Part 16

It was about 1750 that Hugo Meynell, the “Father of Fox-hunting,” purchased Quorn Hall and established the hounds, and he hunted and he halloed for forty-eight years over a huge stretch of country from Market Harborough to the Trent—more than thirty miles across—so that there was scarce a bullfinch whose rails his horses’ hoofs had not scraped in all this hunting territory. He knew the muddy bottom of many a ditch and had been soused in every stream before his hunting days were done and his son succeeded him as Master for a brief two years. Meynell not only established the Hunt, but made it pre-eminent, and Quorn was then—what with the lavish hospitality he dispensed at the Hall, and with the many hunting men who took up their quarters here—what Melton Mowbray is now, the metropolis of hunting. The village—or little town that it was for gaiety—was in fact too lively and too expensive for some, and it was this too great success that led to Melton arising in its stead: an old-time sportsman discovering the then unknown sleepy old market-town and establishing himself there, for quiet and economy. Hunting men who have ridden to hounds in Leicestershire any time during the last sixty years or more will smile at the association of Melton with cheapness. Our exploratory sportsman of long ago had, however, made a great discovery. He found that Quorndon being in the centre of the Quorn Hunt, you must hunt, unless you be exceptionally energetic, almost exclusively with that pack; whereas from Melton, that town standing in the marches of other hunts, you might be loyal to your old love and yet take the field, day in and day out, with the Belvoir and the Cottesmore as well. And thus the fame and fortune of Melton grew.

[Sidenote: _THE QUORN HUNT_]

This is no place to tell of the glories of the Quorn Hunt under Assheton-Smith, or Osbaldiston—“The Squire,” as every one loved to call him; or the further splendours under Sir Richard Sutton, who, when asked why he hunted seven days a week, replied, “Because I can’t hunt eight.” The annals of the Hunt are extensive and the gossip endless, ranging through the whole gamut of sentiment: rising to Homeric laughter and sinking to the depths of mysticism, as when the older villagers tell you of the story, elderly when even they were young, of how Dick Burton, the huntsman, died and was buried in Quorndon churchyard, and how the hounds killed a fox on his grave at the close of the next hunting day.

The interior of Quorndon church is beautiful and exquisitely kept,

## particularly the Farnham Chapel, the property of the ancient Farnham

family, seated at Quorndon for many centuries past, and still here. The chapel, only to be entered by favour, is filled with the elaborate monuments of bygone Farnhams, of which the most notable is that to John Farnham, Gentleman Pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, who died in 1587. He lies in life-sized effigy beside Dorothy his wife, and is habited in armour, with a representation by his side of the axe carried by the honourable corps of which he was a member, whose duties were to form a bodyguard to the Sovereign on public occasions. “Pensioner” appears to be a misleading term, the membership being honorary and entailing expense, rather than bringing payment.

[Illustration: FROM THE MONUMENT TO JOHN FARNHAM.]

John Farnham appears to have been also a kind of captain of free-lances, warring in the pay of foreign princes on the Continent. An alabaster bas-relief on the wall of the chapel (like the tomb itself, recently restored) shows him leading his men on to the siege of a castle. A quaint epitaph in verse tells us something of what he was:

John Farnham here within this tombe enterred doth remaine, whose life resigned up to God, the heavens his soul containe; and if you do desire to knowe his well deserved praise, go aske in court what life he ledd, and how he spent his days, where princes great he truly served with whõ he stood in grace, for good conceit and pleasaunt wit favour’d in every place. Beloved of the noblest sorte, well liked of the rest, unto his friend a faithfull friend, and fellowe to the best, In warres he spent his youth, for youth the best expense of dais, and did transfer from field to Court his just rewarde of praise. Descended of an antient house, with honour ledd his life only with one daughter blest, and with a vertuous wife. God gave him here on earth to live twise fortie years and odd, with life well spent he liveth now for aye with God.

XXIV

[Sidenote: “_GREAT PAUL_”]

Loughborough, standing among ecclesiologists for bells, succeeds to Quorndon. The bell-founding firm of John Taylor & Sons, established here in 1840, is the birthplace of many of these instruments of the barbarous practice of bell-ringing that has survived into an otherwise civilised age, and here in 1881 was cast the monster bell of St. Paul’s Cathedral, “Great Paul,” whose hoarse growl—like a bell with bronchitis—is heard daily at one o’clock in the City of London. It is the largest bell in England, weighing 17-1/2 tons, and one of the most useless, being practically little else than the City man’s luncheon bell. “Great Paul,” being too big for the railway bridges, was brought to London by road.

But there are other industries beside bell-founding at Loughborough. The ancient trade of bobbin-net making is still carried on, together with the hosiery and weaving and stocking-knitting that so thoroughly pervade Leicestershire and a good deal of Notts; and there are dye-works and engineering-shops too, a whole basketful of unromantic but useful and mutually dependent trades: the extensive coal-trade of the town ministering to the engineering and other power-using factories, and the big breweries subsisting upon the magnificent thirsts produced by coal-grit and the heat of furnaces. It will be guessed from the foregoing that Lovely Loughborough is not a phrase by which the place can rightly be known. Only the narrow main street, where the old “Bull’s Head” inn still exhibits a gallows sign stretching from side to side overhead, is at all removed from commonplace, and the broad market-place is lined with modern buildings in which many of the great number of Loughborough’s flashily rebuilt inns that call themselves “hotels,” and are really nothing but drinking shops, are situated.

[Sidenote: _LOUGHBOROUGH_]

One commonly finds that Loughborough enjoys—or perhaps that is not quite the right word; let us say endures—some of the coldest weather that the Meteorological Office reports in the winter. When a cold snap makes the whole country shiver, it will generally be found that, of all places in England, Loughborough is the coldest. But _per contra_, the townsfolk say that it is also extremely hot in summer, and the parish register records in the summer of 1808 an exceptional _heat_:

“Wednesday, _July_ 13th; the heat was so intense that in consequence thereof many People died, especially they that were at work in the fields, also a great number of Horses, particularly coach-horses, drawing stage-coaches. The thermometer as high as 92.”

The great, empty-looking parish church, an example of the depths of commonplace to which the Perpendicular style can descend, has nothing of interest, partly, no doubt, because Sir Gilbert Scott was had in during 1863-4 to “restore” it, at a cost of £9,000, and partly because it is designed in a monotonous repetition of window for window, and moulding for moulding, from end to end. It is, in short, tedious and tiresome to a degree, and contains a very nasty effigy of “Joana Wallis,” dated 1675.

A depressing influence seems to prevade the district between Loughborough and the Trent. The scenery is of no striking quality and the villages seem to have experienced their best days. Hathern is an uninteresting village of framework knitters, and Kegworth—in Domesday Book “Cogesworde”—that comes next after it, makes hosiery, brews beer, manufactures plaster, and carries on a variety of useful industries, but looks as grim as a person responsible for thousands who has but a penny in his pocket. It is a gaunt townlet, with large and equally gaunt church of the Decorated period, standing in a commanding position in the centre of the unlovely place. Both alike look ragged and poverty-stricken, and although a large sum has been spent on restoring the building, it still looks as though no care had been taken of it for centuries. A bell still rings curfew at 8 p.m. in the winter months. The Vestry was formerly the residence of a “domus inclusus,” or hermit.

Tom Moore, that merry Irishman, found it possible to write poetry at Kegworth, but he performed some marvellous things. Tommy dearly loved a lord, and was here in 1811 for the express purpose of being near his friend, Lord Moira, whose park at Donington is near by. When my lord went to India, the poet removed to Mayfield, and thence to Sloperton Cottage, near Devizes, to be near Lord Lansdowne.

Three miles away to the right of the road and across the Soar, into Nottinghamshire, is Gotham, a place so famed in legend that the impulse to visit it is irresistible. The way lies by Kingston-on-Soar, where there is a beautiful little church with wonderfully elaborate monument to the Babington family, bearing their punning rebus of the “Babe in Tun.”

The “Wise Men of Gotham” is an ironical saying, for the Gothamites are proverbial for stupidity; but, like the fatuous behaviour of the Wiltshire “moonrakers” of Bishop’s Cannings, the childish simplicity of the original Gotham wiseacres was merely assumed. Their great exploit was to plant a hedge round a cuckoo perched on a bush, in order to keep him in; and on a hill one mile distant may to this day be found the “Cuckoo Bush,” pointed out as the scene of their efforts. It is an ivy-grown circular bank in a plantation enclosing a group of trees.

[Sidenote: _THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM_]

But for the most circumstantial account of the doings of these rude forefathers of the hamlet, we must have recourse to the legend preserved by Thoroton, in the pages of his history of Nottinghamshire.

It seems, then, that King John, passing through Gotham towards Nottingham, and intending to go through the meadows, was prevented by the villagers, who imagined that the ground once travelled by a king would for ever become a public road. The King, furious at their proceedings—and the tantrums of a Norman sovereign were something fearful—sent some of his retinue to learn the reason of this strange, not to say highly temerarious, conduct; but during the interval the men of Gotham had been able to reflect, and had come to the conclusion that something terrible in the way of punishment awaited them, unless they could prove themselves exceptional fools.

Accordingly, when the messengers arrived, they found the villagers engaged in all manner of fantastic employments. Some were endeavouring to drown an eel; others were occupied in dragging carts on to the roof of a barn, to shade the wood from the sun; yet others were tumbling their cheeses downhill, to find their way to Nottingham market; and some were busily engaged in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched itself upon an old bush. In short, they were all busy in some foolish way or another; and their folly was duly reported to the King; who, however, shrewdly remarked that “we ween there be more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.”

The folly of the Gothamites, according to this version, was more apparent than real; but it is the name for folly, rather than that for cunning, which has survived. So early as 1568 appeared the book entitled “The Merry Tales of the Mad-men of Gottam,” and other ancient allusions are plentiful; among them that to “Gotham College,” an imaginary institution for the training of simpletons. A rhyme, of unknown antiquity, celebrates another exploit of the villagers, in a delicately allusive way:

Three Wise Men of Gotham Went to sea in a bowl; If the bowl had been stronger, My tale had been longer.

The tragedy of the voyage we can vividly picture for ourselves.

There is, however, a rival Gotham, disputing these doubtful honours. It is a place called Gotham Marsh, situated in the neighbourhood of Pevensey, and the identical tales are told of it; but if any place may be said to be the real original, the Nottinghamshire village is the one, although it must not be forgotten that many places are credited with similar stupidity. Of the village of Towednack, in Cornwall, in the neighbourhood of St. Ives, the identical cuckoo story is told; the people of Coggeshall, in Essex, are said to have chained up a wheelbarrow, after it was bitten by a mad dog, for fear it should develop hydrophobia; and in the ancient world Bœotia and Phrygia were notoriously considered the home of the dunderheaded. We are familiar, too, with the taunt in the Scriptures, “Can any good come out of Nazareth?”

[Illustration: GOTHAM.]

[Sidenote: _ASSORTED FOLLY_]

This is all very highly uncomplimentary and interesting, and Gotham seems eminently a place to be visited; but travellers meet with strange disappointments. Gotham is a furiously ugly village of extraordinarily wide and empty roads, and smelling violently of pigs; gypsum mines and soap-works still further render it undesirable. A commonplace inn, the “Cuckoo Bush,” displays a double-sided pictorial sign, very faded, exhibiting on one side the cuckoo and on the other a group of the wiseacres aforesaid, attempting to build him in.

It is indeed, by selecting the fine church, possible to make an illustration of Gotham that shall not be commonplace; and the interior, being in part Transitional Norman, is even finer than the exterior. A singular uncouth carving on the chancel arch, popularly supposed to represent “Toothache,” was probably intended to typify the Divine “gift of speech.”

Resuming the road at Kegworth, the fag-end of Leicestershire is soon ended. Lockington, on the left hand, with a very dilapidated church, being the last village in this angle of the shire, where it joins Notts and Derbyshire, was once considered a remote and out-of-the-way place: hence the old rustic saying, “Put up your pipes and go to Lockington Wake”: _i.e._ “Be quiet and go away with you.”

XXV

And thus we come to the Trent, but before crossing at Cavendish Bridge and into Derby, we will leave the modern high road, and, striking off to the left, through Castle Donington, come, in something like six miles, to Stanton-by-Bridge and the long causeway that leads up to the famous bridge of Swarkestone. The present line of road between Derby and London, by way of Loughborough, did not come into great use until 1771, when Cavendish Bridge was built. Until that time, the broad and swift Trent, at the best of times not easily crossed, and always peculiarly subject to flooding, was without a bridge anywhere else than at Swarkestone in all those twenty-four miles or so between Nottingham and Burton, and much of the traffic of horsemen, pedestrians and pack-horses, instead of crossing the Trent here, at Wilne Ferry, went southward of Derby by Osmaston, Chellaston, and across the river at Swarkestone, and thence past Stanton-by-Bridge and King’s Newton, coming into a choice of roads for London at Ravenstone, whence one went, at discretion, either by Hinckley and Towcester, or else by Groby and so into Leicester.

[Sidenote: _THE RIVER TRENT_]

The Trent was thus, in those ancient days when bridges were few, a barrier of high strategical importance, and whoso held those infrequent bridges commanded the military situation in the midlands: hence the high importance, from an early period, of the castle, town, and bridge of Nottingham.

[Sidenote: _SWARKESTONE BRIDGE_]

Between Stanton and Swarkestone, on either side of the Trent, the land stretches out perfectly flat for nearly a mile, and is at this day a fertile expanse of water-meadows in summer. In winter, or in wet seasons, it becomes a vast inland sea, not, even now, altogether without its dangers, but anciently extremely hazardous.

[Illustration: THE CAUSEWAY, SWARKESTONE BRIDGE.]

To build a causeway from the comparatively high ground of Stanton on one side, and Swarkestone on the other, with little bridges spanning the intermediate rills, and a large bridge crossing the Trent itself, became early the good work of some pious founder, whose identity has, in the way usual with such things, become involved in legends. The chief legend of Swarkestone Bridge tells us that it was built by two maiden sisters, whose lovers were drowned in the passage, before ever a bridge or causeway existed. They expended all their fortune upon, and devoted their lives to, the work, and built a chapel on the bridge itself, wherein wayfarers might give thanks for their safety, and pray for the souls of those who had been drowned, and those of the pious benefactors. Another version says that the two ladies were daughters of the Countess of Bellomont, and that they expended all their fortune on the work, and were reduced to spinning for a livelihood.

But if we seek the real origin of this early work, thought to have been originally undertaken in the twelfth century, we must look to the neighbouring Priory of Repton, which built it and kept it in repair, just as many other religious houses undertook similar works of practical Christianity on behalf of wayfarers, all over the country; making roads, bridging rivers, and providing hostels for all and sundry whose evil fate compelled them to travel in those days when the best place in the world was a man’s own fireside.

In the chapel they placed on the bridge a brother of the Priory officiated, at the same time receiving offerings from grateful travellers for maintenance and repairs of the structure. And so the combined chapel and toll-house remained, until all religious institutions suffered a thorough change, under Henry the Eighth. We know what then became of it, for in the report of the Church Goods Commissioners in 1552 it is stated: “We have a chapell edified and buylded uppon Trent in ye mydest of the greate streme annexed to Swerston bregge, the whiche had certayne stuffe belongyng to it; ii desks to knell in, a table of wode, and certayne barres of yron and glasse in the wyndos, which Mr. Edward Beamont, of Arkeston, hath taken away to his owne use, and we saye that if the chappell dekeye, the bridge wyll not stande.”

The chapel was, however, allowed to “dekeye,” and yet the bridge stood, having been rebuilt so late as 1796. It says much for the excellence of the monks’ work that their bridge remained until 1795, when, not floods merely, but floods aided by a heavy lot of timber from a yard upstream, came and overthrew it.

The bridge has been the scene of some military exploits. Here the redoubtable Sir John Gell of Hopton, commanding the Parliamentary forces, routed a force of Cavaliers on January 5th, 1643; and held the approaches during all that troubled time. In 1745, too, when Prince Charles and his Highlanders came so near to overthrowing the House of Hanover, and regaining the crown of England for the feckless Stuarts, he made, as any invader from the north was bound to do, for this essential position.

The story of “the Forty-five” is closely involved with the course of the Manchester and Glasgow Road, from this point onwards, and therefore requires some brief historical summary.

[Sidenote: “_THE FORTY-FIVE_”]

In 1745, Prince Charles, the “Young Pretender,” son of James, the “Old Pretender,” who in 1715 had made an ineffectual attempt to secure the crown his father, James the Second, had lost, determined on a bold throw for fortune. Setting out from France, July 2nd, on the _Doutelle_, a little brig of 18 guns, engaged in privateering against English shipping, he landed eventually at Erisca, in the Hebrides. He had not voyaged without adventure. Accompanying the _Doutelle_ was a French warship, the _Elizabeth_, which carried 68 guns and 700 men.

The precise connection of the French government with this attempt of Prince Charles is obscure; but it would appear to have been an elastic arrangement, by which the French could disclaim any hand in the rising, if it proved a failure, while sympathetic enough to secretly aid, and to be prepared for further help if the prospects of the enterprise were sufficiently hopeful. Off the Lizard, the two ships were challenged by an English man-o’-war, the _Lion_, which engaged the _Elizabeth_, with the result that both were disabled and compelled to put back to their respective ports; while the brig bearing the Prince, his few followers, his supplies of money and arms, made away to Scotland.

Prince Charlie, the darling of many a romantic tale and legend, the hero of numberless pathetic Scots ballads, was at this time twenty-five years of age: tall above the average, comely and courteous: every inch a Prince, so his admirers declared. The Highland chieftains who had been so lavish of promises when he was away, across the water, were not at first so ready with their help when he appeared among them. A good deal of time was wasted, and he raised his white standard with the red cross at Glenfinnan only on August 19th. Thereafter, the clans poured in to his aid; but it was not until September 16th that he appeared before Edinburgh and summoned the city to surrender. Edinburgh, let it be acknowledged, placed no obstacles in his way, for it submitted very tamely, and Charles, in all the glory of a costume which seems to the present generation, that goes clad in so sombre a fashion, to have been extravagantly theatrical, had the satisfaction of proclaiming his father at the High Cross, as King James the Eighth of Scotland, and Third of England.

Let us see what figure of romance he presented to the loyal eyes of the clansmen, and the melting glances of the ladies. He stood straight as a lance, and wore breeches of red velvet, military boots, and a short tartan coat crossed with a blue silk sash, edged with gold. On his head was a blue velvet bonnet, bound with gold lace, and with a white cockade, the badge of his party. On his breast depended the star of the order of St. Andrew, and at his side swung a basket-hilted broadsword. The hair of this very picture of a Prince of romance was of an auburn tint, but it was generally concealed from view by a white wig. Altogether, this was a display that may be thought more suitable for ceremonial occasions than for the serious business of campaigning.

[Sidenote: _THE INCOMPLETE LETTER-WRITER_]

To modern censorious minds the picture formed by this gay figure suffers in the letters he wrote. They were written, let it be said, in the loftiest sentiments, but the spelling of them was abominable. When every one—among those who were sufficiently accomplished to write at all—spelled according to personal predilection, this mattered little or nothing; but in these days, when every Board School boy can at least spell simple words, it seems shocking, and tarnishes romance with a smear of vulgarity, to read Prince Charlie’s references to “muney” and “munishuns.” When he draws his “sord,” we laugh, instead of being thrilled, and when he writes of his father as “gems,” we with difficulty understand that he means “James.”

[Illustration: SWARKESTONE BRIDGE.]