Part 15

The Newarke is changing, like all else. A sign of the times is the new Technical School on the site of St. Mary’s. But that is a striking view as you enter by Wyggeston’s Chantry House, and see the spire of St. Mary de Castro behind one of the old Castle arches. The Castle is a mere memory now, and where the Keep stood is at this time a bowling-green; but the Great Hall remains, where Parliaments met in 1414, 1426, and 1450; in those days when the Legislature was a more or less perambulating body, following the King to heel, like a dog. Faced nowadays with brick, none would suspect the antiquity of the Great Hall, now used as an Assize Court.

The natural pendant to the Assize Court is, of course, the Gaol; but that is removed by the length of a long street from the place of judgment. In it is stored the Leicester gibbet, last used in 1832, when one Cook, a bookbinder, who carried on business in a yard off Wellington Street, was hanged for a peculiarly revolting murder. A Mr. Paas, of London, a manufacturer of brass ornaments used in the bookbinding trade, had been accustomed to call upon him, and Cook, expecting his visit, had evidently prepared to murder him for sake of the gold he carried. The unfortunate man put up at the “Stag and Pheasant” inn, and, saying he would soon return, made his call upon Cook the last of the day. He was never again seen alive. Cook appears to have killed him with the iron handle of his press, afterwards hacking his body in pieces and burning it on an immense fire. His story of a quarrel, and of accidentally killing Mr. Paas, was, in view of the preparations he had made—of laying in an unusual quantity of coal, having a hatchet re-ground, and giving his errand-boy a holiday—not believed; and eventually he pleaded guilty and posed as a contrite sinner. After he had been duly hanged, his body was gibbeted in Saffron Lane, on the outskirts of the town. The spectacle seems to have been popular, according to the following testimony:

[Sidenote: _THE GIBBET_]

“LEICESTER, _Aug._ 12.—Our town is like a fair to-day, with the people who are come to see Cook hanging in chains. He was put up yesterday afternoon, at four o’clock, when all the market people flocked in thousands to see the sight, and continued going all the night. To-day they are coming from the villages all round; some have walked as far as fourteen miles. Last night there were ginger-bread and other stalls at the place, but the mayor has put a stop to all that. It is not far from our new county gaol, which perhaps you remember. His brother says his body shall not hang long, but it would be no easy matter to remove it. It hangs about 35 feet from the ground, and is dressed in the same clothes as when he was hanged. We hear his bowels have been taken out, to try the experiment of burning them. It is currently reported his father has died to-day of a broken heart. I think it is very likely to be true, as he was very ill last week. The Ranters have been preaching under the gibbet this morning, before breakfast, and will again to-night. It is thought there were 40,000 people to see him hanged, but there will be many more to see him now hanging, if they continue to come as they do to-day.”

Riots followed, and the body was speedily removed. Two years later, the custom of gibbeting, or hanging in chains, was abolished by statute, chiefly owing to the disgraceful scenes enacted here.

XXII

Richard III., “as every schoolboy knows,” marched out from Leicester to defeat and death at Bosworth, but he did not march forth from the Castle, even then dilapidated. He slept—or, as Shakespeare would have it, his guilty conscience refused to let him sleep—the night before the battle at the “Blue Boar” inn.

Two days later, his body, flung ignominiously across the back of a horse, was brought back, and exposed publicly to view in the Hall of the Guild of Corpus Christi, and was then buried without any ceremony in the Greyfriars Church. There it remained for fifty years, until the destruction of the religious houses caused the remains of all who lay there to be cast away. Bow Bridge, crossing the river Soar near by, was replaced by the present iron bridge in 1862, and on it may be seen the inscription, “Near this spot lie the remains of Richard III., the last of the Plantagenets.”

The Corporation of Leicester has an ancient and honourable history, and has included in the many centuries of its existence a number of public-spirited men. “Many centuries” truly it is that the Corporation has existed, for the time is not known, since Leicester was Leicester, when there was not a Corporation. There was, however, no Mayor, so-styled, until 1251.

[Sidenote: _THE OLD TOWN HALL_]

The Town Hall that served the purpose from 1563 until 1876, when the great modern building was completed, still stands, hard by St. Martin’s Church, with which in fact it was closely associated, having been originally the home of a religious fraternity—the Corpus Christi Guild. The Mayor’s Parlour, built in the time of Charles the First, panelled with bog oak, remains, as also does the public hall, with timber roof, like a boat reversed. The building was self-contained to the minutest

## particulars, for adjoining the Parlour where the Worshipful the Mayor

took his ease, was, and is, the cell where petty malefactors found what ease they might until justice, as then understood, dealt with them. A very full and complete account might be written of the old Town Hall, for the records concerning it are full and precise, but they lack confirmation of the tradition that Shakespeare himself acted with Richard Burbage’s company of players here. Mayor, aldermen, and common councillors were not averse from merry-making, and we have accounts of the mafficking that took place here to celebrate the defeat of the Armada, when the Town Waits were had into the gallery and discoursed on pipe and tabor, and the town went wild with joy, and fell on each other’s necks and wept, by which it seems that the glories of Mafeking Night in the twentieth century had their counterpart in the sixteenth. And a good thing, too; for when we cease to rejoice in victory we shall be a pitiful folk indeed. What the pro-Spaniards thought of it all is not recorded.

The old town library, adjoining, in what was once the Chantry House belonging to the Guild of Corpus Christi, was founded in 1632, chiefly from books until then belonging to St. Martin’s Church, and remains practically a museum of ancient devotional manuscripts and early printed works.

[Illustration: IN THE COURTYARD, THE OLD TOWN HALL.]

The modern Town Hall, eminently characteristic of the architecture that came into so extraordinary a vogue in the ’seventies and was completed in 1876, is of course in the style called “Queen Anne,” and largely in red brick. So greatly has the municipal business of Leicester grown that it is already much too small; but it is one of the most tasteful buildings of the kind in the country, and designed more with a view to excellence of detail than of the flamboyant eccentricity that has later prevailed. The design of the Crown Court is especially beautiful, in the restrained way, and even in the detail of the finely imagined decorative iron railings of the gardens in Town Hall Square this rare artistic quality is seen.

[Sidenote: _RADICAL LEICESTER_]

It will be judged from all the foregoing that Leicester is a large and busy place. It now numbers 215,000 inhabitants, engaged chiefly in the making of boots and shoes and hosiery. With a well-deserved Radical reputation—Leicester ever was Radical, even before it made boots—the Corporation now owns the Water, Gas, Electricity, and Tramways undertakings and makes them all pay a profit in relief of rates. Indeed, they do things on a business footing. In the public libraries of other towns where the betting news in the newspapers is discouraged, it is simply blacked out, but here it is neatly pasted over with local advertisements, and from them the Library garners in a modest income of between £20 and £30.

In every way this is very different from what John Evelyn, writing in 1654, calls “the old and ragged Citty of Leicester.” In his time it was “large and pleasantly seated, but despicably built, the chimney-flues like so many smiths’ forges.” But it is within the last decade that Leicester has suddenly rebuilt itself. It had grown enormously, but the ancient central streets were until then obviously ancient. Now they are Twentieth Century streets, in all—in the way of gigantic and highly ornate frontages with show-shops—that the expression indicates.

The growth of industrialism has wrought this marvellous change. History—a fine stirring history—the town has, but towns cannot live on the memory of times past. For the first small beginnings of modern Leicester you must trace back to 1680, when one Alsop began—not brewing—but stocking-weaving, in a small way. He prospered, and his success attracted others, and thus the “ragged old Citty” that Evelyn saw was first set upon its march to modern greatness. But I do not see, anywhere, a statue to that original stockinger. In a century from that time the trade of town and shire in hose was the largest in the world. The total population of Leicester was then only 14,000, and of these 6,000 were stocking-weavers.

[Sidenote: “_JEMIMAS_”]

In recent times Leicester had a reputation for cheap cotton hose and “side-springs.” All the “Jemimas” in the kingdom came from Leicester, and the prototypes of Arthur Sketchley’s porky “Mrs. Brown at the Seaside,” and at half a hundred other places, and the fat old women pictured in the comic prints of 1860-1870, with their legs encased in white cotton stockings bulging over their “side-spring” boots, were fully furnished, as to coverings of legs and feet, from here. “Jemimas”—that is to say, “side-spring” boots—are no longer worn, but elastic webbing for other purposes continues to be a staple product.

Leicester became a boot and shoe manufacturing town in 1859. The trade began in a small way, but now employs close upon 40,000 people. Boots and shoes for women and children, and canvas shoes, are the kinds specially made. Fancy hosiery also is an important trade, and when jerseys were the fashion, about 1879, Leicester did very well. The blouse has probably come to stay, and Leicester rejoices in the prospect, for it has busy factories engaged in the production of them. In addition to these, and a host of minor industries, the stout tapestry fabrics used in upholstery, and particularly in the cushions of railway carriages, are made almost exclusively here.

And lastly, it was at Leicester in 1841 that the idea of railway excursions first occurred to Thomas Cook; and from Leicester to Loughborough, a distance of 10-3/4 miles, the first excursion train and the first Cook’s tourists set out, on July 15, 1841. The double journey cost a shilling and 670 excursionists took tickets.

[Sidenote: _CARDINAL WOLSEY_]

The site of the great Abbey of Leicester, the place where Cardinal Wolsey died in 1530, on his way from York to London, where he would undoubtedly have been executed had he survived the journey, lies beside the river Soar—own brother to the Saar in Alsace, and the Suir in Ireland—which skirts the western and north-western sides of the town, and has always rendered it subject to floods.

You come to the site of Leicester Abbey by way of many hosiery factories, whence emerge the warm oily smells of wools and worsteds and the click-clack of machinery; and thence by Frog Island. The Abbey of St. Mary de Pratis, _i.e._ “St. Mary of the Meadows,” stood, as its name indicates, by the water-meadows of this sluggish river. The site, with merely the old surrounding precinct wall, is alone left, and even the first secular mansion built there stands a roofless ruin.

Wolsey was under arrest, and worn with illness and misfortune, when he came here. In the words of Shakespeare:

At last with easy roads he came to Leicester, Lodged in the abbey; where the reverend abbot, With all his convent, honourably received him; To whom he gave these words—“O Father Abbot, An old man, broken with the storms of state, Is come to lay his weary bones among ye; Give him a little earth, for charity.”

He died the third day of his arrival, in the sixtieth year of his age. On the second day, observing his custodian, the Lieutenant of the Tower, in the room, he said, “Master Kyngston, I pray you have me commended to His Majesty. Had I but served God as I have served him, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is my just reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but only my duty to my prince.”

And thus died the proud Cardinal, before whom all in the land, except his Sovereign, had earlier abased themselves. They buried him in the Lady Chapel, but in another seven years the Abbey itself was dissolved, its lands seized, and the buildings themselves destroyed; and no man knows what became of the body of Wolsey. Like that of Richard the Third, it was obscurely dispersed with others, and hence these two great historic characters have no known resting-place and no monument. The site was granted to a Mr. Cavendish, and on it in another thirty years was built the mansion whose ruins are now to be seen.

This way ran the old original road out of Leicester to the north, instead of the existing road through Belgrave. The change, like that in the southern approach to the town, was due to the dread with which wayfarers in the early years of the seventeenth century regarded the place, sore stricken with the plague. They sought the byways and unfrequented paths outside the walls, and were careful not to enter the town itself. Traffic has ever been conservative, and when all fear of infection had at last died out, the new routes thus struck out were retained.

XXIII

Climbing steeply up out of the seething hollow where Leicester’s busy population strives, the road in a mile and a half comes to the hundredth mile from London. It is quiet and solitary, the village of Wanlip, near by, not revealing its existence. But the neighbourhood of Rothley—_i.e._ Roth-ley, the red field—on the left hand is presently seen by the disgusting deshabille of the allotments. However economically and socially desirable they may be, allotment gardens have ever a squalid note. Rothley is growing vast and growing ugly, with cheap, flimsy buildings and a hard-working population of stockingers and quarrymen; and the march of the little hutches of provincial suburbia is advancing on Rothley Temple, that historic house in its beautiful park of stately trees where Thomas Babington Macaulay was born, October 25th, 1800, “in a room panelled from floor to ceiling, like every corner of the ancient mansion, with oak almost black with age.” It had been in the time of Queen Elizabeth the home of that Anthony Babington who in 1586 was executed for a wild and foolish plot to murder the Queen and to release the Queen of Scots: a conspiracy that not only failed, but sealed the fate also of the Scottish queen.

The name “Temple” indicates that this was formerly the site of a Preceptory of the Knights Templars, and adjoining the house is still a chapel including some remains of the Templars’ church and an effigy of some unknown Crusader.

[Sidenote: _MACAULAY_]

When raised to the Peerage in 1857 as Baron Macaulay, the historian sentimentally added “of Rothley,” although, to be sure, he owned no property here. In 1859 he was dead. The place is thus doubly associated with the man who made history a romance, beside whose enthralling pages the novels of the day when his History of England was new were flat and stale. Latter-day destructive critics have fallen foul of his style and reduced what they term “Macaulayese” to a formula in which the use of antithesis takes a prominent and mechanical part. Macaulay’s style, however, remains the most brilliant exemplar of the oratorico-narrative method, and is not likely to suffer greatly at the hands of the unsympathetic.

Still, there is an extravagant note in the epitaph over his grave in Westminster Abbey: “His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth for evermore.” Such language would be almost extravagant if employed upon Shakespeare himself, and is fitting only for a Nelson or a Wellington.

The river Soar, lending its name to a number of neighbouring villages, is responsible for that of Mountsorrel, a lovely name; but the district is full of the most impressive place-names. What a fine mouthful is “Ratcliffe-on-the-Wreake.” It must be a satisfaction to date one’s correspondence from a place like that. “Thrumpton,” too: is that not fine? Walton-on-the-Wolds has its merits, while there is an air of distinction about Groby, recognised centuries ago, when Lord Grey was “Lord Grey of Groby.” But “Barrow-on-Soar” is not nice.

The great rock of Mountsorrel, a bold craggy height of syenite, or exceptionally hard granite, largely quarried for millstones and road-metal, gives its name to the village nestling beneath the crag. A castle once frowned upon the crest of it, but has long been a thing of the past. Even in Camden’s day it was but a heap of rubbish. In remote times a stronghold of the Earls of Leicester, and afterwards of Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, its history is obscure, but it seems early to have been abandoned by those dignified nobles and occupied by bands of outlaws who levied toll upon wayfarers, and behaved so outrageously that at last the countryside was roused. “In the year 1217,” according to Camden, “the inhabitants of these parts pulled it down to the ground, as a nest of the devil, and a den of thieves and robbers.”

[Illustration: MOUNTSORREL.]

[Sidenote: _MOUNTSORRELL_]

An ancient legend told how the devil, on his way to Leicester, essayed the journey in three leaps. At Mountsorrel he mounted his sorrel horse, and made one leap to Wanlip: not an altogether insignificant performance, for the distance is three miles. Thence he sprang a mile further, to Birstall, where horse and rider were both burst with the force of their descent; but with his remaining strength he sprang another mile, to Belgrave, where, a mile short of Leicester, he was buried: and that is how Belgrave got its name. So now we know.

Let no one, charmed with the name of Mountsorrel, come to the place with high expectations of finding a picturesqueness to match. The romantic scenery of rugged rock looking down upon the pleasant valley of the Soar has been since 1845 the scene of quarry operations, and atrocious raw scars seam the mount on all sides; and beneath it, and for close upon a mile along the road, runs an abject townlet of the out-at-elbows, down-at-heel variety, with rows upon rows of mean cottages where many of the seven hundred quarrymen and their families dwell. That is modern Mountsorrel. Enfolded in midst of all these later developments, you still see vestiges of the Mountsorrel of from a hundred to three hundred years ago, when it was a village dependent for its existence solely upon the road. Still stands the “Black Swan”; although, to be sure, it now does little else but stand, being empty and forlorn. Even yet, relics of a happier day, the emblematic bunches of grapes hang from its eighteenth-century red-brick frontage, telling of the generous wine once dispensed within. The “White Swan,” itself a house contemporary with its black brother, is more fortunate, and appears still to thrive.

Mountsorrel is precisely as described above, but it is a charming subject for a sketch. Standing on the cobblestoned footwalk by the “White Swan,” you look across to the granite crag, to a group of old houses, and to the singular, temple-like market-cross that replaces the beautifully shafted Gothic cross removed in 1793. Sir John Danvers of Swithland, a neighbouring squire, afterwards Lord Lanesborough, coveted the cross for his park and offered to erect the existing building in exchange for it; and, the people of Mountsorrel agreeing, the thing was done.

Quorndon succeeds to Mountsorrel, at the interval of a mile and a half. Nowadays, and for many a year past, it has been docked of half its name, and is now “Quorn”; the seal having been set upon the practice by the style adopted for the Great Central Railway’s station, “Quorn and Woodhouse.” And thus are place-names debased. If the name of Quorndon were translated from the ancient Saxon whence it is derived, this would then be called Mill Hill, the “Quorn” coming from “quern,” in the Middle Ages a hand-mill, but originally a mill of any kind. The original Quorndon must therefore have been a mill on the adjoining uplands.

[Illustration: CHURCH AND CAVERN, WOODHOUSE EAVES.]

Woodhouse itself lies away back in Charnwood Forest, with the parish of Woodhouse Eaves adjoining; the “Eaves” in the name referring to its ancient situation on the edge, or “eaves,” of the Forest; although there have been those who derived it from the remarkable cavern, over whose roof the modern church is built.

[Sidenote: _QUORNDON_]

The village of Quorndon, once and for long years the home of the famous Quorn Hunt, has since 1905 lost that distinction. The old kennels were then relinquished, and new built two miles away, at Barrow-on-Soar, a busy place of lime-works, with a church remarkable for a number of eccentric epitaphs on the Cave family, of which here below is an example:

Herein this Grave there lyes a Cave, We call a Cave a Grave— If Cave be Grave, and Grave be Cave, Then, reader! judge, I crave, Whether doth Cave here lye in Grave, Or Grave here lye in Cave? If Grave in Cave here buried lye, Then ‘Grave where is thy victorie?’ Go, reader, and report, here lyes a Cave Who conquers Death and buries his own Grave.

One is curious to know what kind of men they were who wrote this sort of thing. Nothing seems to have been sacred to these funeral funny fellows and mortuary wags, who would start a conceit on false premisses, pursue it to its own death, and then worry it into rags.

[Illustration: THE CHASE AND THE ROAD.

[_After H. Alken._ ]