890, the house was purchased by the Corporation, and then in 1896 came the Great Central Railway to Leicester, on its extension to London, with its embankment and arches, and abolished many things, among others a Quaker burial ground. The Quakers, therefore, lie nowadays very much deeper than those who laid them there ever contemplated; and at the same time the house with the Roman pavement was levelled. To move the pavement would have been to injure it, and in the end arrangements were made by which the railway company constructed a special room, lined with glazed white bricks; and there in this species of shrine it rests, while the trains roll overhead.

But to return to the Jewry Wall, hard by the Norman church of St. Nicholas. It is grimy with modern filth, but reverend in its age of some 2,000 years, and of giant strength, so that you cannot but smile at sight of the recent flimsy pillars of brick that “support” it, and are already themselves decrepit.

[Sidenote: _THE ROMAN MILESTONE_]

But the most interesting of all Leicester’s relics of Roman Britain is stored in the Museum. This is the milestone discovered so long ago as 1771, on the Fosse Way, near Thurmastone, two miles from the town; on its original site, as the inscription on it proves. It is a cylindrical block of sandstone, rudely incised with a long, highly characteristic statement in a shockingly abbreviated and ill-spaced form, which, translated, runs, “During the Emperorship of the Divine, August, Most Great and Noble Cæsar, Hadrian, son of the Divine, August, Most Great and Noble Trajan, Conqueror of Parthia, in the Fourth Year of his Tribunal Power: thrice Consul. To Ratæ, Two Miles.”

[Illustration: THE ROMAN MILESTONE.]

I cannot withhold my astonishment, either at the miracles of condensed information displayed in this inscription, which outvies Pitman’s, or any other, shorthand system; or at the diabolic cleverness of whoever first solved the problem it must have presented. It must have puzzled even a good many Roman travellers, and to-day looks very like a “Bill / Stumps his mark” order of monument. The Romans evidently did not understand the first function of a milestone: to present clear and concise information. A modern milestone made in like manner, and inscribed: “During the Kingship of His Most Gracious Majesty Edward the Seventh, son of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, Conqueror of the Boer Republics, in the seventh year of his reign, Emperor of India. To Leicester, Two Miles”—would, it may be suspected, be the subject of unfavourable criticism.

It is not a little wonderful that this relic of an earlier civilisation has survived the rough usage that followed its discovery. It was removed to a garden close at hand, and would have been converted into a garden-roller, had it not been for the timeous intervention of Dr. Percy. A little later it narrowly escaped a worse fate, for it was claimed by one of the road commissioners, who would have had it broken up for road metal, had not public interest become aroused; with the odd result that this hoary relic was placed on a pedestal in midst of the town, crowned with a conical-shaped stone, and surmounted by—of all things—a lamp-post! Thus it remained until 1844, when, having been nearly ruined by exposure to the elements, and to wanton mischief, it was removed to its present home.

[Sidenote: _DESTRUCTION OF RATÆ_]

_Ratæ_ suffered under fire and sword when the protection of the Romans was withdrawn, and lay, the charred funeral pyre of its inhabitants, for long years, the Saxons, after their custom, settling outside the ruined place, alike for sanitary and superstitious reasons. They called their settlement Leir-ceastre, after the original British name, Caer Leir, and thus the name of _Ratæ_ disappeared, save in historical records; becoming the “Leicester” of our day; the “Less-ess-tare” of French visitors, who cannot reconcile the spelling of the name with its pronunciation of “Lester.”

The claim of Leicester having been the home of King Lear is based merely on the phonetic likeness of his name to that of the British town.

The place had a new era of troubles when, in their turn, the Anglo-Saxons decayed and a more virile race invaded the land. Then Leicester fell a prey to the Danes, whose settlements may be traced at this day in the characteristic ending of Leicestershire place-names in the syllable “by,” peculiar to places of Danish origin: Oadby, Rearsby, Dalby, Sileby, and many others.

The old churches of Leicester are fairly numerous, and very interesting. St. Nicholas’ was built in Saxon and early Norman times, chiefly from the materials of the Roman wall, by whose remains it stands. Here Leicester is seen in its latest development, the neighbourhood having been cut up and largely rebuilt since the advent of the Great Central Railway. There remained until that event a curious street at the side of St. Nicholas, known as “Holy Bones,” but in the great clearances “Holy Bones” disappeared, and only gaunt remains of houses and factories mark the site of it. The name arose from a great find of bones here, supposed to be relics of sacrifices made in the Temple of Janus. Their sanctity, seeing that they are thought to be the bones of oxen, has been challenged.

St. Mary de Castro, whose spire is one of the most prominent landmarks of the town, is unquestionably the finest church, but extraordinarily dark. It is Norman, Early English, and Decorated, and has two naves. But an architectural account of St. Mary’s would occupy many pages. I like to think how here, in this very building, Henry the Sixth, at the time only five years of age, but already four years a king, passed the midnight vigil that formed part of a new knight’s probation. With him, forty others were received into the ranks of chivalry. How many of them survived the bloody Wars of the Roses that raged in after years around the person of that unhappy King?

[Illustration: ST. MARGARET’s.]

[Sidenote: “_SMOKE FARTHING_”]

St. Margaret’s, down in the low-lying, soggy Church Gate, is not, in its present form, the oldest church, having been rebuilt in the Perpendicular period, but it is the successor and representative of the mother-church of the town, built about A.D. 600, when Leicester was the seat of a Saxon bishop. It stands not so far from the site of Leicester Abbey, and the street of “Sanvey Gate,” at the corner, indeed derives its name from “Sancta Via,” having been the way by which the mediæval religions processions came and went. The great imposing tower, built from the proceeds of a tax of “Smoke Farthing,” levied on the domestic hearths of the parish, is now a very weathered and crumbling mass, but all the more venerable-looking; and when the proposed restoration has taken place, it is to be feared that much of the majesty of it, will have vanished until such time as the surrounding factories have deposited more soot. But that will take a considerable time, for Leicester is not a sooty place.

For an example of thorough and unsparing restoration we must turn to St. Martin’s. Strangers, gazing at the exterior and the tall broach spire, imagine they have before them a new structure, but it is chiefly an Early English building, and, as the interior proves, a very fine one, and built on the site of a Roman temple to Diana. An epitaph of strange human interest is seen by the south porch:—

“Enquiring mortal, whoe’er thou art, ponder here on an incident which highly concerns the whole progeny of Adam. Near this place lieth the body of John Fenton, who fell by violence May 17th, 1778, and remains a sad example of the incompetency of judicial institutions to punish a Murderer. He left to mourn his untimely fate a mother, a widow, and two children. These, but these alone, are greatly injured: personal security received a mortal wound when vengeance was averted from his assassin by the sophistical refiners of natural justice.”

The man who slew Fenton was one François Soulés, a French officer then prisoner-of-war at Leicester, who was at the time a guest in Fenton’s house. The affair took place in a quarrel over a game of billiards. Soulés was condemned to death, but the sentence was revised, and he was in the end acquitted.

All Saints’ is chiefly interesting from the curious clock over the south porch, originally set up about 1610, removed in 1875, and in 1900 restored and replaced. So not all restoration is to be reprobated. Time, _edax rerum_, is represented on it, with his scythe, and above, in two little tabernacles, are a couple of miniature Jacks-smite-the-Clock, in the costume of James the First’s time, who strike the quarters.

[Sidenote: _TRINITY HOSPITAL_]

The Collegiate Church of St. Mary, in the Newarke, founded in 1331 by Henry, Earl of Lancaster, in conjunction with his magnificent Hospital of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity, has utterly disappeared, and with it, by all accounts, the grandest architectural work Leicester ever possessed. “Knights and Squires commended it as being the most fairest they had ever seen.” I like that old phrasing: by “most fairest” something supremely fair must surely have stood here. But the old Knights and Squires had not, it may be supposed, seen everything, and their testimony is not conclusive. Every one who has read ancient accounts of fine churches knows that each one was the finest, and makes allowances accordingly.

But it _was_ very fine. The Reformation did well in many ways, but it did not so in the destruction of St. Mary’s, whose only fragments may now be seen in a cellar.

Henry, Earl of Lancaster, ancestor of Henry the Fourth, founded church and Hospital in the four acres of ground adjoining the Castle. He surrounded them with a wall and a defensible gateway—the “Magazine Gateway,” as it is now called. By Hospital, of course, we understand almshouse. It was designed, oddly enough, for fifty infirm old men, and five women as nurses. The Hospital, “restored” in 1776, was again restored, and very largely rebuilt, in 1902; the work excellently well done. Interesting relics of ancient days are preserved in the hall. There stands the so-called “Duke of Lancaster’s Porridge-pot,” a fine bell-metal cauldron of sixty-one gallons capacity, whence the Hospitallers were helped. What a capacity for porridge! Others more or less resembling it are found in England, notably the Nuns’ Cauldron at Laycock Abbey, Wiltshire.

[Illustration: TRINITY HOSPITAL PORRIDGE-POT.]

In the hall is also to be seen “Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket Piece,” a salt-box or nutmeg-grater dated 1579, inscribed “This belongeth to the Olde Ospitall”; and with the moral maxims: “Thinke ° wel ° and ° say ° wel ° bvtrather ° do ° wel”; and “Flee ° idilness ° and ° be ° wel ° occupied.”

[Sidenote: _THE TOWN WATCH_]

In the chapel is the finely robed effigy of Mary de Bohun, mother of Henry the Fifth. Seven morions and a number of breastplates, with a group of halberds disposed upon the walls, once belonged to the Town Watch, and are relics of the way in which Leicester was policed in Good Queen Bess’s glorious days.

[Illustration: ST. MARY’s.]