Chapter XXX
.
(5) To his friend, MR. E. HAWORTH EARLE, and to his colleagues, MR. C. BAZELL and MR. J. V. PUGH, for reading the proofs of the entire book and correcting many errors that would otherwise have escaped detection.
(6) To his friend and old pupil, MR. C. W. MASON, for the great amount of time and care which he has bestowed upon the taking of special photographs.
(7) To the PUBLISHERS of the book, who have placed in his hands every possible facility for enriching its pages with whatever illustrations they thought would prove of interest, and who have thereby produced a book which it is hoped will reach the high-water mark of excellence in artistic production.
HYMERS COLLEGE, HULL,
1912.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. WHAT THE EAST RIDING IS 1
II. HOW THE EAST RIDING WAS MADE 3
III. MEN OF THE STONE AGE 8
IV. MEN OF THE BRONZE AGE—THE ANCIENT BRITONS 20
V. MEN OF THE IRON AGE—THE ROMANS IN EAST YORKSHIRE 29
VI. OUR ANCESTORS 40
VII. HOW THE MEN OF THE NORTH BECAME CHRISTIANS 47
VIII. THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN 56
IX. IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 892 65
X. TWO FAMOUS BATTLES OF LONG AGO 74
XI. HOW THE NORMANS CAME TO YORKSHIRE 85
XII. HOW OUR ANCIENT PARISH CHURCHES WERE BUILT 95
XIII. THE BIRTH OF HULL AND THE ROMANCE OF THE DE LA POLES 111
XIV. MONKS, NUNS, AND FRIARS 123
XV. SAINT JOHN OF BEVERLEY AND HIS MINSTER 135
XVI. SANCTUARIES 145
XVII. HOW TWO KINGS OF ENGLAND LANDED AT SPURN 155
XVIII. LIFE IN A MEDIÆVAL TOWN 162
XIX. THE TRADE UNIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES 179
XX. THE SUPPRESSION OF THE MONASTERIES AND THE PILGRIMAGE 188 OF GRACE
XXI. HOW THE GREAT CIVIL WAR BEGAN AT HULL 202
XXII. HOW HULL WAS TWICE BESIEGED 212
XXIII. SOME ANCIENT EAST RIDING FAMILIES 223
XXIV. STAGE COACH AND RAILWAY 238
XXV. ENGLAND’S THIRD PORT—THE MODERN GROWTH OF HULL 253
XXVI. FAMOUS SONS OF THE EAST RIDING 269
XXVII. SHIPS OF THE HUMBER 284
XXVIII. FOLK-SPEECH OF THE EAST RIDING 301
XXIX. HOW THE EAST RIDING GOVERNS ITSELF 311
XXX. EAST RIDING SCHOOLS 321
XXXI. THE EAST RIDING ROLL OF HONOUR 344
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THE PRIDE OF THE EAST RIDING _Frontispiece_
THE THREE RIDINGS OF YORKSHIRE 2
ONE OF THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF THE EAST RIDING 4
RELICS OF THE ICE AGE 6
SKULL AND ANTLERS OF A RED DEER 7
BONE IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS FROM BARROWS ON THE WOLDS 9
SECTION OF HOWE HILL, DUGGLEBY 12
POLISHED FLINT KNIFE FOUND IN DUGGLEBY HOWE 14
FLINT IMPLEMENT AND WEAPONS 15
UNFINISHED STONE ADZE HEAD AND WHINSTONE AXE HEAD 16
FOOD VESSEL FROM A BARROW ON ACKLAM WOLD 17
THE RUDSTONE MONOLITH 18
THE EARLIEST KIND OF AXE USED IN EAST YORKSHIRE 19
BRONZE CELT OR AXE HEAD FOUND AT SWINE 21
PLAN OF A BARROW ON CALAIS WOLD, AND IDEAL RESTORATION OF THE SITE OF BURIAL 23
BRITISH GOLD COIN FOUND AT ATWICK 24
HOW A BRITISH CHIEFTAIN’S WIFE WAS BURIED IN GARTON SLACK 25
A BRITISH WAR CHARIOT 26
EARTHWORKS AT SKIPSEA BROUGH 28
STATUE OF A ROMAN SOLDIER IN THE YORK MUSEUM 30
SECTION OF A ROMAN MILITARY HIGHWAY 31
ROMAN ROADS AROUND THE HUMBER 35
ROMAN PIG OF LEAD FOUND AT SOUTH CAVE 36
ROMAN ‘PENS’ FOUND AT BROUGH 36
RELICS OF ROMAN FEASTS FOUND AT EASINGTON 37
A ‘SAFETY-PIN’ SIXTEEN HUNDRED YEARS OLD 38
DESIGN OF THE PAVEMENT OF A ROMAN VILLA AT HARPHAM 39
IRON KNIFE AND BRONZE SPOON FROM AN ANGLIAN CEMETERY 45
CHILD’S TOYS FOUND IN A BURIAL VASE AT SANCTON 45
‘FINDS’ IN AN ANGLIAN CEMETERY NEAR GARTON GATEHOUSE 46
GOODMANHAM CHURCH (From an Old Engraving) 52
TWO SIDES OF AN ANGLIAN CROSS SHAFT AT LEVEN 55
DANISH SETTLEMENTS IN A PORTION OF NORTH LINCOLNSHIRE 60
DANISH CROSS HEAD AT NORTH FRODINGHAM 63
DANISH SUN-DIAL BUILT INTO THE WALL OF ALDBROUGH CHURCH 64
PLAN OF THE BATTLE OF STAMFORD BRIDGE 81
HOLDERNESS IN THE DOMESDAY BOOK 93
A NORMAN FONT IN KIRKBURN CHURCH 96
A PISCINA IN PATRINGTON CHURCH 97
PART OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE TOWER OF HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, HULL 99
FILEY CHURCH, SHOWING THE LINES OF THE ORIGINAL ROOF 100
THE ‘BEVERLEY IMP’—ST. MARY’S CHURCH, BEVERLEY 101
DIFFERENT FORMS OF ARCHES 103
‘NORMAN’ AND ‘EARLY ENGLISH’ SOUTH DOORS 105
PART OF THE SOUTH WALL OF THE CHURCH AT GARTON-ON-THE-WOLDS 106
‘CHURCHWARDEN’ RESTORATION AT WELWICK CHURCH 108
A GROTESQUE ‘POPPY-HEAD’ AT HOLY TRINITY, HULL 109
BRASS OF THOMAS TONGE, RECTOR OF BEEFORD 110
ARMS OF KINGSTON-UPON-HULL 111
SILVER PENNY COINED AT HULL IN THE REIGN OF EDWARD I. 112
PHOTOGRAPH OF THE HULL CHARTER 113
EFFIGIES OF SIR WILLIAM AND DAME KATHERINE DE LA POLE 117
ARMS OF THE DE LA POLES 118
COMMON SEAL OF THE CORPORATION OF KINGSTON-UPON-HULL 119
SEAL OF EDMUND DE LA POLE 121
PEDIGREE OF THE DE LA POLES 122
ARMS OF BRIDLINGTON PRIORY 123
A CISTERCIAN MONK 124
A BENEDICTINE NUN 125
PLAN OF THE CISTERCIAN ABBEY OF KIRKSTALL 127
THE PRIORY CHURCH, BRIDLINGTON 129
A CORNER OF THE CLOISTER COURT AT KIRKHAM PRIORY 131
THE BAYLE GATE, BRIDLINGTON 132
A WHITE FRIAR IN HIS STUDY 133
ARMS OF BEVERLEY MINSTER 135
BEVERLEY MINSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 137
‘EARLY ENGLISH’ DOORWAY IN THE SOUTH TRANSEPT 138
SMALL ‘DECORATED’ DOORWAY AT THE WEST END 139
PART OF THE ARCADING ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE NAVE 141
‘HEY-DIDDLE-DIDDLE, THE CAT AND THE FIDDLE’ 142
PLAN OF BEVERLEY MINSTER 143
SANCTUARY CROSS AT BISHOP BURTON 147
THE BEVERLEY FRITH-STOOL 150
SANCTUARY KNOCKER AT ALL SAINTS’ CHURCH, YORK 151
HENRY OF LANCASTER’S CROSS 161
PRESENT SEAL OF THE BOROUGH OF HEDON 162
NORTH BAR WITHOUT, BEVERLEY 163
PART OF A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PLAN OF HULL 165
HIGH STREET, HULL 166
SECTIONS OF A MEDIÆVAL AND A MODERN STREET 167
PARISH STOCKS PRESERVED IN BEVERLEY MINSTER 169
ARMS OF THE HULL TRINITY HOUSE 172
A MIRACLE PLAY IN THE OLDEN TIME 174
NOAH’S ARK 175
A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ‘SHOW’ 177
BEAR-BAITING 178
THE BEVERLEY MINSTRELS 185
ARMS OF THE HULL MERCHANTS’ COMPANY 186
THE GATEWAY OF KIRKHAM PRIORY 190
RUINS OF THE EAST END OF THE CHURCH 191
BADGE OF THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE 193
HOWDEN CHURCH FROM THE SOUTH 196
HOWDEN CHURCH—RUINS OF THE CHAPTER HOUSE 198
ALL THAT REMAINED OF MEAUX ABBEY IN 1900 201
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF KYNGESTON-VPON-HVLL, A.D. 1640 206, 207
KING CHARLES I. AT THE BEVERLEY GATE, KINGSTON-UPON-HULL 211
SIR JOHN HOTHAM 216
MEDAL STRUCK IN MEMORY OF SIR JOHN HOTHAM 219
HULL’S WATER GATE 221
WRESSLE CASTLE 225
THE PERCY TOMB, BEVERLEY MINSTER 230
BURTON CONSTABLE HALL 232
BRASS OF SIR THOMAS DE ST. QUINTIN IN HARPHAM CHURCH 233
BURTON AGNES HALL 234
EFFIGY OF A KNIGHT IN PLATE ARMOUR AT SWINE 235
EFFIGY OF A KNIGHT IN CHAIN ARMOUR AT HOWDEN 236
COAT-OF-ARMS OF THE STRICKLANDS 237
ON THE ROAD IN 1812 238
HULL AND YORK COACHING BILL, A.D. 1787 241
COACHING ROADS AND EARLY RAILWAYS 243
PISTOLS AND HOLSTERS FORMERLY USED ON THE HULL AND PATRINGTON COACH 245
THE FIRST TIME-TABLE OF THE HULL AND SELBY RAILWAY 248
THE HULL AND BEVERLEY STAGE COACH 251
ON THE ROAD IN 1912 252
WHITEFRIARGATE BRIDGE AND THE VICTORIA SQUARE, HULL 255
PLAN OF DOCKS WEST OF THE RIVER HULL 258
PLAN OF DOCKS EAST OF THE RIVER HULL 259
THE WILSON LINER ‘ESKIMO’ GETTING UP STEAM 260
GRAIN SHIPS DISCHARGING THEIR CARGOES 261
AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY ON THE WAY TO RUSSIA 264
A STEAM TRAWLER 265
N.E.R. RIVERSIDE QUAY 267
THE GARDEN VILLAGE, HULL 268
JOHN ALCOCK, BISHOP OF ELY 270
JOHN FISHER, BISHOP OF ROCHESTER 272
ANDREW MARVELL 273
BIRTHPLACE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE 275
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE 277
SIR TATTON SYKES 281
CHARLES WILSON, FIRST BARON NUNBURNHOLME 282
ARTHUR WILSON 283
AN ANCIENT ‘DUG-OUT’ FOUND IN NORTH LINCOLNSHIRE 285
A VIKING SHIP ON A CHURCH DOOR 286
ANCIENT SEAL OF THE CORPORATION OF HEDON 287
ENGLISH WARSHIPS IN THE TIME OF THE ARMADA 289
A NEWS SHEET OF 1837 291
THE HULL WHALER ‘TRUELOVE’ 293
THE FIRST STEAMSHIP BUILT ON THE HUMBER 295
A HUMBER PILOT BOAT 297
SHIPS OLD AND NEW—THE ‘SOUTHAMPTON’—‘BAYARDO’ 299
ENTRANCE TO THE OLD HARBOUR 300
ANCIENT ARMS OF BEVERLEY 311
MODERN ARMS OF BRIDLINGTON 313
LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREAS IN THE EAST RIDING 314
THE HEDON MACE—THE OLDEST CIVIC MACE IN BRITAIN 316
CREST OF THE EAST RIDING COUNTY COUNCIL 318
COUNCIL CHAMBER AT THE COUNTY HALL, BEVERLEY 320
ARMS OF BEVERLEY GRAMMAR SCHOOL 322
ARMS OF HOWDEN GRAMMAR SCHOOL 322
ARMS OF BRIDLINGTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL 323
ARMS OF HULL GRAMMAR SCHOOL 324
ARMS OF POCKLINGTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL 325
AT SCHOOL IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 325
PART OF THE SEAL OF A LINCOLNSHIRE GRAMMAR SCHOOL 326
ANCIENT COCK-FIGHTING BELL OF POCKLINGTON SCHOOL 328
A BOYS’ PLAY-GROUND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 330
THE OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL, HULL 333
THE HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, BRIDLINGTON 335
SEAL OF THE GIRLS’ HIGH SCHOOL, HULL 336
BRIDLINGTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL 339
ARMS OF HYMERS COLLEGE 340
HYMERS COLLEGE 341
A TYPICAL SCHOOL ON THE YORKSHIRE WOLDS 342
A MODERN CITY COUNCIL SCHOOL 343#
MAP OF THE EAST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE _End Cover_
THE STORY OF THE EAST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE.
I. WHAT THE EAST RIDING IS.
That an English county which is nearly as large as the ancient kingdom of Wales should become divided into separate portions for the purposes of local government is only what one would expect. But it is not obvious why the number of these portions should be three, and there is even an air of mystery about the name given to them. ‘North Riding,’ ‘West Riding,’ ‘East Riding’—what is this word ‘Riding’?
For the answer to this question we must go back many centuries, to the time of the hardy Norsemen who, as we shall see, settled in such large numbers in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. It was common among the Norsemen of old to divide lands into three portions for the purposes of government, and their name for each portion was _thrithjungr_.[1]
Footnote 1:
_Thríth-yunger_
This mysterious word means in our tongue ‘a third part,’ and from it arose the English word THRIDING as companion to _feorthing_, another word which we use to-day in a very slightly altered form. But the difficulty of pronouncing distinctly and easily the combination ‘North Thriding’ is evident, and the troublesome word suffered the same fate as commonly then befell the troublesome man—it got, quite naturally, beheaded.
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE THREE RIDINGS OF YORKSHIRE.]
A glance at the small map on this page will show how the county of Yorkshire is divided. By no means are the three Ridings equal in area, the East Riding being far the smallest. In order of size they stand as follows:—
West Riding 2,766 square miles. North Riding 2,128 " " East Riding 1,172 " " —-—-—-—-—-—-— 6,066 square miles.
The map shows another point of contrast between the three Ridings. Whereas the West and North Ridings have numerous ranges of hills and correspondingly numerous water-channels, the East Riding is, with the exception of its northern extremity, an eastward extension of the ‘Vale of York’ and very nearly as flat as the proverbial pancake. Its only rivers are the Hull and the Derwent, and the latter for more than half its course forms the boundary of the Riding.
An uninteresting part of the county it looks to be, does it not? But, nevertheless, it has an interesting history behind it, and men and women have been born and bred in it—men and women who have helped to make our country what it is to-day. Who they have been, how they have lived, and what they have done in the ages before we ourselves were born, it is the purpose of the following pages to show.
II. HOW THE EAST RIDING WAS MADE.
Stand on the very highest point of the white limestone cliffs that stretch northwards from Flamborough Head, and realise that you are standing on what was once the bed of the sea.
Strange though this be, it is nevertheless true. Countless ages ago what now towers up 450 feet above sea-level had over it the ceaseless rolling of the waters of the ocean, and during countless ages it was slowly formed out of the shells and teeth and bones of the creatures that lived in these waters.
Men who know tell us that the layer of chalk at the bottom of the ocean to-day is composed principally of the remains of creatures so minute as to be visible only by the aid of a microscope, and that this layer grows in thickness at the rate of not more than one-tenth of an inch per year. They tell us also that the layer of chalk which extends under our county is not less than 1200 feet in thickness, and thus a simple calculation will help us to form some idea of the extent of time necessary for its formation. But however long this time actually was, it came to an end with a tremendous upheaval of a portion of the ocean bed, and the formation of a new area of ‘dry land.’
All the coast line of the East Riding, however, does not consist of chalk cliffs. North of Bempton and Speeton lie cliffs of sandstone and clay, which have yielded the fossil remains of living beings that once inhabited the water and the shore. Such are the belemnites and ammonites—the ‘thunderbolts’ and ‘St. Hilda’s snakes’ we may have heard them called—and the _Ichthyosaurus_, whose skeleton was recently discovered embedded in the clay cliffs at Speeton and may now be seen in the Hull Museum. Not a very handsome gentleman in the flesh he must have been, unless appearances are deceptive.
[Illustration:
ONE OF THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF THE EAST RIDING. Actual length about twelve feet. ]
Again, walk southwards from Flamborough Head, and the chalk cliffs are found to get less and less in height until they disappear altogether, and their place is taken by cliffs of clay. Then these disappear, and are succeeded by the long, flat bank of sand and shingle which is known as Spurn Point; and if we round this point and follow the river bank, we find it nothing but mud and clay until we get past the mouth of the river Hull. At Hessle the chalk cliffs break out once more, and we know, from investigations, that the bed of chalk comes to the surface completely westwards of a line drawn from Flamborough to this point.
Draw on a map of the East Riding a line from Sewerby, through Driffield and Beverley, to Hessle, and you are drawing the line of the old sea-beach when the upheaval previously mentioned had taken place. This was the shore of a land inhabited by races of animals now found living only in tropical regions. The elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus and hyena ranged the land for food, and bones of these creatures have been found in considerable numbers in the caves that exist at Kirkdale in the North Riding.
* * * * *
Then came a great change. The climate of Northern Europe became colder and colder till there prevailed what scientists call the ‘Great Ice Age.’ This was the time of formation of huge glaciers which spread from the mountains of Scandinavia, Scotland, and north-west England southwards and eastwards into the sea, until they met and made its whole area a slowly moving mass of ice. With the ice were carried sand, gravel, clay, boulders torn from projecting rocks, and bones of Arctic animals, such as the walrus, the reindeer, and the Irish elk; and as the ice gradually melted, all these were deposited at the base of the line of chalk cliffs, or even on the summit of the cliffs where these were low. From the gravel pits at Burstwick excavations of ballast for the embankments of the North Eastern Railway brought to light animal bones in such quantities that many tons were sold to chemical manure manufacturers, and it is probable that many tons still remain undiscovered.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] Relics of the Ice Age. [_C. W. Mason_
]
A walrus tusk from Kelsey Hill and the tooth of a mammoth from the cliffs at Atwick.[2]
Footnote 2:
The weight of this tooth is 9½ lbs. One side has been worn down and polished smooth by the friction of the ice in passing over it.
In this way was formed the ‘great mass of gravel, clay, and sand ... east of the Yorkshire Wolds’ which we know as the Plain of Holderness. Here is what one of our foremost local geologists has to say of its beginnings:—
‘Let us imagine the probable appearance of East Yorkshire on the final melting of the ice. Huge fans or sheets of gravel occur at Bridlington and other places as a result of the floods. Rounded hillocks of gravel and clay stand out in all directions; the hollows in between are filled with water, forming miniature lakes or meres. Of animal or plant life there is little or none. The climate gradually becomes milder; at first Arctic plants and animals exist in small numbers. Later, the margins of the meres become clothed in vegetation; peat is eventually formed, and huge trees of Oak and Fir thrive. The Red Deer, Beaver, Short-horned Ox, Otter, and Wild Horse, haunt the woods, and finally primitive man makes his appearance.’
[Illustration:
SKULL AND ANTLERS OF A RED DEER FOUND IN THE HORNSEA PEAT-BED. ]
III. MEN OF THE STONE AGE.
What sort of man was it who first inhabited Holderness and how did he live? Artists in his day were few and far between, and the few who did exist in Europe gave pleasure to themselves and to their companions by drawing portraits of reindeer and horses on pieces of bone. To draw portraits of their fellows was probably the last thing they would think of doing. Reindeer and horses are graceful creatures, but the artists’ fellows were anything but graceful.
As far as we know, the first inhabitants of Holderness were a race of short, dark-haired men, who depended for their food and clothing on the animals of the forest and the mere, who pursued their prey and fought one another with weapons of stone, and who lived in dwellings built on piles driven into the bed of a lake in exactly the same way as the New Guinea islanders live to-day.
Something definite about their dwelling-places we know; for what is appropriately called a _lake-dwelling_ was discovered thirty years ago at Ulrome. This was a structure made of tree trunks laid side by side and held together by piles driven into the bed of what was then a large mere.
[Illustration: BONE IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS FROM BARROWS ON THE WOLDS.]
A, B. Hammer head and pick made from the shed antlers of a red deer (1/1, 1/4).
C. Bodkin or needle (1/1).
D. Dagger made from a man’s thigh-bone (1/3).
On this rough sort of platform, which measured 90 feet by 60 feet, dwelling-places had been constructed, and a ‘popular watering-place’ it must have been; for there was evidence that it had been built in the first place by a race of people whose tools were of flint and bone, and that this race had been ousted many years later by another more advanced race who had weapons and tools of bronze. That the dwellers here were mighty hunters and mighty eaters was proved by enormous accumulations of animal bones under and around the platform. That they were also cannibals is likely from the presence of human bones among this refuse.
* * * * *
So much for the ‘lake-dwellers’ of Ulrome. Up on the Wolds there were men living a somewhat different life. These hunted and ate the same kinds of creatures, and they used the same kinds of weapons, but their dwellings were dug out of the soil—shallow circular or elliptical pits each covered over with a conical roof of branches and turf, supported on a central post; or deeper troughs covered over with sods and scrub laid on slabs of chalk, so that the roof was level with the surrounding earth and indistinguishable from it.
Of the former kind of _pit-dwelling_ an example has been discovered in the hollow known as Garton Slack, the pit measuring rather less than 9 feet by 6 feet in length and breadth, and 5 feet in depth; while one of the latter kind has come to light under Kemp Howe, a few miles north of Driffield.[3] The underground chamber here measured 25 feet by 4½ feet, had a depth of 6 feet at its deeper end, and was approached by a sloping passage 11 feet in length, the entrance to which would doubtless be hidden with scrub. The roof had been supported on six upright posts, and for twelve feet along one side of the chamber ran a stone ledge—this last being evidently a luxury.
Footnote 3:
Groups of circular _pit-dwellings_ have been discovered at Bempton and at Atwick—the latter by Mr. William Morfitt, whose house at Atwick contains many ‘treasures’ which he has unearthed in the district around Hornsea.
It is probable that these two kinds of dwellings may have been respectively the summer and winter houses of the same people. For the Roman historian Tacitus says of the ancient tribes on the other side of the North Sea:—
Besides their ordinary habitations, they have a number of subterranean caves, dug by their own labour and carefully covered over with soil, in winter their retreat from cold and the repository for their corn. In these recesses they not only find a shelter from the rigour of the seasons, but in times of foreign invasions their effects are safely concealed.
Of the men who lived on the Yorkshire Wolds we know a great deal; for it was their custom to raise over the burial places of their chiefs circular mounds of earth, some still very large, others now only a foot or two high. The relative size of a burial mound, which we speak of either by the Latin name _tumulus_ or by the English names _barrow_ and _howe_, marks the importance of the chieftain whose body or ashes once lay under it.
These _tumuli_, or barrows, are very plentifully strewn over the Yorkshire Wolds, and for more than fifty years the late Mr. J. R. Mortimer, of Driffield, devoted all his leisure time to their excavation. The results of his labours are to be seen in his private museum—the Mortimer Museum—and details of his ‘finds’ are recorded in his large book on the _Burial Mounds of East Yorkshire_, some of the illustrations in which are here reproduced.
A general idea of how a barrow has been constructed, and of what it may contain, can be gained from the illustration on the next page.
Howe Hill, Duggleby, is one of the larger barrows, built on a sloping hillside, and having at its base a diameter of 125 feet and at its flattened top one of 47 feet.
[Illustration: SECTION OF HOWE HILL, DUGGLEBY.]
A-K. Skeletons in position as buried. O. Cremated remains. Y. Band of blue clay impervious to water.
W. Inner mound of clay. Z. Outer mound of chalk.
X. Bed of chalk grit. * Probable summit of the barrow when built.
From the diagram we see that the bodies first interred have been placed at the bottom of a cavity dug out of the solid chalk. This hole not proving large enough for the numbers to be buried, an extension has been begun, but not finished. Time was evidently pressing, for some bodies have been buried above the surface of the ground. They have been placed in different positions, but the legs of all have been bent at the knees and all are enclosed in a low mound of clay. Above this lie the remains of numerous other bodies, which have been burnt before burial; and over them comes a twelve-inch layer of a blue clay which is impervious to water. Then a large mound of soil and pieces of chalk has been raised over all, the mound being originally much higher than it is to-day.
Such has been the building of Howe Hill. But it must not be thought that all barrows contain the remains of a large number of bodies. Most contain one only, and the body has either been buried as it was when life left it or been burnt and the calcined bones gathered up in an earthenware vessel, or pinned in a skin garment. The eight full-grown skeletons discovered under Howe Hill are those of men, and we may suppose that they represent a chieftain and his relatives killed in the onslaught by a hostile clan. The cremated bodies, forty of which were discovered in the digging of a trench through the barrow, would be those of his dependants, who died fighting in defence of their lord and master.
* * * * *
But the barrow contains evidence of the lives of the people of the time as well as of their deaths. Scattered through the soil under the band of blue clay were found many broken bones of the ox, roebuck, red deer, fox, goat, and pig, the remains of the burial feast; and among these were human bones which had quite evidently been broken and cooked. It is horrible to think of the people of our East Riding as having once been cannibals, but the evidence to that effect is indisputable.
Here and there were also found portions of the weapons with which the defenders of the settlement had fought—the hammer head shown on page 9, made from the shed antler of a red deer, and the broken javelin head of flint shown on page 15. In this barrow was also found the wonderfully made flint knife represented below—an implement fashioned out of a piece of flint with no other tools than such as are mentioned below, and yet fashioned so delicately that its greatest thickness is only one-sixteenth of an inch.
[Illustration:
POLISHED FLINT KNIFE FOUND IN DUGGLEBY HOWE (1/1). ]
A clever workman he must have been who made this wonderful knife. But such beautifully wrought implements are very rare. Only one similar knife—found in a barrow at Aldro—was known to its discoverer, and he had himself superintended the excavation of no fewer than two hundred and eighty-eight barrows.
The weapons and tools which have been buried with their owners are more commonly of the rougher types figured on the opposite page. They include knives, chisels, spear heads, saws, and arrow heads, all made from flints by the processes of chipping and flaking, with hammer heads, picks, needles and daggers of bone.
Compare the figures A and B given on page 9 with the illustration of the antlers of a red deer on page 7, and see how cleverly the hammer head and the pick have been fashioned. Equally clever has been the adaptation of a bone in the making of the very primitive dagger figured at D on the same page. But in this case it has been not the antler of a red deer that has been brought into use, but the thigh-bone of a man.
[Illustration:
FLINT IMPLEMENT AND WEAPONS.
A. Chisel from Aldro (1/1). B. Barbed arrow head from Grimston (1/1) C. Javelin head from Duggleby Howe (1/1). ]
So far we have spoken of weapons and implements of bone and of flint. Others were then in use made of whinstone and greenstone, such as the axe heads figured overleaf. Notice the different arrangement of the cutting edge in these two implements, and notice also that in the first one the hole intended for the insertion of a wooden handle has, for some reason or other, not been finished. Perhaps the maker was killed before he had time to finish it, or perhaps he grew tired of his work and threw it away. At any rate this unfinished adze head was found loose on the surface of the ground, and not buried under a howe as was the other.
[Illustration:
UNFINISHED STONE ADZE HEAD PICKED UP ON ACKLAM WOLD (1/1). ]
[Illustration:
WHINSTONE AXE HEAD FROM A BARROW ON CALAIS WOLD (2/3). ]
Weapons and implements of stone! May we not justly call their makers MEN OF THE STONE AGE? They lived before man knew how to dig metals from the earth, and how, having obtained them, to melt and mould them to his wish.
But besides these weapons which have lain buried with their owners for some thousands of years, there are yielded up by the barrows earthenware vessels of different sizes and shapes. Some, like that shown below, are wide-mouthed and have a thick rim; others are narrower, and their rim is not thickened. Then others have an overhanging rim; and others, again, are small, only an inch or two in height, and have from two to six holes perforated in their sides. All are marked with simple patterns, made by pressing the pointed end of a stick or the thumb-nail into the moist clay, or by pressing round it a twisted thong of hide. There has been no glazing and no attempt to make use of artificial colour.
[Illustration: FOOD VESSEL FROM A BARROW ON ACKLAM WOLD (1/2).]
Each of these vessels has had its particular use. The first-named vessels, which are by far the most common, are always found to be stained with some decomposed matter on the inside of the bottom, and their use has undoubtedly been as _food vessels_. So also we may consider the second group to be _drinking vessels_. The food and drink which these two contained when they were buried have been intended for their owners in the new life to come, when food and drink would be again required. The vessels of the third kind are always found to contain remains of a body which has been cremated before burial—hence their name _cinerary urns_—and the last-named and smallest, which are found with them, have probably been used to hold the precious spark of fire which lit the funeral pyre.
[Illustration: THE RUDSTON MONOLITH]
Let us leave these howes and barrows and examine another example of the work of the Men of the Stone Age. Close to the wall of the village church at Rudston stands a huge upright stone, or monolith. Twenty-five feet is its height above the ground, and sixteen feet its girth, while it is said to be embedded in the ground as deep as it is high above the surface. Its weight is estimated as not far short of forty tons. What is it doing in a village churchyard, and who put it there? When and how was it placed where it now stands?
[Illustration: THE EARLIEST KIND OF AXE USED IN EAST YORKSHIRE.]
It is impossible to give any definite answers to these questions. A century ago, however, the village people answered them all very easily. The Devil, they said, objected to the building of the church, and flung this stone to destroy it before its completion. But his aim was not so accurate as it was intended to be, and the missile missed its mark. Asked for a proof of their wonderful story, they would point to the stone itself. There it was for everyone to see. What further proof could be needed?[4] Whether we believe this legend or not, two things are certain. First, that the stone is as old as the barrows in the surrounding wolds; secondly, that there is no rock of the same nature nearer to it than Filey Brig and the Brimham Rocks. Was it brought down by the great ice sheet and then erected by the men of the Stone Age to serve some purpose in their heathen rites, or did they bring it up from Filey or down from the hills of the North Riding on wooden rollers? Perhaps it is not more difficult to conceive of their doing this than of their raising such a huge barrow as that which stands unopened at the foot of Garrowby Hill—a mound 250 feet in diameter at its base and 50 feet in height.
Footnote 4:
The ‘Devil’s Arrows’ is the name by which three similar huge stones are known at Boroughbridge.
IV. MEN OF THE BRONZE AGE.
THE ANCIENT BRITONS.
With the coming of Julius Caesar to Britain in the middle of the first century before the birth of Christ, we reach the time in the history of our country when definite facts about its people begin to be recorded.
Thus we know from Caesar’s own writings that the Britons lived in houses like those of the Gauls, that they had great numbers of cattle, that they used copper coins, that many of the inland tribes did not grow corn but lived on milk and flesh and went clothed in skins, that in war time they dyed their bodies with a blue stain to give them a more terrible aspect, and that they wore long hair on their heads and their upper lips.
So also, with regard to their religion, Caesar tells us that their priests were called Druids; that if any crime had been committed, or if there were any dispute about an inheritance or a boundary, it was the Druids who gave judgment; that they had vast stores of learning, all of which was committed to memory and none committed to writing; and that their chief doctrine was that the soul of man did not perish, but passed after death into another body, so that no man should fear death.
[Illustration:
BRONZE CELT OR AXE HEAD FOUND AT SWINE. ]
From these accounts we see that there had been great progress made since the times described in the last chapter. This was due to the migration westwards of a new race of people—the Kelts—who had gained a knowledge of the use of metal, and who, consequently, had weapons and implements made of bronze instead of stone. Their greater knowledge gave them greater power, and the extinction of the men of the Stone Age was only a question of time. For not often was the bronze-weaponed warrior slain by a weapon of stone.
But the account written by Julius Caesar refers to the inhabitants of the southern parts of our island. ‘Many of the inland tribes do not grow corn, but live on milk and flesh and go clothed in skins.’ This passage may be taken as true of the tribes living north of the Humber, known—so later Roman writers tell us—as the BRIGANTES, the wildest and most savage of the tribes inhabiting Britain.
Let us see what Mr. Mortimer’s discoveries have to tell us of these BRIGANTES. The most interesting discovery, perhaps, was that made in a barrow on Calais Wold, the highest point of the Yorkshire Wolds, 807 feet above sea-level. Here, on the mound being removed, a double row of stake-holes was exposed in the surface of the ground. These were from 3 to 15 inches in diameter, and were arranged in circles having diameters of 21½ and 28 feet. Outside these were four other stake-holes, and beyond these again a circular trench 100 feet in diameter, 3 feet 9 inches deep, 9 feet across at the top, and 1 foot across at the bottom. Within the double circle of stake-holes was a cavity cut in the chalk and containing a skeleton lying on its side, with its knees bent.
The plan on the opposite page shows the arrangement exactly, and the drawing which accompanies it gives Mr. Mortimer’s clever conjecture of the meaning of the stake-holes. The space enclosed between the inner and outer walls would be used, Mr. Mortimer thought, as a storage place for food, skins, and weapons. It would also serve to keep the inside living-room warm in winter.
[Illustration: IDEAL RESTORATION OF THE SITE OF BURIAL.]
[Illustration: PLAN OF A BARROW ON CALAIS WOLD, SHOWING THE ENCIRCLING TRENCH AND STAKE-HOLES.]
‘We will bury our chieftain in his home, which no one after him shall have power to defile.’ So, probably, thought those who buried him. But, if so, time has played them false; for men of a race undreamt of and speaking a tongue of which he would understand hardly one word, have ruthlessly laid bare his burial place, and have carted away his bones to be measured with tape and pencil, and his skull to have its brain cavity estimated with grains of millet seed. What an insult added to injury!
A mighty chieftain he had doubtless been, and it must be his favourite weapon that lies buried with him, so placed that he should be buried as he slept—grasping its handle firmly in his right hand. One wonders how many of his enemies’ skulls that weapon of his had beaten in before its master ceased to use it. Perhaps it had been wielded against the Roman legions brought north of the Humber by Ostorius Scapula in A.D. 50. Who knows? If you would see the head of the weapon you must go to the museum at Driffield; its likeness you will find on page 16.
The Brigantes buried their dead chiefs just as the earlier tribes had done, and the photograph on page 25 shows very clearly the curious way in which the legs were doubled and the head bent back. This skeleton was obtained from a barrow in Garton Slack, and here is what its discoverer says of the pains taken to obtain it:—
‘Being desirous of possessing this skeleton in its entirety, we obtained a quantity of stiff, mortar-like material, scraped from the adjoining high road, with which we covered the remains, in order to keep all the bones in position. We then passed three broad pieces of sheet iron under it without displacing any of the bones. The remains were then lifted on a prepared board, and conveyed to Fimber. After being carefully cleaned, the skeleton was mounted in a glass case, and now, with its relics, and part of the ground on which it was found, forms a highly interesting relic in the museum at Driffield.’
The skeleton is that of a woman, and with it, you will notice, are two objects. There is no need to say what has been the use of the bone ornament lying behind the head, but the use of the flint implement placed before the jaw is not so obvious. This is one of a class of implements known to us as _scrapers_—roughly chipped pieces of flint used by the women of a household in scraping the insides of animal skins when preparing them for human wear, and in scraping the roots that went into the ‘stock-pot’ with the flesh of the animals that provided also garments and beds for the household.
[Illustration: HOW A BRITISH CHIEFTAIN’S WIFE WAS BURIED IN GARTON SLACK.]
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
British Gold Coin. Found at Atwick by Mr. W. Morfitt (1/1).
]
In neither of these two barrows was there any sign of a bronze implement. Weapons and implements of bronze are rare among those found in the barrows of East Yorkshire, and the few discovered are dagger or knife heads and prickers. The Brigantes were far behind the Britons of the south in their knowledge of the use of metal; and at the time when the latter were making use of bronze, the wild and savage tribes of the north were content still to make use of greenstone and flint.
Personal ornaments, too, are rare, and were found accompanying only fifty-seven out of eight hundred and ninety-three burials that Mr. Mortimer excavated. They include dress-fastenings, such as rings and links of jet, and buttons of amber, jet and bone. With only one British interment was gold found, and of silver ornaments none were discovered at all.
* * * * *
[Illustration: A BRITISH WAR CHARIOT.]
Especially interesting to a Yorkshireman are the discoveries of what are called ‘chariot burials.’ The Britons were renowned for their war-chariots, of which the chieftain Caswallon is recorded to have had 4000 when he fought against Julius Caesar. To the Briton himself his chariot was known as an _essa_, a word which his Roman conquerors latinised as _essedum_. An _essedum_ was drawn by two horses, and driven by a charioteer who was very expert at running out along the pole between the horses. The _essedarii_, or charioteers, were held in high esteem among the tribal armies, and when they happened to be captured by the Roman soldiers were great favourites among the spectators of the gladiatorial shows.
On the death of a British chieftain who was a renowned chariot warrior, it was the custom for him to be buried in his chariot together with his horses and their trappings; and the East Riding has given more evidence of this custom than any other part of our country of equal area. The ‘Yorkshireman’ even then, it seems, loved a horse.
Remains of British chariot burials have been discovered at Hesselskew and Arras, near Market Weighton; at Beverley Westwood; at Danes’ Graves; and, most recently, at Hunmanby. In all these instances there have been interred two horses standing in their harness, and in the barrow opened at Danes’ Graves in 1897 there were _two_ human skeletons, proving that in this case the charioteer, as well as his chieftain, was buried.
Of course in all these interments the remains of the chariots themselves have been small, little existing but fragments of the bronze naves and iron rims of the wheels, and of the bridle bits of the horses. But these have been sufficient to show that the diameter of the wheels varied from 2 feet 8 inches to 2 feet 11 inches, and that the horses themselves were of a much smaller breed than those of to-day.
With three, at least, of these chariot burials, were also found remains of an iron mirror, a thing not found elsewhere. We are accustomed in these days of motor-cars to make use of mirrors for a knowledge of what is happening on the road behind the driver, and these remains point to a similar practice among the charioteers of the Brigantes. Really we are not, perhaps, so far advanced in the twentieth century as we thought we were.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] Earthworks at Skipsea Brough. [_C.W. Mason_
]
* * * * *
Further evidence of the Brigantes in the East Riding is to be seen in the wonderful series of entrenchments that are so noticeable in the Wold districts. Dikes, double dikes, and treble dikes once covered the whole of the Wolds, says Mr. Mortimer; in fact, in the area of 75 square miles which he explored there are 80 miles of earthworks existing to-day. These consist sometimes of one ditch and one rampart only, but commonly of three ditches and four ramparts; and in one case, in the neighbourhood of Huggate, the entrenchment consists of a series of six parallel ditches and seven ramparts.
By far the most remarkable of these ancient entrenchments is the so-called ‘Danes’ Dyke,’ which, 2½ miles in length, cut off the rocky promontory of Flamborough Head, and converted it into an impregnable fortress 5 square miles in area. In making it, advantage was taken of a natural ravine—a relic of the Ice Age—which ran down to the south; but in its northern portion, where the ground was naturally level, a huge ditch roughly 60 feet wide and 20 feet deep was dug, the soil from this being thrown up to form a dyke or rampart on its eastern face.
At Skipsea Brough, near Hornsea, may be seen other British earthworks, consisting of a central mound 70 feet high, having a flat top one acre in extent, and covering altogether an area of 5 acres, together with a series of entrenchments forming the segment of a circle. The outer rampart is half a mile in length. Other much smaller earthworks exist at the ‘Castle Hill,’ Sutton, and the ‘Giant’s Hill,’ Swine.
V. MEN OF THE IRON AGE.
THE ROMANS IN EAST YORKSHIRE.
In the last chapter we saw that the later Britons had some knowledge of iron, as well as of copper and tin. But with the Romans the use of iron was much more extensive, and hence they may be called MEN OF THE IRON AGE.
The first Roman general to enter the territory of the Brigantes was Ostorius Scapula, who came north in A.D. 50. Twenty-eight years later came Julius Agricola, who penetrated as far north as the rivers Forth and Clyde. By Agricola the ancient British camp CAER EBURAC—the camp on the Ebura, or, by its modern name, the Ure—was made into a Roman walled city under the latinised name Eburacum.
From this time EBURĀCUM,[5] or EBORĀCUM as later Roman writers spelt its name, became the proud capital of Britain—_altera Roma_, a second Rome in importance. Here died the great Roman Emperor Severus in A.D. 211, and here was born the still greater Emperor Constantine, under whose reign Christianity was established in the Roman Empire.
Footnote 5:
Pronounced _Eb-oo-ráh-kum_.
[Illustration:
STATUE OF A ROMAN SOLDIER IN THE YORK MUSEUM. ]
For nearly three and a half centuries the Roman armies ruled the land of the Brigantes, during which time great alterations were taking place in the lives of its people. Northwards came troop after troop of German and Italian soldiers to subdue and enslave the people of the land north of the Humber, and to wage incessant war against Rome’s enemies still farther north. And southwards marched troop after troop of the men of the Brigantes, on their way to Gaul and Italy and Spain, there to serve as Roman soldiers. In A.D. 117 came to Eboracum the famous Sixth Legion—LEGIO SIXTA, surnamed VICTRIX, the ‘All Conquering’—and Eboracum was its headquarters thenceforth till A.D. 406, when it was withdrawn to help in defending Rome against the enemies mustering on her threshold.
* * * * *
For the constant movement of troops the Roman invaders needed roads, and the military highways which they constructed across Britain remain foremost among the evidences of their occupation of the country. The fact that their roads have existed for so many centuries—centuries of hard use but of constant neglect—is due to the great care bestowed upon their construction.
When a Roman road was made, the first thing done was to mark out its course by the digging of two parallel ditches. This course was from 15 to 21 feet wide, and on it as the _gremium_, or foundation ground, was placed a layer of large stones 5 inches deep. This, known as the _statumen_, was followed by a fifteen-inch layer of broken stones cemented with lime. The _rudus_ thus formed was succeeded by the _nucleus_, a similar layer 10½ inches thick and constructed of small fragments of brick and pottery. Last came the _pavimentum_, made of large irregularly-shaped blocks of very hard stone fitted together and cemented with lime so as to form a perfectly even surface. The pavimentum was 5 inches thick, thus making a solid road raised about 3 feet above the level of the surrounding land.
[Illustration: SECTION OF A ROMAN MILITARY HIGHWAY.]
Such was the usual method of construction of a Roman highway. Where the natural surface of the ground passed over was hard rock, the two lowest layers, or _strata_, were dispensed with; but where no safe natural foundation existed, the labour was increased by the driving of piles into the soft ground to afford this.
Over hill and down dale were constructed these wonderful roads. No obstacle save an impenetrable marsh or an unbridgeable river baulked the Roman engineer; and the outward distinguishing mark between the Roman road constructed sixteen centuries ago and its modern successor is often the fact that whereas the latter goes round a hill, and thus makes things easy for the traveller, the former climbs in a straight line right over the summit.
What engineering skill the Romans must have possessed to build their roads! Straight from one military station to another miles distant over the hills did they succeed in driving their road. How did they judge its direction so accurately? We know not. And what immense labour was needed for the construction of their roads! Think of the cohorts of Roman soldiers engaged in building them, and of the slave-gangs of Britons toiling under the lash of the task-master as they quarried the materials for the use of the soldiers working many miles away. So hard was the work of the Roman soldiers in Britain, we read, that they ‘wished for death to relieve them from their insupportable toil.’
But human life stood for little in those days. What Roman engineer cared whether thousands of lives were spent in the making of his road? His one concern was to build it in such a way that for centuries to come the Roman legions should be able to march, and the Imperial Post to ride, along its hundreds of miles at the greatest possible speed. One hundred and sixty-five English miles were covered by Caesarius, a Roman magistrate, in the space of one day on a journey from Antioch to Constantinople, the whole distance of 665 miles taking less than six days. There is little wonder that Rome had become ‘Mistress of the World.’
* * * * *
Let us now see what the Roman road-makers did in East Yorkshire. Stretching north from Londinium ran the military highway known in later times as ERMIN STREET. At Lindum Colonia this branched in two directions, both branches meeting eventually at Eboracum. Skirting the impassable marshes around the meeting-places of the Yorkshire rivers and the Trent, one branch reached Eboracum by bridges or fords across the Trent, the Don, the Aire, and the Wharfe, where now stand Littleborough, Doncaster, Castleford, and Tadcaster. The crossing-places were protected by military stations which have since grown into these towns.
But directly north from Lincoln the second branch reached the Humber at Winteringham, whence the river was crossed by ferry to Brough, where also was a military station, named Petuaria. From Brough to York the road passed through South Cave, South Newbald, Houghton Woods, Thorpe le Street, Barmby Moor and Stamford Bridge. Along this second branch would travel the Roman Emperors and Generals, the Imperial Post, and the slave-carried litters and chairs of the Roman aristocracy; round by the former would march the foreign troops drafted to Eboracum to replace the wastage in the Sixth Legion, and the British levies on their way to fight and die in other parts of the Roman world.
At South Newbald this Roman road branched to the right, passing by Londesborough, Warter, Millington and Acklam, to a camp at Old Malton. From Stamford Bridge eastward ran another road by Garrowby, Fimber, Cottam and Kilham to a Roman station on the cliffs at Sewerby. Higher up on the Wolds ran an alternative route by Fridaythorpe, Sledmere, Octon and Rudston. These two roads are to-day known as the Low Street and the High Street.
Smaller roads ran from Stamford Bridge to Old Malton, and from the latter to Fimber and possibly farther south in the direction of Beverley. Round the coast from Bridlington there was probably a road—long since washed away—to a military station on the headland which then existed about a mile to the east of the present Kilnsea.
In North Lincolnshire Ermin Street is a typical Roman military road, and for the greater part of its course it is to-day the ‘king’s highway.’ But its northerly portion has, since the establishing of the Ferry at New Holland, been disused, and is now but a green lane, whose very surface is lost to view as we approach the Humber.
When we enter the territory of the Brigantes the road is not so distinguishable, and its course is in some parts uncertain. But even then the name of ‘Street’ given by the successors of the Romans to the Roman paved way—the way made of _strata_—survives; and on the map of the East Riding we shall find Garrowby Street, Humber Street, Wharram le Street, and Thorpe le Street, each name being significant of a Roman road. In some instances the road itself has been uncovered, as in the building of Drewton Bridge 60 years ago, and in building operations at Londesborough Park, where it was found to be 24 feet wide, and to show plainly the marks of wheeled carriages.
* * * * *
At many places in the East Riding have been discovered evidences of Roman commerce and domestic life. Bronze and silver coins buried in vases or boxes have been unearthed at Cowlam, Warter, Nunburnholme, Skerne, Wetwang, and Brough. At the first-named place more than 10,000 coins had been buried in a large black vase, the finds at Warter and Nunburnholme numbered about half that at Cowlam, and the Copper Hall Farm at Skerne owes its name to a similar find.
So also Roman coins have been unearthed at Hornsea, Aldborough, Withernsea and Hollym, on the line of a coast road from Bridlington to Kilnsea, though the road itself has long since been washed away.
[Illustration: ROMAN ROADS AROUND THE HUMBER]
Of particular interest, as pointing to the fact that the road leading southward to Brough was an export trade route, is a ‘pig’ of lead weighing 9 stone 9 lbs. discovered twenty years ago in a field adjoining the road at South Cave. This bears in raised letters an inscription, which, written in uncontracted form as
CAII IVLII PROTI BRITANNICUM LVTVDAE EX ARGENTO
would mean in our tongue [The lead] of Caius Julius Protus, British [lead] from Lutuda, [prepared] from silver.
[Illustration: ROMAN PIG OF LEAD FOUND AT SOUTH CAVE.]]
The lead mines of Derby were famous in Roman times, and much lead was exported from Britain to Italy; so we may easily suppose that this
## particular pig was lost in transit to the place of shipment.
As evidences of domestic life we have _hypocausts_, or underground heating-chambers for the supply of hot air and hot water to the rooms of Roman villas. These must once have been numerous—for no wealthy Roman could do without his warm bath—but so far only a few have been discovered. Again, we have examples of the Roman writing-implements, _styli_ by name, two of which, found at Brough, are illustrated below.
[Illustration: ROMAN ‘PENS’ FOUND AT BROUGH.]
When a Roman wished to write, his implements were very simple—a tablet of wax and a _stylus_. With the pointed end of the latter he scratched his letters on the surface of the wax; and if he made mistakes he had only to smooth them out by using the other end, which was flattened for the purpose. The Roman schoolboy probably found the stylus a very convenient instrument.
[Illustration: RELICS OF ROMAN FEASTS FOUND AT EASINGTON.]
Humbler evidences of domestic life have been discovered in the ‘kitchen middens,’ or refuse heaps, which the incursions of the sea have exposed at Easington and Kilnsea. From these have been obtained numberless oyster shells and fragments of pottery, the relics of dining-room feasts and kitchen breakages. The former are very interesting, because they show the method by which the Roman cook overcame the natural reluctance of the creatures within them to ‘come out of their shells.’
* * * * *
How very curiously such discoveries of ancient relics may be made is seen in the recent case of an inhabitant of South Ferriby. A half-witted man, by name Thomas Smith, but known locally by the more familiar name ‘Coin Tommy,’ made it his practice for several years to walk along the shore of the river just after the periods of high tide, and to pick up all metal objects which he happened to see. Whether horse-shoe or brace-button did not matter to ‘Coin Tommy.’ Into his pocket went everything of metal which he found; and on his reaching home after each of these expeditions, his ‘finds’ were transferred to a stock of tin canisters, and packed away on the shelves of his cupboard never again to be looked at by their finder.
Now it was known by Coin Tommy’s associates that his finds were not all horse-shoes and brace-buttons. But few of his friends expected that after his death would-be purchasers of these finds from distant parts of the country would vie with one another for their possession. Yet so it happened; for Coin Tommy’s miscellaneous collection included no fewer than 3000 Roman coins of gold, silver and bronze, and bronze brooches, finger-rings, bracelets, tweezers, spoons, earpicks and styli innumerable.
The explanation of the occurrence of all these objects along this portion of the south bank of the Humber is that there had been at this spot a Roman cemetery, and that changes in the currents of the Humber have caused each high tide during the last few years to wash away some portion of the bank, and thus bring to light treasures buried sixteen centuries ago. And though South Ferriby is not in East Yorkshire, Coin Tommy’s finds may fitly be mentioned in the story of the East Riding; for it is probable that many of the owners of the bracelets and brooches and finger rings had lived at Petuaria, on the Yorkshire side of the river.
Very interesting are the _fibulae_, or brooches, here discovered. Some have engraved upon them the name of their maker, AVCISSA, and one, having blue enamel let into the bronze surface, is constructed in the form of a fish.
[Illustration: A ‘SAFETY PIN’ SIXTEEN HUNDRED YEARS OLD.]
This may be taken as evidence of its wearer’s being a Christian, for in early days the fish was an emblem of Christianity. In other cases the brooch is made of a single piece of bronze wire, twisted to form a spiral spring, and having one of its ends flattened out and bent over to form a catch for the pin—an illustration of the oft-quoted saying ‘There is nothing new under the sun’; for here is an exact model of the safety-pin invented, or rather re-invented, in the nineteenth century.
[Illustration: DESIGN OF THE PAVEMENT OF A ROMAN VILLA DISCOVERED AT HARPHAM.]
To come back to the East Riding, our last mention of relics of Roman times shall be that of the mosaic pavement which was discovered in a ploughed field at Harpham in 1904. This pavement formed the floor of the _atrium_, or square hall of a Roman villa, and was in use probably about the year A.D. 300. It is constructed of small _tessarae_, or cubes, of red sandstone and chalk, with a few others of dark blue clay, red clay, and yellow limestone in the centre-piece of the design, and makes an ingenious piece of work in the form of a maze.
This Roman pavement has been removed to Hull and reconstructed in the Hull museum. On it when found lay the flat sandstone slabs which had once formed the roof over it. Many iron nails with large flat heads were also found, and in one instance the nail remained fast in position through a hole in one of the slabs.
VI. OUR ANCESTORS.
From the time when Roman soldiers first penetrated into the territory of the Brigantes, the land which we name Holderness was troubled by the piratical attacks of a people from the other side of the North Sea; and in the early years of the second century the low-lying marshes of this district were inhabited by a tribe whom the Romans called PARISII. In our language they would be called FRISIANS.
These early Frisian settlers have left us evidence of the places they chose for settlement in the village names Arram, Newsom, Hollym, and Ulrome. Their settlements would probably be peaceful, for the lands taken would be unoccupied pieces of ground rising just above the level of the surrounding marsh.
But as time went on, the eastern and southern shores of Britain were assailed by numerous other bands of plunderers and would-be settlers; and in the later Roman times we find that, beside the army stationed at York under the command of the _Duke of Britain_ to repel the Picts and Scots of the north, there was an army under the _Count of the Saxon Shore_ whose duty it was to defend against invaders the coast from the Wash to the shores of Sussex.
* * * * *
Under Roman rule Britain as a whole prospered exceedingly. Agriculture and commerce were extended, so that we find the lead-merchants of Derby exporting lead to Italy, the chalk-merchants of Tadcaster exporting chalk, and the corn-merchants of the Rhine provinces importing corn from Britain in large quantities.
But beside the export of lead and chalk and corn, another export of trade was going on—the export of the warlike youth of the country, who went to furnish with men the Roman armies in Spain and Gaul and Germany. Those left at home were forbidden by law to carry arms; so there is small wonder that when the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain Roman towns were sacked and burnt, and Roman civilisation blotted out by hostile invaders. ‘Tragedies can still be guessed at from heaps of ashes and from skeletons of men, women and children found ... in crouching attitudes in hypocausts and other places of concealment; and the human bones frequently discovered at the bottoms of wells ... enable us to see the ruthless savage removing the traces of a murderous raid.’
Petuaria, Praetorium, Derventio—all were sacked and burnt by the hosts of ENGLE who sailed up the Humber and the Derwent, or landed at Bridlington Bay. Roman houses were generally one-storied buildings roofed with tiles or thatch, and the destruction of a town by fire would be complete. It was also, in most cases, lasting; for the destroyers were men who cared not for a life passed within walls and fortifications. ‘They liked better to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak.’ So the Roman cities, towns and camps ‘remained in ruins, to be haunted by the owl and the fox.’
But an exception was made by the invaders in the case of the greatest of the Roman cities. Eboracum, Londinium and Lindum Colonia became the chief centres of life for the tribes that captured them; and thus the EBORACUM of the Romans became the EOFERWIC[6] of the Angles—a dwelling-place in the haunts of the wild boar. Smaller towns were blotted out; and their sites are known to us only by the finding of the family store of coins, or the personal treasures once placed for safety in a little recess in the wall or buried in a vase under the floor—to be overwhelmed with debris, and to remain undiscovered for many centuries.
Footnote 6:
Pronounced almost as _Yóv-er-wik_.
* * * * *
The hostile tribes who invaded Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries in such numbers as to conquer the whole country from the Isle of Wight to the Firth of Forth, except the mountainous districts of the west, were known as the _Engle_, the _Seaxe_ and the _Iute_.[7] Angles, Saxons and Jutes these are to us. The IUTE landed on the shores of, and established colonies in, Kent and the Isle of Wight, the former of which developed into a kingdom; the SEAXE established three kingdoms distinguished from one another in name by the adjectives South, East, and West; and separate bands of ENGLE formed the kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria.
Footnote 7:
_Eń-gla_, _Sék-sa_, and _Yóo-ta_, in pronunciation.
It is with the last-named of these ‘Seven Kingdoms’ that we are most
## particularly concerned. The huge kingdom of Northumbria stretched
northwards from the Humber to the Forth, and was at different times either ruled by one king or divided into two separate kingdoms—Deira, from the Humber to the Tees, and Bernicia, from the Tees to the Forth.
How complete was the conquest of Britain by these invading tribes is seen in the account written by Bede, the eighth century monk of Jarrow:—
They burned and harried and slew from the sea on the east to the sea on the west, and no one was able to withstand them.... Many of the miserable survivors were captured in waste places and stabbed in heaps. Some because of hunger gave themselves into the hands of their enemies, to be their slaves for ever in return for food and clothing; some departed sorrowfully over the sea; some remained fearfully in their native land, and with heavy hearts lived a life of want in the forests and waste places and on the high cliffs.
The completeness of the conquest may be seen also in the fact that the language of the Britons was replaced by that of the invaders. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes spoke a language entirely different from the Keltic language of the Britons; but except in the Highlands of Scotland, in Wales, and in the Isle of Man—the parts to which the invaders did not penetrate—the language spoken to-day is ENGLISH and the name of the country itself is ENGLA-LAND, the land of the _Engle_.
* * * * *
Very definite evidence of the places chosen by the Angles for settlement can be found on the map of the East Riding. Where the head of the household decided to ‘pitch his tent’ a piece of land was enclosed with a _tūn_,[8] or hedge, and the dwelling erected within it became his new _hām_,[8] or home. Such was the origin of our numerous towns and villages whose names now end in the syllables _ton_ and _ham_. In many cases the name of the family is enshrined in the name of the settlement. Thus the Locings—the sons of Loc—the Essings, the Brantings, the Eoferings, and the Hemings gave their names respectively to Lockington, Easington, Brantingham, Everingham, and Hemingbrough.
Footnote 8:
Pronounced, respectively, _toon_ and _hahm_.
Besides the endings _ton_ and _ham_, others which tell of Anglian settlements are _worth_ and _bald_ (a dwelling), _cote_ or _coate_ (a mud cottage), _stead_ (a place), _brough_ or _borough_ (a fortified place), _wick_ (a village), _wold_ (woodland), _field_ (a place where trees have been felled), _ley_ (an open place in a wood), _mere_ (a lake), _fleet_ (the mouth of a river) and _ford_. Examples of all these can be found on a map of the East Riding.
* * * * *
In their burial customs the Angles were little different from the peoples whom they dispossessed. Like them they often cremated the bodies of their dead, afterwards collecting the charred bones and burying them in earthen vessels, accompanied with the weapons or personal treasures which were to be used again in the life to come. A man was buried with his spear and shield, or with the long one-edged knife whose name—_seax_—gave rise to the tribal name of the Saxons; a woman with her knife, shears, bronze box containing thread and needles, and beads of glass and amber; a child with his toys, such as the tiny tweezers, knife and shears found with a child’s bones in a burial vase at Sancton.
[Illustration:
IRON KNIFE AND BRONZE SPOON FROM AN ANGLIAN CEMETERY NEAR GARTON GATE HOUSE (1/2). ]
Not always, however, did the Angles cremate the bodies of their dead. More often they buried them near the surface of a British burial mound. From one of the mounds at Driffield, known as ‘Cheesecake Hill,’ was taken a necklace consisting of 219 beads, of which 141 were of amber, two of glass, three of carefully cut crystal, and five of cowrie shells.
[Illustration: CHILD’S TOYS FOUND IN A BURIAL VASE AT SANCTON.]
Not very far from Garton Gatehouse, and near the memorial to Sir Tatton Sykes some three miles farther north, were accidentally discovered two Anglian cemeteries, one of which contained more than sixty bodies of men, women and children. Here all but a few had been buried not with their limbs bent, as was the custom among the Britons, but with their limbs stretched out at full length; and all but one had been buried with their heads to the west. Probably these were Christian burials.
[Illustration:
‘FINDS’ IN AN ANGLIAN CEMETERY NEAR GARTON GATE HOUSE. A. Bronze ring (1/1). B. Silver brooch (1/1). C. Bone comb (1/2). ]
From this Anglian cemetery at Garton were obtained many implements and personal ornaments—iron knives and bronze spoons, bronze ankle-rings and buckles, necklaces of glass, amber and amethyst, silver ear-rings, a gold button set with a precious stone, and, luxury of luxuries, a bone comb. What a great advance is thus shown to have taken place in the centuries between the British burial at Garrowby and the Anglian burials at Garton! With the former were weapons of flint and bone; with the latter, implements of bronze and iron, and personal ornaments of silver, gold, and precious stones.
VII. HOW THE MEN OF THE NORTH BECAME CHRISTIANS.
During later Roman times the worship of God had been introduced into Britain, and the discovery of the Roman bronze brooch figured on page 38 shows that Christianity had reached the shores of the Humber.
But the invaders who were to give a new name to the country and to become our ancestors were heathens, and chief among their gods was Woden. We of the twentieth century still preserve, the names of Wōden, Tīw, the god of war, and Frīg, the wife of Wōden, in our ‘Wednesday,’ ‘Tuesday,’ and ‘Friday’—the _Wodenesdaeg_, _Tiwesdaeg_, and _Frigedaeg_[9] of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors.
Footnote 9:
Pronounced, respectively, _Wóh-den-ez-dag_, _Tée-wes-dag_, and _Frée-ga-dag_.
In the passage from Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History of the English People_ which was partly translated in the last chapter, we are given an insight into the way in which the heathen Angles and Saxons despoiled the worshipping-places of the Christian Britons:—
Everywhere priests were slain and murdered by the side of the altars. Bishops together with their people were slain without mercy by fire and sword, and there was none to give the rites of burial to those who were so cruelly murdered.
Thus Britain became again a country entirely pagan, and it was not until the closing years of the sixth century that Christian missionaries from Rome once more set foot in it.
* * * * *
To understand the events leading up to the arrival of these missionaries, we must bear in mind that among the Angles and the Saxons slavery was a common custom. Social ranks of life were very marked, and all men belonged to one of three distinct classes. He who could trace back his descent from the gods ranked as an _eorl_,[10] or man of noble birth, and all others were divided into two classes—the free and the unfree. A free man, who had the privilege of owning land by virtue of his freedom, was known as a _ceorl_[10]; but he who was, body and soul, the property of another was called a _theow_,[10] or slave.
Footnote 10:
_É-orl_, _ké-orl_, and _thái-ow_ in pronunciation.
Slaves must have been very numerous in our country during Saxon days; for wars were constantly being waged between the different tribes, and prisoners of war naturally became the slaves of their captors. So also, a man who had fallen into debt and who could not release himself became the theow of the man to whom he owed money; and when he became a slave, his wife and children became slaves likewise, and could be sold by his master. Worst of all, a free man had the right to sell his own children into slavery until they reached the age of seven.
Now it so happened that this horrible custom of selling children as slaves was the direct cause of Christianity’s being re-introduced into our country. A regular export trade in English children was carried on, and about the year 580 there were one day standing exposed for sale in the market of Rome some boys of fair complexion and beautiful hair. Along the market chanced to pass a monk, who was struck with their light-coloured hair and blue eyes, so different from the dark hair and brown eyes of the South European peoples. On his asking the slave-dealer from what country they had been brought, he was told that they came from Britain, and that the people of that island had fair complexions. Unsatisfied with this information, he asked of what race they were, and was told that they were Angli.
‘_Non Angli, sed Angeli_,’ replied the monk. ‘For their look is angelical, and it is meet that they should become joint heirs with the angels in heaven.’
Then he sought further information concerning them.
‘What do you call the province from which the boys were brought hither?’
‘Deira,’ was the reply given him.
‘Deira!’ said the monk; ‘that is well said. _De ira eruti_—they shall be snatched from the wrath of God!’
Again he asked: ‘What is the name of their king?’
‘Their king is named Aelle.’
‘_Alleluia!_’ replied the monk, playing on the name of the king. ‘It is most fit that the love of God our Creator be sung in those parts.’
Fifteen years after this conversation took place in the market of Rome, the monk had become famous as Pope Gregory the First. Then, in fulfilment of the plans he had formed for rescuing the Angli from the wrath of God, he chose a monk named Augustine to make a journey to Britain with some companions. Augustine, with his small band, set out, but on reaching Gaul was so dismayed by the reports of the savage character of the people to whom he was bidden to go, that he turned back, and sought release from the task which had been imposed upon him. This Gregory refused, reminding him that ‘the more difficult the task, the greater is the reward.’
Augustine once more set out, and landed at Ebbsfleet, in the Isle of Thanet, in the Spring of the year 597. The king of Kent was then Aethelberht, who had married a Christian princess, the daughter of the king of the Franks. Thus the way had been made clear for the mission of Augustine, and Kent soon became a Christian kingdom.
King Aelle of Northumbria died in 588, and thirteen years later his son Edwin became king. Edwin had married the daughter of Aethelberht of Kent, Aethelburga by name, and with her there came to Eoferwic Paulinus, a monk.
For long this monk was unable to persuade Edwin to become a Christian; but in 626 there was called a meeting of the king’s _Witan_, or ‘wise men,’ each of whom was asked what he thought of the new doctrines then being preached by Paulinus.[11] After Coifi,[12] the king’s high priest, had expressed his opinion that the gods they worshipped had no power, one of the king’s counsellors broke in with these words:—
‘Thus it seems to me, O my king, that the life of man on earth, in comparison with the life unknown to us, is just as if you were sitting at table with your ealdormen and thegns in wintertide—when the fire was kindled and your hall made warm, while it rained and snowed outside—and there came a sparrow and quickly flew through the hall, coming in by one door and passing out by the other. During the time that he is passing through the hall he is safe from the winter’s storm, but it is only for the twinkling of an eye, and in the shortest space of time he passes from winter into winter.
‘So seems the life of man—it is ours for a little while, but what goes before it and what follows after we know not. Therefore if this teaching makes anything clearer and more certain, it is meet that we follow it.’
Footnote 11:
The place of meeting was either York or Londesborough.
Footnote 12:
_Kóh-i-fi_ in pronunciation.
What an apt comparison—the life of a man is like the brief flight of a sparrow through a pleasant room! Many a time must those present when the words were spoken have seen a bewildered sparrow fly swiftly through the king’s hall, entering it to seek shelter from the storm without, and leaving it to seek safety from the smoke of the fire and the noise of men’s voices within. And what more suitable illustration of man’s ignorance of the hereafter could have been chosen? We can imagine its effect upon Coifi, who, on hearing the words of the king’s counsellor, exclaimed:—
‘I see clearly that what we have been worshipping is but naught. For the more earnestly I have sought the truth through our worship, the less I have found it. Therefore, O king, I now advise that we speedily destroy and burn with fire the altars which we hallowed without receiving any benefit.’
Thus were King Edwin of Deira and his _Witan_ converted to the true religion, and the temple which contained the heathen altars destroyed. Coifi himself sought permission to be the first to cast down the idols it contained, and the king granted him weapons and a horse for the purpose. Riding to the temple, he first cast his spear against the altar, and then called to his companions that they should pull down the idols and burn them. ‘The place is yet pointed out,’ wrote Bede one hundred years later, ‘not far east from Eoferwic beyond the river Derwent, and is to-day called Godmundingaham, where the high priest, through the inspiration of the true God, cast down and destroyed the altars which he himself had previously hallowed.’
‘Not far east from York, beyond the river Derwent’—such was Bede’s description of the place of this memorable deed. GODMUNDINGAHAM, he says, was its new name, and GOODMANHAM it is in our own day. Tradition says further that the present church, dedicated to All Saints, stands on the exact site of the heathen temple which Coifi, the heathen high priest, was the first to profane. But whether tradition speaks true we have no means of knowing.
[Illustration:
GOODMANHAM CHURCH. (_From an old Engraving_). ]
* * * * *
The immediate results of the adoption of Christianity at Goodmanham were the building of a wooden church at York, and the baptism in it of King Edwin on Easter Day 627. This wooden church, dedicated to St. Peter, was shortly afterwards succeeded by a larger and loftier church of stone, which, in its turn, was destined to be succeeded by another yet larger and loftier—the Minster that we count to-day as one of the glories of Northern England.
Six years later King Edwin was slain in battle against Penda, the heathen king of Mercia, and Cadwallon, a British king, ‘more fierce and cruel than the heathen, for he was a barbarian.’ The head of Edwin was taken to York and buried in the stone church of St. Peter which he had begun to build; and Paulinus, the first Archbishop of York, fled by sea southwards to Kent with Edwin’s widowed queen and their two children. Then for the whole of an ‘unhappy and godless’ year Northumbria was wasted by Cadwallon.
At the end of the year Edwin’s nephew Oswald, with an army small but strengthened by belief in Christ, fought against Cadwallon. Now Oswald was ‘a man dear to God,’ and before the battle he caused to be made a hastily-constructed cross of wood, which was erected in a pit dug in front of his army. With his own hands he set up this cross and held it till his men had made it firm with heaped-up soil. Then did Oswald call to him all his men and gave them his command: ‘Let us all bend the knee and together ask the almighty, living, and true God to defend us with His mercy from this proud and cruel foe; for He knows that we are justly fighting for the safety of our people.’
This they all did; and in the fight which followed, Oswald gained a complete victory, and Cadwallon was slain. The place of Oswald’s victory was called ‘Heavenfield’; and, says Bede, ‘many people to-day take chips and shavings from the wood of that holy cross and put them in water, and sprinkle the water on sick men and beasts, or give them it to drink, and they are at once cured.’
* * * * *
With the accession of King Oswald Christianity returned to the people of the north. This time, however, it was brought not by the monks of Rome, but by British monks from a monastery which had been established by Columba, an Irish saint, on the tiny island of Iona, lying off the west coast of Scotland.
It was to this monastery that Oswald sent asking for teachers for his people. In reply there was sent him a monk of hard and stern nature, to whom the people would not gladly listen; so that he was able to effect little, but returned to Iona and reported that he could do nothing because the people of Northumbria were unteachable. ‘Was it not, brother,’ said one of his fellow monks, ‘you who were not sufficiently patient and gentle with those untaught men?’ The question made all present turn to the speaker, and they quickly decided that he was worthy to be sent as teacher to their friend, King Oswald.
So came to Northumbria the saintly Aidan, whose success in converting the heathen Angles was due chiefly to the fact that as he taught so he himself lived. For, says Bede,
he in no way desired or sought after the things that are of this world; but all the worldly goods that were given him by kings or by rich men he gladly gave to the poor and needy who came to him. Through all the land he travelled, visiting towns and wayside villages, and never on horseback, unless there were special need, but always on foot. And wheresoever he came and whomsoever he met, whether rich or poor, he turned to them. If they were unbelievers, then he invited them to believe in Christ; if they were believers he strengthened them in their belief, and with word and deed stirred them up to almsgiving and the performance of good deeds.
By the labours of Aidan and his fellow monks the men of the north again became Christians; and such earnest Christians were they that they hallowed with the ‘Sign of the Cross’ the places at which they held their meetings for the purposes of government.
A British burial mound was often found convenient for an Anglian _mōt_, or meeting,—whence the name ‘Moot Hill’—and its purpose was marked by a large trench in the form of a cross cut through the mound down into the chalk. The four arms of the trench were made roughly equal, and always pointed north, south, east, and west. Cowlam Cross, near which the village church was afterwards erected, is cut seven feet deep in the solid chalk, and another similar cross with arms twenty-one feet long has been discovered at Helperthorpe.
[Illustration: TWO SIDES OF AN ANGLIAN CROSS SHAFT AT LEVEN.]
Where no convenient mound existed, the place of meeting was sometimes marked in the opposite way. Instead of cutting a deep trench they raised at right angles two ridges of earth and stones, entirely surrounded by a shallow ditch.
Such crosses have been named _Embankment Crosses_, and eleven have been discovered within a radius of fifteen miles from Driffield. A favourite name for them among the country folk is that of _bield_, or shelter, because they were supposed to have been built up to serve as shelters for the cattle. There is one near East Heslerton, known locally as the ‘Old Bield,’ the arms of which measure 45 yards each, north and south, and 50 yards east and west. Another formerly existed near the site of the ancient village of Haywold. Ploughing operations have caused this—and probably many others—to be destroyed; but its name, ‘Christ Cross,’ is still preserved.
With the introduction of Christianity there took place great development of the arts of peace in home and village life. ‘The English forged the ploughshare rather than the sword. They built weirs, and fished, and set up watermills by the rivers. Boat-building, brewing, leather-tanning, pottery, dyeing, weaving, the working of gold and silver, and embroidery, grew and soon began to flourish. The days of merchandise succeeded the days of plunder; life became gentler, nearer in spirit to the homes of England as we now conceive them.’
VIII. THE COMING OF THE NORTHMEN.
Two hundred years pass onwards from the coming of Saint Aidan to Northumbria, and we are again among scenes of famine, sword, and fire. Let us see what the records of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles have to tell.
A.D. 787. In these days first came three ships of the Northmen, and when the bailiff rode down to them, and would take the men to the king’s town—for he knew not who they were—he was slain. Those were the first ships of the Danish men that came to the land of the Angles.
A.D. 833. In this year King Egbert fought against the crews of thirty-five ships at Charmouth, and there was great slaughter, and the Danish men possessed the battlefield.
A.D. 851. In this year the heathen men first remained over the winter, and in the same year came three hundred and fifty ships into the mouth of the Thames, and broke into Canterbury and London, and put to flight Beorhtwulf, King of Mercia.
A.D. 867. In this year the heathen army went from East Anglia over the mouth of the Humber to York ... and there was immense slaughter of the Northumbrians, some within York, and some without, and the survivors made peace with the heathen army.
These records show that the history of the fifth and sixth centuries was being repeated at the close of the eighth century, and during the ninth. They tell us of the inroads of a new race of free-booters, men of Northern Europe—coming from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—men among whom was a passionate love of the sea and an overwhelming desire for the plunder of other lands. Sea-pirates they are now often called, but we must remember that among them what we should call piracy was looked upon as the most honourable career in life.
Each year as Spring came round these Danish sea-rovers would gather together their men, take advantage of the north-east winds, and sail away to Britain, or the northern coast of France, or even to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and return laden with plunder on the coming of Autumn.
One thing the records which have been quoted make very clear. In 787 ‘first came three ships of the Northmen’; less than fifty years later King Egbert of Wessex was fighting against the crews of thirty-five vessels; and in 851 the fleet of ships entering the Thames numbered no fewer than three hundred and fifty. What does this astonishing increase in numbers mean? It can mean only one thing—that the Northmen found their marauding expeditions to England profitable. England, in other words, was worth plundering. In fact, England was so prosperous a country, and its churches and monasteries contained such treasures of gold and silver, that the Northmen found it worth their while to build more ‘long-ships’—as their ships of war were called—in order that they might plunder it more completely.
* * * * *
But as time passed away the Northmen came not merely to plunder and return home, but to seek new homes in the fertile lands of Britain. In later records we find mention of peace being made between the Angles and the Danes without the fighting of a battle:—
A.D. 872. In this year went the heathen army into Northumbria. They also took up winter quarters at Torksey, and the Mercians made peace with the invaders.
A.D. 876. In this year Healfdene divided the Northumbrian land, and the Danes gave themselves up to ploughing and tilling the land.
Two years after the last record Alfred, King of the West Saxons, made with Guthrum, the Danish leader, a treaty by which all Northern and Eastern England—all England, that is, north of Watling Street, the Roman road leading from London to Chester—was ceded to the Danes to be ruled according to their laws. Henceforth this district becomes known as the DANELAGH.
So history goes on repeating itself. For just as the Angles and Saxons had warred against the Britons, and then made settlements and turned to forest-clearing and ploughing, sowing and reaping; so a few centuries later came the Danes to make war upon them in turn, and finally to take possession of uncleared and hitherto unclaimed lands whereon to make for themselves new homes.
Very numerous settlements were made by the Danes in the part of England known as the Danelagh, and most of these may be recognised by the village names of to-day. What to an Angle were a _tūn_ and a _wīc_[13] were to a Dane a _bȳr_[13] and a _thorp_. Hence the name-endings _by_ and _thorp_ denote respectively the sites of a Danish farmhouse and a Danish village; and it is interesting to pick out such names on a large-scale map, and see how they occur in groups or succeed one another along the line of an old highway.
Footnote 13:
Pronounced _week_ and _beer_, respectively.
Thus in the East Riding, within a radius of five miles of the Anglian settlements of Bridlington and Hessle, we shall find the Danish names Hilderthorpe, Wilsthorpe, Fraisthorpe, Haisthorpe, Caythorpe, Carnaby, Bessingby, Sewerby; and Anlaby, Willerby, Skidby, Wauldby, Tranby, Ferriby. Other groups will be found round York, Malton, and Pocklington. The best example of the occurrence of a succession of Danish names along the line of an ancient highway is to be found on the other side of the Humber. Here, along the road from the Humber to the old Roman station at Caistor, passing through the Anglian settlements of Horkstow and Brigg, there are no fewer than fifteen villages whose names end in _by_, and one of them has in addition the suffix _Thorpe_.[14]
Footnote 14:
There are more Danish place names in Lincolnshire than in all the rest of England south of the Humber. North of the Humber the largest number is to be found in the East Riding.
[Illustration: DANISH SETTLEMENTS IN A PORTION OF NORTH LINCOLNSHIRE.]
Place names ending in _by_ and _thorp_ by no means exhaust the list of Danish settlements. A complete list of name-endings which are Norse in origin would include the following:—
beck a stream. by a farmstead. fell a hillside. force or foss a waterfall. garth an enclosure. gill a ravine. holm } an island, or a piece of firm land rising holme } out of the surrounding marsh. how a hill. lund a sacred grove. ness a headland. scar a cliff. tarn a small mountain lake. thorp or thorpe a village. thwaite a forest clearing. toft an enclosure. wick or wyke a bay or creek.
Examples of all these can be found on the map of Yorkshire, and most of them occur in the East Riding. But it must be remembered that the modern place name is not always a sure guide in this direction. Names have in many cases changed during the course of centuries. For example, the name ‘Nunburnholme,’ which looks Danish in origin, was originally _Brunham_; while, on the other hand, ‘Kilnsea’ and ‘Withernsea’ have replaced the older Danish names _Hornes_ and _Witfornes_.
The two name-endings which conclude the list given above are very interesting, because it was the Danish word _vīk_[15] that gave rise to the name by which the sea-rovers became generally known in our country. _Vikings_, or men of the creeks—so they were called; and so may we call them, if we remember that their letter _v_ stood for the sound of our _w_, and that their name is to be pronounced _Wik-ings_ and not, as it is so commonly mispronounced, _Vi-kings_.
Footnote 15:
Pronounced exactly like the Anglian word _wīc_.
* * * * *
A hardy and a daring race were these old Vikings. There were no ‘wasters’ and few ‘slackers’ among them. When a Viking’s son was born, the babe was shown to its father for his approval or disapproval. If the father liked the look of his babe, and thought that it showed signs of growing up into a manly and sturdy boy, it was taken back to its mother to be ‘raised.’ But woe betide the babe that looked puny and sickly, or that showed signs of deformity! The father’s orders were that it should be taken outside his dwelling and exposed to the cold so that it died.
‘What a cruel custom!’ you will think. Yes, so it was. But the Vikings lived in an age when men looked upon things very differently from the way in which we look upon them. In a cruel age the Northmen were so cruel, and the fear that they inspired in the hearts of the people whose lands they plundered was so great, that the monks inserted in their Litany the prayer:—
A FURORE NORMANNORUM, LIBERA NOS, DOMINE! (From the fury of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us!)
There is little wonder that, with such a rearing as the children of the Vikings received, a race of warriors grew up among whom was the unwritten law that ‘a Dane who wished to acquire the character of a brave man should always attack two enemies, stand firm and receive the attack of three, retire only one pace from four, and flee from no fewer than five.’
Social distinctions among the Danes were similar to those among the Angles. In place of the Anglian _eorl_, _ceorl_, and _theow_ were the Danish _jarl_,[16] _karl_, and _thrall_; with this difference—that the Danish _jarl_ was a military commander and not a man who could pride himself on being descended from the gods. It is from the word ‘jarl’ that our English word ‘earl’ has arisen.
Footnote 16:
Pronounced _yarl_
* * * * *
Like their cousins the Angles, the Northmen were heathens when they invaded our shores.
The Wōden, Tīw, and Frīg of the Angles were the Odin, Tȳr and Freya of the Danes. But their greatest god was Thor, the Thunderer, whose name will be recognised in the name for the fifth day of the week.
[Illustration:
DANISH CROSS HEAD AT NORTH FRODINGHAM. ]
Like the Angles, also, the heathen Northmen eventually became Christians, and evidences of their Christianity have come down to us. In the vicarage garden at North Frodingham is a broken cross head of Danish tenth-century workmanship, and in the churchyard at Nunburnholme is preserved a broken cross shaft sculptured with figures of men, women, children, and animals.
But the most interesting relic of Danish Christianity is a sun-dial now built high up in one of the interior walls of the church at Aldbrough. Round it, in Anglian letters, is the inscription:—
ULF LET ARÆRAN CYRICE FOR HANUM AND GUNWARA SAULA.
Put into modern English this would read:—
Ulf caused to be built a church for himself and for the soul of Gunvör.
[Illustration:
_ALDBROUGH_ _Danish Sun-Dial Built into the Wall of Aldbrough Church._ ]
Though written in Anglian letters, the names Ulf and Gunvör are both Danish names, and the word ‘Hānum’ is likewise a purely Danish word. Who this Ulf was we do not know, for the name was a common one. One jarl Ulf married the sister of King Cnut, and another was the owner of lands at Aldbrough and Brandesburton during the reign of King Edward the Confessor.
IX. IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 892.
A PICTURE OF LIFE IN THE EAST RIDING DRAWN FROM DETAILS IN THE OLD NORSE SAGAS.
The year of Our Lord is eight hundred and ninety-two, and the scene lies a couple of miles north of the village of Hessle, on the Yorkshire bank of the Humber.
Twenty-five years before this date a heathen army had crossed over the Humber on their march to York, and a good number of broken heads and hewn-off limbs had been the result of their visit to the province of Deira. Then, like sensible people, the invaders and the invaded had come to terms. Villages of the Angles were not too numerous in the district. At any rate there was plenty of unoccupied land lying around them, and this was just what the invaders wanted; for their brothers and sisters had grown so numerous in the lands across the sea that those who had left their homes had no great desire to go back to them.
Among the band of heathen Northmen had been a jarl named Anlaf, and between Anlaf and the ealdorman at Beverley it had been agreed that the former should choose land whereon to settle his men somewhere in the four miles of unoccupied country lying between Hessle and Cottingham. Also his men were to be allowed to choose wives from among the maidens of these two villages or the neighbouring ones of Weighton and Riplingham. In return the Northmen were to give their attention to clearing and tilling the land they had chosen, and to conduct themselves, as far as could reasonably be expected, in a manner harmless to the people of all the surrounding villages.
Such had been the beginnings of Anlafsbyr. The land for settlement was chosen—nice dry land on rising ground with a natural drainage to the river—rough shelters for the men were first made, and the ground was then marked out for the building of Anlaf’s hall. Three times was the ground measured for this, and each time after the first the measurements proved slightly larger than the previous ones. This boded good luck, and the work was therefore entered upon with spirit.
In the course of time the building of the hall was finished. Then came the rewards to Anlaf’s men for their labours. The surrounding land was marked out and divided up, each karl receiving a portion, large or small in accordance with his own worth; and a considerable portion was left over to belong to all the karls in common. The thralls of course got no land—they did not count as men but as cattle. Probably some of them were exchanged with the ceorls of Hessle for four-legged cattle.
In three years’ time Anlafsbyr was a thriving settlement. The omens had promised good luck and the good luck came. Meanwhile Ketil, the son of Anlaf, chose himself a wife from Riplingham. So did others for themselves; and some, not finding the looks of the maidens of Hessle and Beverley and Weighton and Riplingham to their liking, went farther afield and made raids on the villages of Hotham and Sancton, only to retire with several cracked heads and broken arms for their pains.
But this was an exception to the general rule. In most cases the Anglian maidens were quite willing to wed the handsome strangers, even if their language was at first difficult to understand, and their methods of wooing somewhat rough and unpolished. In fact they rather approved of the roughness than disapproved of it, and to be singled out for one’s good looks and carried off by one of those bold Northmen was something for a maiden to be proud of.
The result of the frequent marriages between the Northmen and the Angles quickly became apparent. Husband and wife spoke languages sufficiently alike for one to make out the other’s meaning in most cases. But the children were, quite naturally, brought up to speak the tongue of their mother and not that of their father; so that as time went on the language of the Northmen disappeared, or rather became merged in the language of the Angles. Thus although Anlaf and his karls spoke the Norse tongue, their grandchildren spoke the English. But for all that, they lived in the Danelagh, where Danish customs and Danish laws were observed.
When Anlaf died in 871, Ketil Anlafsson began to rule his father’s settlement. His two sons, Ulf and Hrafn, went, as custom decreed they ought to go, on Viking raids as soon as they reached the manly age of fifteen or sixteen. Four years of these raids sufficed to prove the prowess of Ulf Ketilsson, and his right eventually to succeed his father as jarl. Then he settled down to help his father, who had become a man past middle age; but Hrafn his brother continued at sea. In 890 Ketil Anlafsson died, and his son Ulf was proclaimed jarl. Hrafn was then away. But now in the Spring of 892 he has just returned, to be honoured by all men as the first among them to make the perilous voyage to an island lying far to the north-west, whose name was spoken of as ‘Iceland.’
* * * * *
Great therefore are the rejoicings at Anlafsbyr. Jarl Ulf has ridden at full speed to the river-shore on hearing that three ships have been sighted coming up the river with red, blue and green sails like those of his brother’s ships. Before he leaves home he has given instructions to his wife Helga that the hall is to be got ready for a great feast in case the ships are his brother’s. A messenger has quickly brought back the good tidings, and preparations are being pushed on rapidly, that the welcome Hrafn and his men receive shall be one fitting to the occasion.
Let us now glance round the hall built by Anlaf and see what it is like.
Picture to yourself an oblong hall built entirely of wood, and with a steep roof supported by upright and cross beams. It is built east and west and at each end is a door, one the men’s door, the other the women’s door. Along each side there is a low aisle, which is partitioned off into small sleeping-rooms for the jarl’s family and guests.
Down the middle of the hall are long stone hearths on which are smouldering three fires of wood and turf. Above each fire is a hole in the roof through which the smoke makes its escape after eddying round the rafters, which are covered with a thick layer of soot. The windows are high up, of just sufficient size for a man’s body to be able to squeeze through, and the holes are covered with the membrane obtained from the inside of a cow, which is almost as transparent as glass.
Along the hall will be two long tables, constructed of planks resting upon trestles. At the middle of the south side stands the high seat of the jarl, and opposite it is another which is always reserved for the most honoured guest. Thralls in white woollen clothes are now running hither and thither placing the long tables in position, and coaxing the smouldering fires into a big roaring blaze; for the nights are still very cold.
Adjoining the hall are numerous other buildings—the women’s sleeping rooms and the kitchens and storehouses. The last two are a scene of bustle. Bondwomen are hurrying about in all directions. If you look at this one you will perhaps notice that she has lost an ear. It has been cut off for an act of pilfering, but she tries to hide her loss by arranging her hair over the place where the ear should be. In the distance is another bondwoman who cannot possibly hide the marks of her punishment. Three times has she been caught pilfering, with the result that she now has to manage as best she can without an ear at all and without a nose.
* * * * *
But outside there is a great noise of shouting and the trampling of horses and of men. Hrafn Ketilsson has arrived with his men, and welcome is being given him by Jarl Ulf and his wife, Helga Eiriksson. It is not yet time for the meal now being prepared, and Hrafn declares that he is not hungry one little bit; so sports are hastily arranged on the green in front of the hall. There shall be a great horse-fight; for two of Ulf’s karls have horses which have been thoroughly trained to fight, and neither of which has yet been beaten.
The horse-fight takes place accordingly. Each karl makes his horse rise on its hind legs and attack the other, biting it wherever it can. As the contest goes on, the horses get enraged and their masters incite them by blows on their hind quarters. Finally one of the horses gives in and runs away, leaving the other the victor.
Then there is a running contest. Hrafn the Viking has among his troop a man from Ireland, named Gilli, whom he wagers to beat any horse in speed. A dozen horses are immediately offered, and the best of them, a horse belonging to a karl named Hrolf, is chosen. Gilli will race Hrolf’s horse; and if the horse wins, its owner shall have a gold ring given him by Hrafn. For half a mile they race along, Gilli being all the while at the horse’s shoulder, and the result being therefore a dead heat.
‘But,’ says Hrolf, ‘you had hold of the strap of my saddle-girth, and my horse pulled you along.’ ‘Then,’ replies Gilli, ‘we will have it over again.’
This time Gilli starts a yard in front of the horse, and at the end of the half-mile he is still the same distance in front. ‘Did I this time take hold of your saddle-girth?’ asks Gilli. ‘No,’ is Hrolf’s answer, ‘but my horse had no chance. You were just in front of him all the way, and I was afraid of riding you down.’
‘Very well,’ says Gilli, ‘we will have the race over again.’
So for the third time they race, and this time the horse is given twenty yards start. But Gilli catches Hrolf up, passes him, stands still till the horse is again in front, then starts again, and finishes ten yards in front. There is tremendous cheering, and Jarl Ulf gives Gilli a gold ring of weight equal to that offered by his brother to the horse’s owner.
Next a game of ball. Sides are chosen, and a hard wooden ball and two wooden bats are brought forth. The bats are given to one man on each side. The ball is thrown up into the air, and one of the batsmen hits it with all his force in the direction of the other. The second batsman tries to hit it back and not let it pass him, but before he can hit it he is pulled down by the men of the other side. So the game goes on. It is by no means a gentle game, for the occasion is a special one and all the players are on their mettle. When ‘time’ is called and bruises and wounds are reckoned up, it is found that the players have sustained three broken arms, a broken thigh-bone, and the loss of one eye. Lesser injuries go uncounted.
* * * * *
By this time the feast is ready, and so are the men. If good appetites are any indication of good health, the uninjured men are all in a state of very vigorous health. Jarl Ulf Ketilsson leads the way to his high seat, and Hrafn the Viking is shown to the high seat opposite. Swords, shields, and axes are hung on nails driven into the walls above the side benches. By the side of Ulf sits his wife Helga. The scene is one of varied colour, the blue, red, green, scarlet, and purple kirtles of the freemen contrasting strongly with the white garments of the thralls who serve the food.
Huge joints of beef and pork are brought in from the kitchens, and there are numerous calls for the former; for there has been little or no fresh meat since the beginning of last November, and men’s stomachs have a way of getting tired of salted pig, when they have fed on it for five months without a break. Plates are of wood, fingers serve for forks, and each man cuts off with his knife-dagger the amount of meat and of bread that he feels himself capable of eating. Ale is served to the jarl and his family in bullock’s horns adorned with gold and silver bands, to the others in wooden drinking-cups. Half-way through the feast Helga leaves her seat, fills a horn with wine, and offers it to Hrafn. As the Viking drains it at a draught there is a great cheer, which takes a long time to die down.
So the meal goes on. There is little variety in the food, but there is plenty of it, and that is the important thing where hungry men are concerned. As they eat, all are talking. This karl is describing to another how he has just been ‘had’ by a fellow at Weighton, who sold him a thrall guaranteed sound in wind and limb. But the thrall cannot run twice round Jarl Ulf’s hall without getting the stitch. His new master is vehemently explaining that he intends to get his money back.
Another is telling how he has seen a karl’s wife and her bondwoman take the ordeal at Hundmansbyr. The bondwoman had accused her mistress of wrong-doing, and the mistress had challenged her bondwoman to go to the ordeal.
So the priests had got ready a bucket of boiling water, at the bottom of which were placed two sacred stones. In sight of all, the mistress had plunged in her hand and brought up one of the stones. And her arm showed no signs of a hurt. Then the bondwoman had attempted the same. But her arm had been frightfully scalded. Thus the innocent had been distinguished from the guilty, and the bondwoman had been taken to the nearest ditch and drowned.
Meanwhile Hrafn the Viking’s karls have been pouring into eager ears tales of their adventures among the snow and ice of the seas far away to the north. One has a walrus tooth to show, and others have the claws of a huge white beast that can walk on its hind legs and can squeeze a man’s body in its arms till every bone is broken. They have the skin of one of these fearsome creatures on board down at the river-shore, intended by their Viking chief as a present to his brother’s wife. A fine bed it will make, but it cost the lives of three men to obtain. Would their listeners hear wonders? There are plenty to tell. In the seas from which they have returned they sailed for four days without a night, while the sun went round and round in a great fiery ring.
While this talk is going on, a shame-faced fellow is trying to slink in unobserved at the men’s door. But he is greeted with cries of ‘Nithing!’[17] and receives a volley of beef bones that first bowls him over and then makes him depart more hurriedly than he had come in. Some of Hrafn’s men follow him, for he has been guilty of stealing from a comrade on one of the ships. His head will be shaven to-morrow, then dipped in tar and covered with eider down, so that he may remember for the future that honourable karls do not steal the belongings of their comrades.
Footnote 17:
This is the old Norse word for our ‘Villain!’
Tables are eventually cleared much more quickly than they were filled. Places are now changed. The jarl and his brother play chess, others play at dice. A wrestling-match is soon fixed up, in which the combatants are strapped together at the waist and each will try to throw the other.
Following this there is a tug-of-war across the fire. An ox-hide is brought in and an end seized by each of two men standing on opposite sides of the hearth stones. Each tries to pull the other into the fire. But they are fairly equally matched, and for some time neither succeeds. Then tempers rise. The shouts of the supporters of each urge them on, and one succeeds in pulling the other on to the fire. As he has drunk deeply of strong ale, he is not content with his victory, but throws the ox-hide over his fallen opponent and then jumps upon him to mark his defeat. When the defeated karl’s friends succeed in pulling him out of the fire, he is, naturally, somewhat scorched.
Now comes in a juggler. He can perform many tricks, and among them is that of keeping three daggers in motion, so that one is always in his hand and the two others in the air. Further, he offers to show his skill on the following day by stepping from oar to oar on the outside of a ship while it is being rowed. He will step thus from stem to stern and back again, and moreover will keep his three daggers moving all the time. The challenge is accepted and he shall have his choice of presents from Hrafn if he can succeed in doing what he says he will.
Challenges are in the air, it seems. Here is Bersi, one of Hrafn’s karls, challenging Egil, a karl of Ulf, because he finds that while he has been away from home Egil has married the maiden to whom he was betrothed. And Bersi is not at all pleased with the course of events, so he has challenged the other karl for his wife. To-morrow they will go to the _holmgang_,[18] and fight it out; and if Egil is not the victor, he will lose his wife and Bersi will gain one.
Footnote 18:
The _holmgang_ was a duel fought according to fixed rules on a piece of ground specially marked out for the purpose. In earlier times it was fought on a _holm_, or island, whence the name.
The excitement caused by Bersi’s challenge is dying down when further excitement arises from the entrance of a karl with news of a strange sight to be seen in the sky. It had been a dark, cloudy night, but suddenly the clouds broke up and there between two clouds appeared a star with a long light streaming from it like a tail of fire. It is there for all to see if they don’t believe him.
So a rush is made for the men’s door and the hall is left deserted. Outside there are groups of wondering men looking upwards at a bright ‘hairy star,’ and asking one another with bated breath what evil fortune to their land this marvellous sight portends.
X. TWO FAMOUS BATTLES OF LONG AGO.
In 901 died Alfred, King of the West Saxons, and Edward, his son, succeeded him, to be succeeded in turn by his son Aethelstan in the year 925. King Alfred had, it will be remembered, agreed with Guthrum the Dane to divide England into two parts, one of which each of them should rule.
But Alfred’s son Edward enlarged his power so greatly that he was in 924 ‘chosen to father and lord by the Scots King and all the Scots people, by all the men of Northumbria—both English and Danes and Northmen—and by the King of the Strathclyde Welsh.’ To Aethelstan was accorded still greater honour, for it fell to his lot to be the first king crowned as ‘King of England.’
Now in the reign of Aethelstan there took place the greatest battle that had yet been fought between the English and the Northmen. The compact of Edward’s reign was short-lived; for in 937 the Danes of Northumbria entered into a league with Constantine, King of the Scots, and Owen, King of the Strathclyde Britons, against the King of England. Their league was joined also by two Norse Kings from Ireland, named Anlaf, one of whom had married the daughter of Constantine. To meet these disturbers of the peace Aethelstan marched north, and at a place known as BRUNANBURH the famous battle between them was fought.
So great was the victory here won by King Aethelstan that the chronicler who records it bursts into song when he tells how
Aethelstan the King, the lord of Earls, The bestower of gifts, and his brother also, Edmund the Prince, life-long honour Won in combat, with the edges of swords, At Brunanburh.
All day, from the rising of ‘God’s candle’ until its setting, went on the fight; so that the battlefield streamed with blood, and many a Northman lay on the ground struck down with spears. Weary and sated with the fight fled the Scots, pursued by the West Saxons with swords new-sharpened on the grindstone. To none of those who, doomed to death, accompanied Anlaf over the sea did the Mercians refuse the hard hand-play. On the battlefield there lay five young kings put to sleep by the sword, with seven of Anlaf’s jarls and an uncounted host of shipmen and of Scots. Then fled the Northmen to the shore of the yellow flood; and so also fled Constantine, who had left behind his son, borne down with many wounds.
Thus departed in their nailed ships those of the Northmen whom the spears had left alive, and the King and his brother sought again the West Saxon land, exulting in victory. Behind them they left the dusky-coated kite, the swart, horny-beaked raven, the white-tailed eagle, and the grey wolf—all eager to feast upon the corpses of the slain.
Such is the picture of the battlefield painted in words by the Saxon chronicler. And when we read it we wonder to ourselves: ‘Where was Brunanburh, at which this great battle was fought?’ But the question is one to which no certain answer can be given. The name ‘Brunanburh’ is lost, and the nearest approach to it among the village names of to-day is Bromborough, on the Cheshire shore of the Mersey.
This may possibly be the site of the battle; but it is curious that two writers of old chronicles, both living within two hundred years of the actual date of the battle, agree in saying that the Norse fleet invaded England by the Humber. So also said the Bridlington monk, Peter of Langtoft, who certainly ought to know; and a Lincolnshire hermit, who translated Peter’s Norman-French into English, is very definite about it:—
At Brunesburgh on Humber thei gan tham assaile, Fro morn unto even lasted that bataile.
If Brunanburh did lie ‘on Humber,’ on which side of the river was it? Some claim that the battle took place at Kirkburn near Driffield, and others put it at Little Weighton, nearer the river.
But one thing is certain. King Aethelstan and his men must have marched north by either the Watling Street or the Ermin Street. If the Norse fleet did come into the Humber, he must have come north by the Ermin Street, and his army could hardly have crossed the river under the circumstances. However much, therefore, we should like to assert that the greatest battle of olden times was fought in the East Riding of Yorkshire, it would be wiser not to do so, but to let our somewhat despised sister-county of Lincolnshire have the benefit of the doubt.
A glance at the map given at the end of this book will show about four miles from the Humber, on the road from Barton to Caistor, a village named Burnham. At this village there are still to be seen the remains of an ancient entrenchment enclosing a space of about 64 acres. One of the half-dozen ancient spellings of the name of the manor of Burnham is _Brunan_, and the suffix _burh_ means ‘a fortified place.’
Further, men’s bones, Saxon coins, and a Saxon sword have been ploughed up on the adjoining fields; while just south of Burnham there was in the eighteenth century a road known as ‘Bloody Gate’ and just north of it there is still a ‘Dead Man Dale.’ So we shall have to concede that the southern bank of the ‘yellow flood’ has some considerable claims to the possession of the site of the famous battle of Brunanburh.
* * * * *
Let us pass on to the middle of the next century. For twenty-eight years England had been ruled by Danish Kings, when, in 1042, the Saxons came into their own again and the third Saxon Edward began to rule in London.
But Danish jarls still ruled at JORVIK[19] and Jarl Siward, the eighth of these, was the greatest of them all. In 1054 he took a large army and a fleet into Scotland, where he fought against the Scots in Aberdeenshire, and slew their king Macbeth. Siward’s son Osbern was also slain in the battle, and when news of his son’s death was brought to the old jarl, he rejoiced that his son had died a worthy death. In Shakespeare’s play _Macbeth_ it is put thus. Ross, a Scots nobleman, has just broken to Siward the news that his son ‘has paid a soldier’s debt’:—
_Siward._ Had he his hurts before?
_Ross._ Ay, on the front.
_Siward._ Why then, God’s soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death.
Footnote 19:
Pronounced _Yór-wik_.
One year later Siward’s own death took place, and these were his words when he felt that he was fated to die not on the battlefield but in his bed:—
‘I feel shame not to have fallen in one of the many battles that I have fought, and to have been preserved to die like a cow. Close me in my mail of proof, gird my sword on me, fit the helmet on my head, and put a shield in my left hand and a gilded axe in my right, that I may die like a soldier.’
So died the lord of the manors of Barmston and Holmpton, and the greatest of the Anglo-Danes of Northumbria. After his death his earldom was given by King Edward to Tostig, the son of Earl Godwin the West Saxon; and if one-half of the stories told about him by the old chroniclers are true, the Northumbrians must have felt the change acutely.
One of Tostig’s little jokes was played at his half-brother Harold’s hall at Hereford. The two had quarrelled at Windsor in the presence of King Edward, and Tostig, expelled from the Court in disgrace, had ridden to Hereford, where he found his brother’s servants busily making ready for a visit from the King. To vent his anger on his brother he killed the servants—so the story goes—chopped up their bodies, threw the legs, arms and trunks into hogsheads of wine and barrels of cider, and gaily sent word to the King that ‘he had provided against his coming plenty of salt meat.’
Small wonder that the proud Anglo-Danes of the north refused to submit for long to such a one of the despised West Saxons. In 1064 they rebelled against their unpopular jarl, outlawed him, slew his servants, both English and Danes, seized all his weapons and his gold and silver in Jorvik, and sent for Morcar, the son of Jarl Aelfgar, to be their jarl. Tostig fled to Baldwin, Count of Flanders, vowing vengeance on his half-brother Harold, who had advised the King to fall in with the wishes of the Northumbrians.
Two years passed away. Edward had died and Harold, Tostig’s half-brother, had been chosen by the Witena-gemōt to be King of England. Now was the time for Tostig to have his revenge. So he enlisted the aid of another Harold—Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, a warrior huge of stature and dauntless in courage, who had, when an exile from Norway, won fame in Sicily, Greece and Africa, and who had formed at Constantinople a bodyguard to the Emperor, consisting of five hundred Northmen. Together they would conquer England, and Harold of Norway should be its king, as Cnut, King of Denmark, had been before him.
With a fleet of 240 warships Harold of Norway set out for the conquest of England, his royal banner, the ‘Land-Waster’ proudly flying aloft. But omens of misfortune to come were not wanting; for he and his men had bad dreams at night—dreams of the English host marching down to the sea-shore led by a wolf on whose back was seated a ‘witch-wife.’ Moreover, the witch-wife fed the wolf with the corpses of Northmen; and as fast as one was eaten, another was ready.
To a superstitious people, such as the Northmen were, these omens must have seemed to bode terrible ill-luck. But Harold had never yet turned back from an expedition, and he did not mean to start turning back now. So over the sea to the Shetlands and the Orkneys his fleet sailed, then down the eastern coast of the mainland till they reached the mouth of the Tyne. Here they were joined by Tostig, and soon afterwards the ‘Land-Waster’ was unfurled in the North Riding of Yorkshire.
So far Harold of Norway had met with no resistance. But the fisherfolk of Scarborough did withstand the attack made upon their little town; whereupon, so the old Norse account of Harold’s invasion tells us—
He went up on a high rock near the town, and set fire to a large pile which he made. They took large poles and lifted it up and threw it down into the town; soon one house after the other began to burn, and the whole town was destroyed. The Northmen slew many people, and took all the property they could get.
Then southward along the coast the fleet sailed, until they reached a place called by the Northmen _Hellornes_, which was probably our Hornsea. Here a pitched battle was fought; but the men of the East Riding were no match for the invaders, and Harold and his Northmen got the victory.
Next the mouth of the Humber was reached. Sailing up this and up the Ouse they cast anchor at Riccall. Here one-third of the Norwegian host was left to guard the ships while the remainder set out on a march to Jorvik.
[Illustration:
BATTLE OF STAMFORD BRIDGE SEPᵀ. 25ᵀᴴ 1066. ]
But at Fulford, two miles from the city, they were met by the forces of Morcar and his brother, Edwin of Mercia. The ensuing battle was fought on a strip of land lying between the river Ouse and a ditch which was ‘deep, broad, and full of water.’ As at _Hellornes_, victory lay with the North men; and so great was the slaughter of the Northumbrian and the Mercians that the Northmen walked across the ditch ‘with dry feet on human bodies.’ Four days later—September 24th—Jorvik surrendered, and the Northmen moved their forces along the Roman road leading to the Derwent, and took up their quarters at STANFORDBRYCG.
Meanwhile news of the invasion had reached Harold of England. Gathering together what forces he could muster, Harold hurried north. Up the Ermin Street, and round by Doncaster, Castleford and Tadcaster, he marched. On the day on which York surrendered he was at Tadcaster; the next day he had passed through York and had surprised the Northmen at Stamford Bridge.
* * * * *
The battle that took place between the two Harolds was preceded by negotiations. To his half-brother, Tostig, Harold of England sent envoys offering peace:—
‘Harold thy brother sends thee greeting, and the message that thou shalt have peace and get Northumberland; and rather than that thou shouldst not join him he will give thee one-third of all his realm.’
‘Then something else is offered than the enmity and disgrace of last winter,’ answered Tostig. ‘If this had been offered then, many who are now dead would be alive, and the realm of the King of England would stand more firm. Now if I accept these terms, what will my brother Harold offer to the King of Norway for his trouble?’
‘He has said what he will grant King Harold of Norway. It is a space of seven feet, and it is so long because he is taller than most other men.’
Tostig’s reply to his half-brother’s terms was a noble one:
‘Go and tell my brother, King Harold, to prepare for battle. It shall not be said among Northmen that Jarl Tostig left Harold, King of Norway, and went into the host of his foes when he made warfare in England. Rather will we all resolve to die with honour, or win England with a victory.’
After the failure of these negotiations, both sides made ready for battle. And then happened another omen boding ill-luck for the Northmen; for their King, who was riding a black horse with a white mark on its forehead, was thrown to the ground by the stumbling of his horse.
In Roman times the passage across the Derwent at the spot where the battle took place had been made by a stone-paved ford; but this had, in later times, been replaced by a wooden bridge, whence the name it then bore—‘Stone-ford-bridge.’
At the outbreak of hostilities some of the Northmen were on the right bank of the river, and were gradually forced back over the bridge by Harold of England’s men. The last of them to cross was a second Horatius, for he kept the bridge against the whole English army. Wielding his huge battle-axe, he had slain no fewer than forty of his enemies before he was himself slain by a soldier in Harold’s army, who floated down the river in a tub and stabbed him with his spear through one of the spaces between the wooden planks of the bridge.
The old Norse account of the battle reads very much like the accounts of the battle of Hastings, which was so shortly to follow. Harold of Norway ordered his men to take up their positions with shield against shield on all sides. The outer rank were to press the spikes of their spears into the ground and to point the heads against the breasts of the attacking horsemen; the next rank were to point their spear heads against the breasts of the horses. If all of them stood firm and took care not to break away, Harold of England’s onset might be completely checked.
But what the English would be unable to do in the battle to come, the Northmen were unable to do at Stamford Bridge. They broke their lines in pursuit of the English, and the battle was lost. Harold Hardrada rushed hither and thither dealing such blows with his battle-axe that ‘neither helmet nor coat of mail could withstand him; he went through the ranks of his foes as if he were walking through air, for all who came near him fell back.’ But to no purpose, and an arrow which struck him in the throat brought him his death-wound. Soon afterwards fell Jarl Tostig, and though the Northmen who had been left in charge of the fleet at Riccall hurried to the battle, they were not able to prevent the ‘Land-Waster’ from falling into the hands of Harold of England.
When darkness had set in, the victorious army was on its way back to York. Thither came Olaf, the son of Harold Hardrada, and the Jarls of Orkney to swear peace and give hostages. And thither also came at full speed a messenger who brought news that William of Normandy had landed with his army on the southern coast of Harold’s kingdom.
XI. HOW THE NORMANS CAME TO YORKSHIRE.
The tale of the Northmen’s invasions of England could be matched by the tale of their invasions of the northern coasts of France. Early in the tenth century a Viking known among his people as Rolf the Ganger[20] made a descent upon Rouen and entered into a treaty with Charles the Simple, King of Paris, by which a large tract of land around Rouen was ceded to him and his followers, in return for their aid against Charles’ enemies.
Footnote 20:
To ‘gang’ meant to walk, and Rolf the Ganger was given this nickname because, being extra tall, he found it more comfortable to walk when on land than to ride one of the small ponies of his native country.
Such was the beginning of the province of Northern France known in later history as Normandy. After forty years of sea-roving Rolf settled down to rule his new and fertile dukedom; and as with the Northmen in England, so with him and his men in France. The Northmen married wives of their new country, and their children grew up to speak the mother’s tongue rather than the father’s. Thus the descendants of heathen Northmen became Christian Frenchmen.
To Rolf the Ganger’s dukedom there succeeded in turn William Longsword, Richard the Fearless, Richard the Good, Robert the Devil, and William, whom his enemies called William the Bastard—‘the Tanner’s Grandson’—but who was destined to become famous as William the Conqueror of England.
How Harold of England, after hearing of William’s landing on the coast of Sussex, marched southward to his death at Hastings, and how William of Normandy was crowned King in his stead at Westminster on Christmas Day in the same year, does not concern us here. But what we are concerned with is the course of events that led to William’s coming north to the city of York.
* * * * *
The events of the last three months of the fateful year 1066 by no means proved that England was a conquered country. True, the Witena-gemōt had accepted William as their king; but that was only because there was no one else fit to lead the Saxon forces, and because Anglo-Danes and Saxons mistrusted each other. Edwin of Mercia and his brother Morcar submitted to William and were allowed to retain their earldoms. Oswulf, who now ruled Northumbria, did not submit, so William appointed a certain Copsige[21] to supplant him. Copsige came north to dispossess Oswulf, and was immediately slain.
Footnote 21:
Pronounced _Kóp-si-ga_.
In 1067, during William’s absence in Normandy, rebellions broke out in the south and west of England; and when the King returned, he began the conquest of the western portions of the country. Exeter submitted after a siege lasting eighteen days, but no sooner had the western rebellion been subdued than Mercia and Northumbria were in revolt.
Next year the King marched north and reached York, the inhabitants of which rather unexpectedly surrendered their city; and on William’s departure he left William de Malet, one of his Norman knights, in charge of it. But after a few months the men of York again rose in revolt and Malet was hard pressed, although he succeeded in holding out till relieved by the King.
All over England these rebellions were going on. But none was more than
## partly successful; and for the reason that ‘Englishmen could not agree
to act together. One district rose at one time and one at another. Some were for Sweyn, some for Edgar, some for the sons of Harold; Edwin and Morcar were for themselves. So there was no common action against William, and the land was lost bit by bit.’
In the autumn of 1069 it seemed as if there really was to be made in the North of England a united effort to throw off the yoke of the Frenchmen. Sweyn Ulfsson, King of Denmark, sent a large fleet of ships into the Humber under the command of Jarl Asbiorn, his brother. Outside the walls of York the Danish shipmen were joined by Edgar the Aetheling, by Gospatric, the dispossessed successor of Oswulf, and by Jarl Waltheof, Siward’s son.
Then began a second siege of York. The French garrison, under William de Malet and Gilbert of Gaunt, retreated to the two wooden castles which William had caused to be erected, and set fire to the portions of the city surrounding these in order to give themselves greater security. For two days the flames raged, destroying many houses and the Minster of St. Peter. Meanwhile the allies entered the city. Then the Normans attempted a sally from their castles, but unsuccessfully. Their forces were cut to pieces, and William de Malet and Gilbert of Gaunt were taken prisoners.
So far all had gone well with the armies of Jarl Asbiorn and Jarl Waltheof, and had they only held the city when taken and awaited the arrival of King William, they would have had every chance of repeating their success. But a fatal dissension once more broke out, and Asbiorn’s men went back to their ships and sailed first to North Lincolnshire and then to Holderness, while Waltheof withdrew his men to the marshes between the Trent and the Ouse.
For the third time King William marched north to York; and this time he determined on vengeance. ‘Par splendeur Dex,’ he swore that he would utterly root out the Northumbrian people; and in fulfilment of his oath he carried out that ‘Wasting of the North’ which changed the fertile Plain of York into a desolate waste. For sixty miles north of York every town and village was sacked and burnt, every inhabitant slain or driven out, all farming-stock and farming-implements destroyed, and nothing spared save only what belonged to St. John of Beverley. Then, having wreaked his revenge, William caused himself to be re-crowned at York, and there he kept his Christmas feast.
* * * * *
The system followed out by William the Conqueror after his subjugation of a district was everywhere the same. Lands were taken from their English owners and given to the King’s Norman followers, while strong castles were built to afford protection to the Norman lords.
Thus Drogo de Bevrere, a Flemish knight who had married the King’s niece, was rewarded for his services with the _Isle of Holderness_, and built himself a castle at Skipsea, where the earthworks of a long-dead chieftain were still standing. No remains of Drogo’s castle now exist, nor have we in the East Riding the remains of any Norman castle such as those existing at Knaresborough, Helmsley, Pontefract, Scarborough, York, and elsewhere in the other Ridings of Yorkshire.
With this parcelling out of the land among William’s Norman followers there became fixed two principles on which the whole ‘Feudal System’ was based:—
(1) All land belonged to the King by virtue of his conquest of the country;
(2) All land was held in return for services rendered.
Under the Feudal System the King would make a large grant of land to one of his followers, who thus became a _tenant-in-chief_ of the King. This tenant-in-chief would sub-divide his land among his particular followers, each of whom might sub-divide his portion. Thus Drogo de Bevrere was a tenant-in-chief, and one of his tenants was a certain Lanbert, who held lands at Sutton ‘two miles long and a half a mile broad.’ Drogo, Earl of Holderness, was a vassal of the King; Lanbert, a vassal of Drogo.
For these lands no regular rent was paid. Instead, there was the obligation of military service, each holder of land being bound to serve the King in war for forty days every year as his services were required. This service had to be performed at the vassal’s own cost, and with proper equipment. By this means the King could always be assured of an army equipped at short notice, and at no cost to himself.
In addition to this military service there were money payments to be made at certain irregular intervals. An _aid_ was due from a vassal to his overlord on each of three occasions:—
(1) The knighting of the lord’s eldest son; (2) The marrying of his eldest daughter; (3) The ransoming of his own person.
Of these occasions the first and second would, as a rule, occur only once in a vassal’s life-time, while the third might not occur at all. For all tenants-in-chief it did occur when King Richard I. had to be ransomed from his enemy, the Emperor Henry VI., into whose hands he had happened to fall. The monks of the Abbey of Meaux, being tenants-in-chief, then found themselves called upon to pay, as their share of the total ransom of 150,000 marks, the sum of 300 marks; to raise which they were compelled to sell their stock of wool and their church plate.
On the death of a vassal and the succession of his heir, another money payment became due to the vassal’s overlord. This was known as a _relief_. Again, if on a vassal’s death his heir or heiress had not yet come of age, his estate passed for the time being into the hands of the overlord, who managed it and took the profits. This right was known as _wardship_, and it might be rather dangerous for the ward.
Thus, in the early years of the thirteenth century, Thomas, the parson of Routh, held certain lands under William de Stuteville, the lord of the manor. Thomas died, and the lord of the manor claimed wardship over his young daughter Agnes. But before Agnes had come of age, William de Stuteville died also, and the wardship passed into the hands of his widow Cecilia. Unfortunately for Agnes her new guardian was not overburdened with principles of honour; for, having two daughters of her own—who were, we may suppose, not sufficiently good-looking to find husbands readily—she offered with them as dowry the lands of Agnes. Thus two lucky bridegrooms, Stephen of Pokthorpe and Henry of Hutton, were enriched by Dame Cecilia, each with one-half of the lands of Agnes, the parson’s daughter. And poor Agnes never succeeded in getting her lands back, though she tried her best.
* * * * *
The various money payments due to a vassal’s overlord depended as to their amount on the value of the estate held. Therefore, in order that the King should know exactly what sums were due to him from his tenants-in-chief, he caused a great survey of England to be made. The vastness of the undertaking may be gauged by the fact that each estate in all the counties of England except Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, and Monmouth—which last was then reckoned as a Welsh county—was to be reported on by the King’s officers, who were instructed to make enquiries as to its value and to record the result of their enquiries.
These officers were to set down the area of each estate, great or small, the area of that part of it which was ploughed land, the area of that part which was grass land, the name of its holder, the name of its holder in the last year of the reign of King Edward the Confessor, the amount of stock and of farming-implements on it, the number and condition of the people living on it, its annual value in the time of King Edward, and its annual value at the time of the investigation—the last two items being the most important of all.
In this manner was constructed what is known as THE DOMESDAY BOOK—the book by which a judgment could be made as to the amount of the money payments due to the King from each of his tenants-in-chief. The work was planned at the Witena-gemōt held at Christmas 1085, and was carried out during the following year.
* * * * *
The Domesday Book is one of the most valuable historical records possessed by the nation, and much information as to the England of 1086 has been gleaned from its parchment leaves. The entries in it are of course in Latin, and the following translation of the portion dealing with the manor of Patrington will serve as an example of the facts recorded in it.
LANDS IN HOLDERNESS.
LAND OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK.
In _Patrictone_ with the four berewicks _Wistede_, _Halsam_, _Torp_, _Toruelestorp_, there are thirty-five carucates and a half, and two oxgangs and two parts of an oxgang to be taxed. There is land to thirty-five ploughs.
This manor was, and is, belonging to the Archbishop of York.
There are now in the demesne two ploughs and eight villeins and sixty-three bordars, having thirteen ploughs. There are six sokemen with two villeins and twenty bordars, having five ploughs and a half. There are thirty-two acres of meadow there. Two knights have six carucates of the land of this manor; and two clerks two carucates and three oxgangs, and the third part of an oxgang. They have there four sokemen and five villeins, and three bordars with five ploughs.
In the time of King Edward the value was thirty pounds, at present ten pounds and five shillings.
Arable land three miles long and one mile and a half broad.
All this reads very strangely to us living in the twentieth century. Put into present-day language it would read something like the following:—
The manor of Patrington, with the neighbouring hamlets of Winestead, Halsham, [Welwick] Thorp, and Tharlesthorp,[22] measures 4300 acres,[23] and its thorough cultivation would provide work for thirty-five teams of oxen, reckoning eight oxen to each team.
Footnote 22:
Tharlesthorp is one of the ‘lost towns of the Humber.’ Its probable site is marked on the map on the opposite page.
Footnote 23:
A ‘carucate’ was the amount of land that a team of eight oxen could plough each year. It varied in size according to the nature of the soil, but may be roughly taken as being equal to 120 acres. An oxgang was one-eighth of this.
It belonged to the Archbishop of York in the reign of King Edward the Confessor, and is still held by him.
Attached to the lands of the manor-house there are eight serfs who have among them sixteen oxen, and sixty-three cottagers, who own 104 oxen. There are also six small farmers who have under them two serfs and twenty cottagers, and work forty-four oxen. Parts of the manor lands are held by two knights and two parsons. The former are tenants of 720 acres, the latter of 290 acres. On their lands there are four small farmers, three cottagers and five serfs, possessing among them forty oxen.
[Illustration:
HOLDERNESS IN THE DOMESDAY BOOK ]
The land on which wheat, barley and oats are grown measures three miles by one and a half miles, and there are thirty-two acres of meadow land.
In King Edward’s time the annual value of the manor was £600, but is now only £205.[24]
Footnote 24:
The value of money was in 1086 approximately twenty times its value at the present day. The Domesday ‘pound’ meant, not a coin, but a pound weight of silver.
The value of the manor of Patrington was, in 1086, only just over one-third of its value twenty-five years earlier. This is one example of the results of the ‘Wasting of the North.’ Others are to be found in the records given of the manors of Burstwick and Kilnsea, each of which had been worth fifty-six pounds, but was then worth only ten pounds. The manors of Withernsea and Hornsea had similarly decreased in value from fifty-six pounds to six pounds. All these belonged in 1086 to Drogo de Bevrere, Lord of Holderness. The manor of Beeford had experienced a still greater decrease in value; for it had sunk from twenty pounds to ten shillings. Others again, such as estates at Barmston, Drypool, Routh, and Sigglesthorne are recorded by the ominous word ‘waste.’ Such entries tell a very sure tale of the effects of King William’s vengeance.
On the map on page 93 are shown most of the manors and a few of the hamlets recorded in that part of the Domesday Book which deals with the Holderness division of Yorkshire. In many cases the spelling is very quaint; but most of the names are recognisable if we remember that U and V are different forms of the same letter, and that our letter W was then what, according to its name, it ought still to be. We must remember also that the men who took down the records were Frenchmen, who found it difficult in many cases to pronounce the names they heard the English witnesses use, and who had to spell these names as best they could according to their sound.
* * * * *
For more than nine hundred years the Domesday Survey remained the only survey made of English lands as a whole, and not till 1910 was an attempt made to compile the second Domesday Book. In that year commissioners started on the same task as was performed by the King’s officers in the year 1086; and the task has been undertaken for the same purpose—to enable the King’s taxes to be gathered in correctly.
XII. HOW OUR ANCIENT PARISH CHURCHES WERE BUILT.
In these days of bicycles most of us have experienced the pleasure of seeing, over the tree-tops in the distance, the spire or the square-capped tower of one of our village churches. For us on that occasion, perhaps, it marked the goal of a long journey, and we therefore hailed it gladly. Then probably we thought no more about it.
Yet that village church was worth a few minutes of our thoughts. To one who knows how to see it was worth walking round, and worth also looking into. For it had a tale to tell—a tale that stretches back into the centuries long past, a tale of the joys and sorrows of the people whose places we now fill, a tale which ought to make us realise that we of the twentieth century are not the only clever people who have lived in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
A Norman Font in Kirkburn Church.
]
Let us learn how to read the tale aright. In the first place we must know the names of the different parts of a church. If it is small, it will be simply a rectangular building, running east and west, and divided by an open arch or by a woodwork screen into two parts, a _nave_ and a _chancel_. The former is, on service days, occupied by the congregation of worshippers, the latter by the clergy and the choir. At the east end of the chancel is the _altar_ or _communion-table_, at the east end of the nave are the _lectern_ and _pulpit_, at the west end of the nave is the _font_.
If the church boasts a _tower_, this will be at the west end, where also will probably be the main entrance door. This may, however, be on the south of the nave near the west end. On the south of the chancel may be another smaller door, once the _priests’ door_; and by it in the wall may be the _sedilia_, or priests’ seats, three in number. Close to these may be the _piscina_, or drain, at which the holy vessels were once washed; and in the wall on the opposite side may be the _aumbry_, or cupboard, in which the holy vessels once stood.
But such small churches are not common. Generally the nave has along each side what is called an _aisle_, in which case its central roof is supported on a double row of pillars. Possibly the chancel also has aisles. The walls above the lines of pillars may be pierced with windows, which thus look out above the roofs of the aisles. These windows are known as _clerestory_ windows.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C. W. Mason_
A Piscina in Patrington Church
]
In cathedrals and very large churches there is a story which runs along each side of the nave and chancel, between the capitals of the pillars and the clerestory. This is called the _triforium_. Beverley Minster has a triforium, but there is no passage round it, and it is really a blind story. A portion of it can be seen in the photograph of the Percy Tomb on page 230. Bridlington Priory Church has a triforium on the north side only.
In churches of large size the building is not simply a rectangular one with or without aisles, but is formed of two rectangular buildings crossing each other at right angles. The nave and chancel have added to them a _north transept_ and a _south transept_, and above the crossing-place rises a _central tower_ on four huge _piers_.
These transepts, as well as the nave and chancel, may have aisles. But this is customary only in cathedrals. Holy Trinity Church, Hull, the third largest church in Britain,[25] has aisles only to the nave and chancel; Patrington Church—the ‘Queen of Holderness’—has aisles to the nave and to each transept; and Hedon Church—the ‘King of Holderness’—now has aisles only to its nave, though its transepts formerly had an aisle on the east.
Footnote 25:
The following are the _internal areas_ of the three largest churches in Britain:—
St. Nicholas’, Great Yarmouth 25,023 sq. ft. St. Michael’s, Coventry 24,015 " Holy Trinity, Hull 21,756 "
* * * * *
Many were the difficulties that the builders of our ancient churches had to overcome. In the East Riding one difficulty was the obtaining of suitable building-material. Stone blocks were costly, for these had to be brought by water from the quarries of the West Riding. So usually the builders had to make the best use they could of the materials they obtained locally—boulders from the cliffs of the sea-shore, blocks of chalk from the Wolds, or clay bricks from the low-lying bank of the Humber.[26]
Footnote 26:
The brickwork of the chancel and transepts of Holy Trinity, Hull, is probably the ‘earliest existing example of mediæval brickwork in England.’ These portions of the church were built during the first quarter of the fourteenth century.
Another difficulty was sometimes encountered in obtaining suitable foundations. The clay soil on which the church of Holy Trinity, Hull, is built was not of sufficient depth to afford foundations for the heavy central tower which it was intended to build.
Twentieth-century builders would drive piles down into the clay to make a firm foundation; the fourteenth-century builders solved the problem by constructing four huge rafts of trimmed oak trunks, each consisting of two rows of trunks crossing at right angles. On these rafts they raised the piers for their tower; and when, in 1906, it became necessary to take out the tree-trunks and replace them with steel girders and cement, many of the trunks were found to be as sound as on the day that they were placed in position six hundred years ago.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_J. Ball_
Part of the Foundations of the Tower of Holy Trinity Church, Hull.
]
The greatest charm of our ancient churches lies in the fact that, except in a very few instances, a church is not built in the same style throughout. It is quite evident, if we have a seeing eye, that additions and alterations have been made at different times. The nave and the chancel were plainly not designed by the same architect; the north side of the church differs from the south; here has been added a new door, there a new window; the roof has been taken off, the worn ends of the rafters sawn away, and the rafters used again, so that the roof has to be of less slope than it was before.
[Illustration: FILEY CHURCH, SHOWING THE LINES OF THE ORIGINAL ROOF.]
All these are the signs of life and growth. If we wish, we can read by them how our forefathers prospered in their worldly business, and how they gave thanks to God for their prosperity; or how the coming of the Plague brought them poverty and distress, and perhaps put a stop to their building operations, which were not completed till many years afterwards, and then in a style quite different from that in which they had been begun.
Often these alterations and rebuildings were put on record, and some of the records remain to our day. Thus John Skinner, of Westgate, Hedon, by his will made in 1428, left the sum of forty shillings towards the building of the new tower of St. Augustine’s Church. On the south face of the tower of Aughton Church is an inscription which is now illegible, but which once told in the Anglo-French language that Christopher Aske, the second son of Sir Robert Aske, rebuilt the tower in 1536.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
The ‘Beverley Imp’—St. Mary’s Church, Beverley.
]
Cut into the stone of the same tower is in two places the likeness of an _aske_ or newt, a punning allusion to the name of the builder. In the same way, the tower of Hemingbrough Church is ornamented with a row of ‘dolly-tubs’ or ‘weshing-tuns’—an allusion to the name of Prior Wessington, in whose period of rule the tower was rebuilt.
Most interesting of all such records are the inscriptions on the pillars of the north side of the nave in St. Mary’s, Beverley. They show that when the tower fell in 1520 and destroyed that side of the nave, the destruction was repaired by a combined effort on the part of the parishioners. A family named Crosslay provided the wherewithal for rebuilding the half pillar at the west end, and the two pillars next to it towards the east; the ‘good wives’ of the parish rebuilt the next two pillars; and, as will be shown later, the remaining pillar was rebuilt by the Gild of Minstrels.[27]
Footnote 27:
See page 185.
Hence the inscriptions which we may read to-day high up on the pillars:—
XLAY AND HIS WYF TO PYLLORS FE MADE THES AND A HALFFE
THYS TO PYLLO WYFFYS GOD RS MADE GVD REWARD THAYM
But though no written or inscribed record may exist, it is yet possible to tell approximately the date at which either a church was built, or some particular portion of it was rebuilt. This is so because men built in different styles at different times—the fashionable mode of building changed as the centuries went on. Let us see how we can recognise these styles.
* * * * *
When the Normans came to England, they brought with them great zeal for church-building, and many churches built by them remain to our day on the Wolds of the East Riding.
The NORMAN style of building was one of round-headed arches and of narrow round-headed windows with the sides widely splayed, so that the window-opening inside is very much larger than the narrow slit which appears on the outside of the wall. The walls were very thick, the masonry was rough, the joints between the stones were very clumsy, and the buttresses, if used at all, did not project more than a few inches from the walls. The early Norman churches had very plain chancel or tower arches, such as we see at Speeton, Reighton, and Rudston; but those built later had arches magnificently carved with zigzags or _chevrons_, and with animal forms. Good examples of these may be seen at North Newbald, Kirkburn, Nunburnholme, Etton, and Garton-on-the-Wolds.
[Illustration: DIFFERENT FORMS OF ARCHES.]
The Norman style of building lasted from 1066 to 1190. Then came a change. Instead of using a semi-circular or one-centred arch, architects found out the advantages of a two-centred arch. They also made the discovery that the walls need not be so thick, if the thickness of the buttresses was increased. Thus came about what we call the EARLY ENGLISH or LANCET style of building, which was fashionable for the ninety years from 1190 to 1280. Beautiful examples of this style can be seen in the churches of Filey, Hedon, Middleton-on-the-Wolds, and Kirk Ella.
Again came a change, a growth of ideas. Men grew tired of the simple form of _Lancet_ window, which we to-day consider so beautiful because of its simplicity. First they experimented by piercing an ornamental hole through the stonework above a group of lancets. This gave what we call _Plate Tracery_, examples of which are not numerous in our Riding.
Then a further experiment was made. Instead of building the head of a group of lancets in solid stone, some architect-builder hit upon the idea of making a pattern of shaped bars of stone, and of filling in the pattern with glass cut to fit the spaces. This at once proved popular, and an entirely new fashion in window designs set in.
At first the patterns made in stone were simple _Geometrical_ ones, such as those in the chancel windows at Rudston. But gradually, as one set of builders vied with another in building the most beautiful church, the patterns became more complicated and _Curvilinear_ in form. These last two styles together made up what is usually known as the DECORATED style of building, and were in fashion from 1280 to 1380.
[Illustration:
‘NORMAN’ AND ‘EARLY ENGLISH’ SOUTH DOORS.
STILLINGFLEET. HESSLE. ]
Lastly came another great change, due to the discovery of methods for producing stained glass. The windows of Norman churches had been very small, and the interiors of the churches had been very dark. How dark they were may be judged from the present interior of the church of Garton-on-the-Wolds when the doors are both shut. Very early the worshippers experienced a desire for more light, and at Garton they solved the problem by knocking down some of the wall and inserting a much larger _Decorated_ window.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C. W. Mason_
Part of the South Wall of the Church at Garton-on-the-Wolds.
]
But when stained glass became reasonably cheap, there were few church-people who could endure the thought that some neighbouring church had stained-glass windows when their church had none. So there began a competition among them as to who should be able to show the greatest area of stained glass in their church windows. Walls were therefore pulled down, and windows enlarged, or perhaps a nave or chancel was entirely rebuilt, for the reception of this glass; until where there had once been a stone wall with a few narrow slits in it, there was now a series of wide expanses of glass separated with narrow strips of wall.
For convenience also, the bars of stone which formed the window tracery were made straight instead of curved. This is the style which we call the _Perpendicular_ style, and it grew in popular favour from 1380 until 1547, when the Reformation put an end to further growth.
* * * * *
All the three styles, _Early English_, _Decorated_, and _Perpendicular_, make up what is known as GOTHIC architecture. The name is unfortunately a meaningless one; for it does not in any way refer to the architecture of the Goths, as the name NORMAN does to the architecture of the Normans.
The great difference between the two styles is that whereas the roof of a _Norman_ building was supported by the walls, the roof of a _Gothic_ building was supported not by the walls, but by the buttresses, some of which might be constructed in the form of bridges. Such buttresses are known as _flying buttresses_.
It would be almost true to say that we might knock down every inch of wall in Beverley Minster or Patrington Church and yet leave standing the framework and roof of the buildings, with the western towers of the one and the central spire of the other. Such buildings are perfect in design, and their perfectness is due to the knowledge and skill which were possessed by their architect-builders.
Gothic architecture grew like a plant, and reached its full development in the _Perpendicular_ style, when the enthusiasm for church-building was at its height. Most of our village churches show signs of having been in part rebuilt during the period when the _Perpendicular_ style flourished, and one of its most marked features is a lofty central or western tower, such as we see at Hedon, Howden, and Driffield.
For a long time after the Reformation there was no fresh church-building, and little church-repair. What little attention our ancient parish churches had at the repairers’ hands was often of the kind that is called ‘churchwarden’ restoration, an example of which we see in the accompanying photograph of a portion of Welwick Church. Now, happily, such is a thing of the past, and our church restorers aim at a restoration which is true to its name.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
‘Churchwarden’ Restoration at Welwick Church.
]
It is unusual to find an ancient parish church built in one style throughout. But Filey Church is almost entirely on the border-line between _Norman_ and _Early English_; Patrington Church is almost entirely _Decorated_; and Skirlaugh Church, which was built by Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, about 1403, is entirely _Perpendicular_.
Modern churches are, on the other hand, usually in one style throughout. The churches of Kilnwick Percy, East Heslerton, and Sledmere will serve as good examples of modern _Norman_, modern _Early English_, and modern _Decorated_ styles.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
A Grotesque ‘Poppy-Head’ at Holy Trinity, Hull.
]
In and about many of our ancient parish churches are preserved features which remind us of the customs and beliefs of long-past days. At Easington we may see the ancient tithe barn, in which was stored the parson’s tithe of corn when tithes were paid not in money but in kind. At Barmby-on-the-Marsh, North Frodingham and Swine are preserved the church chests in which the parish records were kept. Holy Trinity, Hull, has only recently parted with the library of which its parishioners enjoyed the use long before the days of ‘Free Libraries.’
In the churches at Barmston, Burstwick, Goodmanham and Thwing may be seen the _squint_, or hole cut through a pier of the tower so that the people worshipping in the transept might see the ‘elevation of the host’ before the high altar. At Millington, Nunburnholme and Sancton there remain the _low-side_ or _lepers’ windows_, so built that the poor unfortunates outside the walls of the church might not be deprived of the sight of the same.
[Illustration: BRASS OF THOMAS TONGE, RECTOR OF BEEFORD. A.D. 1472.]
Just within the south door of the church at Great Givendale stands the _stoup_ or holy-water vessel, from which all worshippers were once sprinkled; and across the chancel arches at Flamborough and Winestead stand the ancient _rood screens_. At Kirkburn we may see a modern replica of an ancient rood screen in all the glory of brilliant colours; and the interior surface of the walls and roof of the church at Garton-on-the-Wolds reproduces the ancient custom of painting in colours every square inch of available space within a church.
In several churches there are grotesque carvings in wood and stone—gargoyles, corbels, poppy-heads, and misericords—carvings so grotesque and irreligious that we can only wonder at the feelings which prompted their construction.
Brasses and altar tombs show us plainly how the lords and ladies were dressed in former days, and an occasional brass of a parish priest serves to point out the differences between the parish priest of the fifteenth century and his successor, the ‘parson’ of to-day.
XIII. THE BIRTH OF HULL AND THE ROMANCE OF THE DE LA POLES.
[Illustration: ARMS OF KINGSTON-UPON-HULL.]
To say exactly the date of birth of the city which to-day the inhabitants proudly call ‘The Third Port’ is one of the things that are beyond man’s power. It used to be thought that Hull was founded by King Edward I., but we know now that this was wrong; for there are in existence old title deeds which show that the city goes back in point of time more than one hundred years before ‘Edward of the Long Shanks’ became King of England.
On the other hand, we are certain that there was no town of Hull in the time of William the Conqueror. Had there been, we should find mention of it in the Domesday Book. Hessle is mentioned in this, and so is Ferriby. But, though we find in the Domesday Book no mention of Hull, we do find mention of Myton, a hamlet belonging to the Manor of North Ferriby, and recorded at the time of the survey as ‘waste.’
Later on we find this hamlet grown into a manor, and meanwhile there was growing up alongside it another small settlement to which became attached the names _Wyke_, _Wyke-upon-Hull_, and _Hull_. Its position was the angle formed where the small river Hull empties itself into the mighty Humber, and its first inhabitants would doubtless be fishers and other sea-faring men, who found the place convenient for beaching their boats. Whether they were Angles or Danes we cannot definitely tell, for its name, _Wyke_, might have been given by either of these peoples.
The first mention of Wyke is in a grant of land made in the year 1160, and after this date its growth must have been rapid. Less than forty years later it was one of the ports to which was given the privilege of exporting wool; and in 1203 the taxes collected on wool and other exported goods at Hull amounted to no less than £344, while those collected in London amounted to only £836.
[Illustration: SILVER PENNY COINED AT HULL IN THE REIGN OF EDWARD I.]
The export trade in wool grew by leaps and bounds during the thirteenth century, and Hull was the port in the north of England that derived most benefit from this growth. At the close of the century there were ‘some sixty houses in the town, mostly built of clay and timber, and one-storied, with perhaps a chamber or two in the thatched roof; a gaol; a court-house; a church[28] ...; a monastery of White Friars; with some seven acres of land set apart for markets and fairs, and lying around and about where the Market-place now runs.’
Footnote 28:
This was a chapel, dedicated to the ‘Holy Trinitie,’ which James Helward, a townsman, founded in 1285. It stood where the chancel of Holy Trinity church now stands, and was pulled down when the present transepts and chancel were built a few years later.
Such was Wyke, or Hull, when in 1293 the monks of Meaux Abbey, its owners, sold the greater part of it to King Edward I., in exchange for other lands. Its annual value was £81 12s. 4d., and that of the part sold was £78 14s. 8d. With it were sold some farm lands and buildings at Myton, worth not quite half as much.
When the town thus passed into the King’s hands, he had to appoint a Warden to collect his rents, and the first King’s Warden rejoiced in the name of Richard Oysel. Six years later the townsmen obtained from the King a charter granting them all the privileges belonging to the inhabitants of a ‘Free Borough.’ Among these was the right of holding a market twice weekly, and a fair lasting for thirty days each year.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_J.R. Boyle_
Photograph of the Charter granted by Edward I. to the Townsmen of Hull in 1299. (One-fifth actual size).
]
Under its new name of the _King’s Town upon Hull_ the port naturally drew to itself merchants from the less-privileged towns of the neighbourhood, and among those who came to take advantage of its privileges was a wealthy merchant of Ravenser named William de la Pole. With the migration of this Ravenser merchant began an uninterrupted course of prosperity both for his family and for the King’s Town.
William de la Pole’s two elder sons, Richard and William, came into great prominence as merchants. The ‘great Hull Firm of De la Pole Brothers’ has been a modern description of their business enterprise, and the adjective ‘great’ is rightly used. For not only was Richard de la Pole King Edward III.’s wine merchant, but the two brothers were also for many years the King’s bankers. As royal wine merchant, Richard had some twenty deputies in other ports of England, and as royal bankers the ‘Firm’ lent large sums of money to the King for the carrying on of his wars with Scotland and France.
In 1327, for instance, these Hull merchants lent the King sums amounting to £10,200; and in February of the next year the King, while at York, paid two wine bills, one of two thousand marks and the other of £1,200. Later on in this year, the brothers undertook to find £20 per day for the upkeep of the King’s household, and as much wine as was necessary.
In 1337 Edward declared war against France, and that war was carried on mainly with supplies of money provided by the De la Pole Brothers.
Within two years of the opening of war, the King had borrowed money on the crown jewels, on the crown itself, and even on his own person. Edward was actually stranded in France unable to move for lack of money, when his ‘beloved merchant,’ William de la Pole, came to his assistance with new supplies; and the King acknowledged himself bound to him for the astonishing sum of £76,180, a sum equal to more than a million pounds in our money.
‘How was this immense sum raised?’ we may quite naturally ask. Probably a large portion of it was borrowed by the lender from others who were quite ready to put their spare cash into the hands of such a far-sighted and reliable man of business as William de la Pole. And how was the loan repaid by the King?
The answer to the second of these questions gives the secret of the wealth of the ‘Hull Firm.’ Edward repaid his loans not with money but by grants of the customs and duties payable on exported goods at the various ports of the kingdom. In other words, if the King borrowed £1000, he gave to the lender of this sum permission to collect all the dues at, say, the port of Bristol, for the next five years; and as the trade of Bristol was then rapidly growing, the lender very probably received during those five years twice as much value in dues as he had lent in money to the King.
Such services as these, rendered at a critical moment, did not go unrewarded in other ways. In 1332 Edward visited his new ‘King’s Town’ on his way to Scotland, and was the guest of William de la Pole, whom he knighted before his departure.
At the same time the townsfolk were granted the dignity of having a Mayor and four Bailiffs instead of a Warden, and Sir William was, naturally, the man chosen by them to hold this office. Thus the long line of Mayors of the city of Hull goes back to Sir William de la Pole, who was Mayor for three years, 1332–1335. Later on other honours were showered upon him, and when he died his body was buried in the church of the Holy Trinity, where the alabaster effigies of himself and Dame Katherine his wife may still be seen.
As William de la Pole was a great favourite of King Edward III., so his son Michael was equally a favourite of Edward’s grandson, King Richard II. Michael de la Pole had gone to Spain in the train of John of Gaunt, Edward’s third son, and his retinue had consisted of 140 men-at-arms, 140 archers, 1 knight banneret, 8 knights bachelor, and 130 esquires.
In 1376 Michael was not only Mayor of Hull but also ‘Admiral of the King’s Fleets in the Northern Parts.’ Seven years later he became a Knight of the Garter and Lord Chancellor of England. In another two years he was raised to the peerage as Earl of Suffolk, the first example in our history of a prosperous merchant becoming a peer of the realm. As Earl of Suffolk, Michael began the building at Kingston-upon-Hull of a mansion which was known when finished as Suffolk Palace, and which stood on the ground where has recently been built the General Post Office.
But the first Earl of Suffolk was by no means a favourite with Parliament, whatever he might be with the young King; and though he had as Lord Chancellor advised the members of Parliament to ‘avoid all corruptions,’ he was accused by them of enriching himself at the expense of the nation. As the result of the charges laid against him by his many and powerful enemies he was exiled, and died at Paris four years after the creation of his peerage.
[Illustration:
EFFIGIES OF SIR WILLIAM DE LA POLE AND DAME KATHERINE IN HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, HULL. _From Gough’s ‘Sepulchral Monuments.’_ ]
[Illustration: ARMS OF THE DE LA POLES.]
Richard II.’s deposition by Parliament followed ten years after his favourite’s death, and Henry IV. became King. This King’s son, Henry V., attempted to rival in France the exploits of his great-grandfather; and in his retinue when the English army sailed from Harfleur were two Michael de la Poles, father and son. Both were of high honour in the King’s train, both set out in hopes of winning still higher honour in the glorious conquest that was to be, but both were fated to die a soldier’s death on the soil of the country which they had hoped to conquer. The elder Michael, second Earl of Suffolk, died of dysentery before the walls of Harfleur in September 1415; the younger Michael, third Earl of Suffolk, fell mortally wounded in the battle of Agincourt, five weeks after the death of his father. His body was brought home to England, and lay in state in Saint Paul’s Cathedral before it was buried in Oxfordshire.
You will find an account of the Earl of Suffolk’s death in Act IV.,
## Scene 6, of Shakspeare’s play _Henry the Fifth_; and when you next read
of the wars of Edward III. and Henry V. in France, do not fail to remember, if you yourself belong to the city of Hull, that good silver crowns from Kingston-upon-Hull provided the wherewithal for the battle of Crecy, and that good honest men from Kingston-upon-Hull fought, and—in one case at least—died in the battle of Agincourt.
* * * * *
Two years after this battle, King Henry was again fighting in France, and in his retinue was again an Earl of Suffolk. This was William, the fourth Earl, brother of him who had been slain at Agincourt. ‘Thirty lancers and four score and ten archers’ was the portion of the army furnished by this Earl, and for seventeen consecutive years he served in France as a soldier of the King. While Henry VI. was the infant King of England, Suffolk was in command of the English army in France, and it was his misfortune to be beaten by the ‘Maid of Orleans.’ In this war he was taken prisoner by the French, and ransomed for the sum of £20,000.
After Suffolk’s return home as a defeated soldier we find him playing the part of a successful ambassador. The marriage of King Henry with Princess Margaret of Anjou was arranged by him, and for his services he was raised to the dignity first of a Marquis and secondly of a Duke. At the same time his heirs were granted the privilege of carrying at the coronation of all the King’s successors a golden sceptre with a dove upon the top—a privilege embodied in the design of the Common Seal of the Corporation of Kingston-upon-Hull.
[Illustration: COMMON SEAL OF THE CORPORATION OF KINGSTON-UPON-HULL.]
But this marriage brought the newly-created Duke of Suffolk into great disfavour with Parliament; for he was accused of having delivered the important province of Maine into the hands of the French, this being one of the conditions of the marriage treaty. His enemies also accused him of having murdered the Duke of Gloucester.
To save his favourite Duke the King banished him for five years, but his enemies were determined that he should not escape their vengeance. Realizing the danger he was in, he set sail from Ipswich, and hoped to reach Calais in safety. Before his departure he wrote, on the 30th of April, 1450, the following letter to his young son:—
My dere and only welbeloved sone, I beseche oure Lord in Heven, the Maker of alle the world, to blesse you, and to sende you ever grace to love hym, and to drede hym; to the which, as ferre as a fader may charge his child, I both charge you and prei you to ... do no thyng for love nor drede of any erthely creature that shuld displese hym....
Secondly, next hym, above alle erthely thyng, to be trewe liege man in hert, in wille, in thought, in dede, unto the Kyng ... to whom bothe ye and I been so moche bounde to....
Thirdly, in the same wyse, I charge you, my dere sone, alwey, as ye be bounden by the commaundement of God to do, to love, to worshepe youre lady and moder, and also that ye obey alwey hyr commaundements, and to beleve hyr councelles and advises in all youre werks....
Wreten of myn hand, The day of my departyng fro this land.
Your trewe and lovying fader,
SUFFOLK.
It was indeed the day of Suffolk’s ‘departyng fro this land,’ as the following portion of a letter written in London on the 5th of May of that year will show. The writer tells first how news had then reached London that on April 31 the Duke of Suffolk had been captured off Dover by a ‘shippe callyd Nicolas of the Towre,’ whose master ‘badde hym “Welcom, Traitor.”’ Then—
Yn the syght of all his men he was drawyn ought of the grete shippe yn to the bote ... and oon of the lewdeste of the shippe badde hym ley down his hedde, and he should be fair ferd wyth, and dye on a swerd; and toke a rusty swerd, and smotte of his hedde withyn halfe a doseyn strokes, and toke awey his gown of russet, and his dobelette of velvet mayled, and leyde his body on the sonds of Dover.
Although the first Duke of Suffolk suffered this ignominious death, the tide of fortune for his family still rose. John, his son, the second Duke, married the sister of King Edward IV.; and in the year 1484 their son John, Earl of Lincoln, was declared heir-presumptive to the throne of England.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
SEAL OF EDMUND DE LA POLE EARL OF SUFFOLK. ]
This is the high-water mark of the family fortunes. The battle of Bosworth, and the accession of King Henry VII. a year later, altered everything. The Earl of Lincoln took up arms against King Henry on behalf of the pretender, Lambert Simnel, and was killed at the battle of Stoke in 1487. His younger brother, Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, was considered a man too dangerous to be allowed to live and was beheaded by Henry VIII. in 1513; and his remaining brother, Sir Richard de la Pole, having fled to Italy, was killed in the battle of Pavia in 1525.
=Sir WILLIAM DE LA POLE.= A merchant of Ravenserodd, who migrated to Hull. | +-------------------+------------------+ | | =Sir Richard de la Pole.= =Sir William de la Pole.= A merchant of Hull; A merchant of Hull, founder d. 1346. of the Hull Charterhouse and | first Mayor of Hull (1332–5); | d. 1366. | | =Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk.= Mayor of Hull 1376, and Admiral of the King’s Fleets in the Northern Parts; Italian Ambassador and | Lord Chancellor of England; | d. 1389 in exile at Paris. | | =Richard, Duke =Michael, Earl of Suffolk.= of Buckingham and Fought at Harfleur, and Chandos.= died of dysentery, Sept. d. 1889. 18, 1415. | +-------------------------------------+---+ | | =Michael, =William, Earl of Suffolk.= Earl of Suffolk.= Commander of the English army Slain at Agincourt, in France; became =Marquis=, and Oct. 25, 1415. later =Duke, of Suffolk=; was accused of various crimes, exiled, and murdered at sea, 1450. | =John, Duke of Suffolk.= Married Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV. and of Richard III.; d. 1491. | +-------------------------+----------+---------+ | | | =John de la Pole, =Edmund de la Pole, =Sir Richard Earl of Lincoln.= Earl of Suffolk.= de la Pole.= Declared heir-presumptive Beheaded by Fled to Italy, to the English throne Henry VIII., 1513. and was killed 1484; Commander-in-Chief at Pavia, 1525. in Lambert Simnel’s rebellion; killed at Stoke 1487.
PEDIGREE OF THE DE LA POLES.
In all English history there is no stranger family history than that of the De la Poles. For had there been no battle of Bosworth, the great-great-great-great-grandson of a Hull merchant would, in all probability, have become King John II. Such, however, was not to be, and there is now living no descendant of the first William de la Pole in the male line. A few years ago the female line was represented in the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, who was lineally descended from Richard de la Pole, the elder partner in the ‘great Hull Firm of De la Pole Brothers.’
XIV. MONKS, NUNS, AND FRIARS.
[Illustration: ARMS OF BRIDLINGTON PRIORY.]
Scattered over some of the pleasantest parts of Yorkshire are to be found the ruined homes of men and women who centuries ago formed a very distinct class among the people of our country. These men and women were the monks, friars, and nuns of mediæval England, and their homes were known as monasteries and friaries.
The foundation of monasteries was due to the growth of an idea that men and women could serve God better by withdrawing entirely from worldly affairs, and by giving themselves up to a life of continual prayer and worship. Many were established in England during the tenth and eleventh centuries, but the great period of their foundation was that from 1066 to 1216. During these years no fewer than 556 monasteries were founded in our country, and 65 of these were in Yorkshire.
[Illustration: A CISTERCIAN MONK.]
According to whether a monastery was independent of all others or not, it ranked as an Abbey or a Priory; and according to the particular code of rules under which its inmates lived, it was inhabited by BENEDICTINES, CISTERCIANS, or CARTHUSIANS. The monks of the Order of St. Benedict were popularly known as _Black Monks_, and their three Abbeys in Yorkshire were at Whitby, Selby and York. They had no House in the East Riding, but there were Benedictine nunneries at Nunburnholme, Nunkeeling, Wilberfoss and Yedingham.
The Order of the Cistercians, or _White Monks_, received its name from the Abbey of Citeaux in Normandy. In this the rules were stricter and the life harder than among the Benedictines. The Cistercians believed that the work of a man’s hands was as acceptable an offering to God as the recitation of prayers and the chanting of psalms, and hence they became great farmers and wool-growers.[29] Yorkshire was particularly their county, and the great Abbeys of Fountains, Rievaulx, Jervaulx and Byland were some of the wealthiest and most powerful in England. In the East Riding the Cistercians had an Abbey at Meaux and a nunnery at Swine.
Footnote 29:
In 1280 the monks of Meaux owned 11,000 sheep and 1000 beasts.
[Illustration: A BENEDICTINE NUN.]
A still stricter Order of monks was that of the Carthusians, who received their name from the Abbey of Chartreuse in the south-east of France. From the popular corruption of the word ‘Chartreuse’ into ‘Charterhouse,’ their monasteries became generally known as _Charterhouses_. One of these was established at Hull by Sir Michael de la Pole,[30] and there was in the North Riding another at Mount Grace, near Northallerton.
Footnote 30:
Close to this Carthusian monastery Sir Michael also built—in 1384—a _Maison Dieu_, or Hospital, for twenty-six poor men and women, ‘feeble and old.’ Its buildings were pulled down during the second siege of Hull, but afterwards replaced by others. This is the ‘Charterhouse’ that exists to-day, the present buildings dating from 1780.
The life of a monk or a nun was one spent apart from the world but, at the same time, in common with all other inmates of the monastery or nunnery. The inmates worked together, prayed together, had their meals together, and slept in a common dormitory.
Their life was also one of absolute devotion to carrying out the rules of their Order. Each inmate took, on entering the religious life, the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. By the first, no monk or nun might own separate possessions except the necessary clothing and bedding. Thus, one mattress, two pairs of blankets, two counterpanes, one cowl and frock, two tunics, two pairs of vests, four pairs of breeches, two pairs of shoes, four pairs of socks, two pairs of day-boots, one pair of night-boots, one night-cap, two towels, one soiled-linen ‘pokett,’ and one shaving cloth formed the wardrobe of a Black Monk. In addition he might possess a silver spoon, and then his outfit was complete. By the second vow he bound himself never to marry, and by the third to obey implicitly the orders of his superiors.
* * * * *
The Houses of these monks and nuns were, with slight exceptions here and there, constructed on certain definite lines, which can best be illustrated by a plan of the Cistercian Abbey of Kirkstall, near Leeds. Surrounding all was a wall, not shown in the plan.
The arrangement of the various buildings was very simple. Foremost in importance ranked the _church_, which was always the first building to be erected and that on which the greatest wealth was lavished. To the south of this were attached the domestic buildings, grouped round a central _cloister court_. Of these the most important were the _chapter house_, in which the monks assembled each morning to hear a chapter from the Latin rules of their Order; the four _cloisters_ or covered walks in which the daily tasks of the monks were performed; the _frater_ or _refectory_, in which their midday meal was served; and the _dorter_ or _dormitory_, in which they slept. This last ran above the line of buildings to the south of the south transept, and had a staircase leading directly into this as well as one leading into the east cloister.
[Illustration:
THE CISTERCIAN ABBEY OF KIRKSTALL.
_From ‘Transactions of the East Riding Antiquarian Society,’ Vol. III._ ]
The other buildings included the _sacristy_ or treasure-house; the _library_; the _locutorium_ or parlour, which was a meeting-place for conversation as well as a school for the novices; the _infirmary_ for sick monks; the _calefactory_, or warming-house, where a fire was kept burning from the first day in November till the following Easter; the _kitchen_; the _cellarium_ or store-room; the _hospitium_ or guest-house; and the _Abbot’s house_.
Attached to each House of the Cistercians was a band of _conversi_, or lay brethren, the uneducated portion of the community, who did all the rough work of the House. Their frater and dorter were separate from the other buildings, the dorter running over the cellarium; and they attended service in the nave of the church, whereas the monks used the choir or chancel.
Such was the general plan of a Cistercian monastery or nunnery. That of the Benedictines did not differ from it except that their churches were larger and more magnificently built than those of the Cistercians, and their fraters ran east and west instead of north and south.
Look at the outer wall of the south aisle of Bridlington Priory Church, and you will at once notice something strange. The windowless wall and blocked arches are due to the fact that the Abbot’s house adjoined the church at this spot. Look along the wall farther to the east, and you will see plainly the brackets on which once rested the roof beams of one of the four cloisters.
In some cases the domestic buildings lay to the north of the church, but this was exceptional. Advantage was usually taken of the protection afforded by the church against the biting north winds of winter, an advantage not to be despised by those who had to live in unwarmed stone buildings on the bleak moorlands of Yorkshire. One can imagine a shivering monk returning from his two hours’ service in the church at two o’clock on a cold winter’s morning, and piling on the bed his whole wardrobe in a vain endeavour to keep the marrow of his bones from freezing into solid ice. It was worth something to be an Abbot. For the Abbot’s house had fire-places, and there would be little fear of his forgetting to make use of such a comfortable privilege.
[Illustration: THE PRIORY CHURCH, BRIDLINGTON.]
* * * * *
As was mentioned earlier in the chapter, the monk lived in common with his fellows. In winter his time-table was as follows:—
7 a.m.—Prime—a prayer,[31] hymn, and three psalms. 8 a.m.—Mixtum or breakfast. 8–30 a.m.—Morning mass. 9 a.m.—Chapter, followed by confession of sins and punishment for faults. 10 a.m.—High mass. 11 a.m.—Dinner. 12 noon.—Manual work. 5 p.m.—Vespers. 6–30 p.m.—Collation—a short reading in the chapter house. 7 p.m.—Compline—a service in the church. 7–30 p.m.—Bed. 12 midnight—Matins and Lauds—services in the church. 2 a.m.—Bed.
Footnote 31:
The prayer with which the daily life began was this: ‘O Lord God Almighty, Who hast brought us to the beginning of this day, so assist us by Thy grace, that we may not fall this day into sin, but that our words may be spoken and our thoughts and deeds directed according to Thy just commands.’
Strict regulations were made with regard to the church services, manual work, and meals. Each monk had some definite occupation for his working hours. He was a stonemason, a carpenter, a worker in metals, a scribe, or a farmer; and his work must be carried out in silence—a very needful exception being made in the case of the blacksmiths.
Each monk’s dinner allowance was one pound of bread and a pint of wine or ale, with two cooked dishes and fruit or salad. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and all the days in Lent were fast days, when no meat might be eaten. On these fast days there were allowed as cooked dishes to every two monks either two plaice or mackerel, or four soles, or eight herrings or whiting, or ten eggs. No breakfast was the rule on fast days, and to avoid excess of blood due to good living, each monk was ‘cupped’ four times a year.
Table manners were also looked after. ‘No one was to clean his cup with his fingers, nor wipe his hands, or mouth, or knife, upon the tablecloths.... Salt was to be taken with a knife, and the drinking-cup was to be held always in both hands.’
[Illustration:
A CORNER OF THE CLOISTER COURT AT KIRKHAM PRIORY.
The two arches at the back formed the lavatory, where the monks washed their hands before passing into the frater by the door on the left. ]
More severe by far was the life of the Carthusians. They lived solitary lives, each in his separate two-roomed cell, never talking to others, and not even seeing others except at matins and vespers. A Carthusian never ate meat and always wore a hair shirt next his skin. It is therefore not surprising that this Order did not become a popular one.
* * * * *
So far we have been dealing with monks and nuns. Besides these there were the REGULAR CANONS—men who lived under a _regula_, or rule, as did the monks, and who took the same three vows, but who were generally priests, while the monks were generally laymen. The Augustinian Canons had priories at Bridlington, Haltemprice, Kirkham, North Ferriby and Warter, and there was a Gilbertine nunnery at Ellerton and a House for both Gilbertine Canons and Benedictine Nuns at Watton. Here the canons and nuns had each their separate domestic buildings, but they shared the church, the canons using one half of it and the nuns the other half.
[Illustration:
THE BAYLE GATE, BRIDLINGTON.
Formerly one of the gateways to the Priory grounds. ]
Quite distinct from monks and canons were the FRIARS. Monks were concerned with one thing only—the salvation of their own souls. Hence their monasteries were, as a rule, built in desolate spots, far removed from the centres of population. The churches of the canons were, in most cases, partly used as parish churches, the prior of the convent being also the rector of the parish. Friars were concerned with the salvation of the souls and bodies of other people, hence they established themselves in populous towns. _Fratres_, or _frères_, they were to all poor people, whether they were Dominican Friars, Franciscan Friars, Carmelite Friars, or Austin Friars.
[Illustration:
A WHITE FRIAR IN HIS STUDY. (_From Abbot Gasquet’s ‘English Monastic Life.’_) ]
The followers of St. Dominic were the teachers, the followers of St. Francis the doctors, of the middle ages. _Black Friars_ and _Grey Friars_ they were in the language of the common people. Beverley had its Dominican and Franciscan Friaries, while Kingston-upon-Hull had its Carmelite and Austin Friaries—the names of the two latter remaining to-day in our ‘Whitefriargate’ and ‘Blackfriargate.’
* * * * *
It is difficult for us to realise what enthusiasm there was in the olden days for that which was called ‘the religious life.’ ‘It is good for us to be here, for here a man lives more purely, falls more rarely, rests more safely, and dies more happily’ was the honest thought of each of the _religious_ in early days.
But as with all other human institutions, these good ideals perished in the course of time. Men did not continue to live up to the rules of their Order. Even in Chaucer’s time—that is, before the year 1400—the typical monk had travelled far away from his vows of poverty and obedience.
Full many a dainty horse had he in stable. * * * * * * Greyhounds he had as swift as fowls in flight; Of riding and of hunting for the hare Was his delight, for no cost would he spare. * * * * * * He was not pale as a tormented ghost, A fat swan loved he best of any roast.
Chaucer’s friar was likewise a wanton and merry man, who knew the taverns well in every town.
His tippet was aye stuffèd full of knives, And pins also, fit for to give fair wives. And certainly he had a merry note, Well could he sing and play upon a rote.[32]
Footnote 32:
A violin with three strings.
XV. SAINT JOHN OF BEVERLEY AND HIS MINSTER.
[Illustration:
ARMS OF BEVERLEY MINSTER. ]
Each of two East Riding villages, Harpham and Cherry Burton, claims to be the birthplace of Saint John of Beverley. His date of birth is even more uncertain than his place of birth; but we know that he was sent to school at the monastery at Canterbury, and afterwards became an inmate of the famous monastery of St. Hilda at Whitby. Then he was for nineteen years Bishop of Hexham, and finally, in 705 or 706, was ‘translated’ to York, and thus became the fifth in the long line of eighty-nine Archbishops from Paulinus to Cosmo Lang.
While John was Bishop of Hexham he purchased a plot of ground in Beverley, and on it built a church which he placed in charge of a small number of canons. The surrounding country was then nothing but swamp and forest—the swamps of the river Hull and the wild woodland whose name has come down to us as ‘Beverley Westwood.’ So fond of this church was John, that in 718 he gave up his Archbishopric and retired to Beverley, where he died three years later.
John’s church suffered the fate which came to nearly all the monasteries and churches of those far-off times. The ravaging Northmen fell upon it, and it was not till the reign of King Aethelstan that it recovered from their attacks.
Then its fame began to grow. In 934 Aethelstan was marching north to make war upon the Scots, and when at Lincoln met—so the story runs—a band of pilgrims who joyously declared that they had been healed of all manner of diseases by visiting the tomb of the blessed John of Beverley. Their story induced the King to pay a visit to the same tomb; so he journeyed directly north, crossed the Humber, and went on to Beverley, while his army went round by the longer branch of the old Roman road to York.
Arriving at Beverley, Aethelstan besought the aid of the holy Bishop John, and placed his knife on the high altar as a pledge of the rewards that he would bestow upon the church if he were successful in his journey. Thereupon a vision of John of Beverley appeared before his eyes, and he heard the words, ‘Pass fearlessly with your army, for you shall conquer’—words which certainly came true enough.
Believing that his success was due entirely to the power of the holy Bishop whose banner he had brought with him from Beverley, the King, on his return, liberally fulfilled his pledge, and endowed John’s church with grants of lands, tolls, and the right of Sanctuary.
=Swa mickel fredom give i ye,= =Swa bert may think or egbe see=—
is the way in which a charter of much later date than the time of Aethelstan describes the King’s gifts to John of Beverley’s church.
[Illustration: BEVERLEY MINSTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, FROM THE NORTH-EAST.]
So great after this became the fame of the miracles performed at the tomb of the founder of the church, that in 1037 the Pope ordered that John of Beverley should thenceforth be ranked as a Saint. His bones and other relics were then laid in a magnificent shrine in front of the high altar, and the story of the fate which came upon the sacrilegious Toustain in 1069 is sufficient evidence of their power.[33]
Footnote 33:
See page 152.
* * * * *
The charter of Aethelstan was renewed by Edward the Confessor, Henry I., and Stephen; and in the reign of the last-named King the banner of St. John was for the second time in the forefront of a battle against the Scots. This was the _Battle of the Standard_, when the banners of the four northern Saints—St. Peter of York, St. Cuthbert of Durham, St. Wilfrid of Ripon, and St. John of Beverley—brought victory to the English host.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
‘Early English.’ Doorway in the South Transept of Beverley Minster.
]
Once again an English King visited Beverley and carried north with him the banner of St. John. The King was Edward I., the ‘Hammer of the Scots,’ and the Household Accounts of his reign show that in 1299 there was paid:
To master Gilbert de Grimsby, vicar of the collegiate church of St. John de Beverley, for his wages, from the 25th day of November, on which day he left Beverley to proceed, by command of the King, with the standard of St. John, in the King’s suite aforesaid, to various parts of Scotland, until the 9th day of January, both computed, 46 days, at 8½d. per diem ...
£1 8s. 9d.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
Small ‘Decorated’ Doorway at the west end of Beverley Minster.
]
Edward II., Henry IV., Henry V., and Henry VI. all paid visits to the shrine of St. John of Beverley, and his power was once more demonstrated in the victory of the English army at the battle of Agincourt. For during the time that the battle was being waged, did not the tomb of the Saint sweat drops of holy oil? So at least said the pilgrims to the shrine, and certainly they ought to have known whether it did or not.
Royal gifts and pilgrims’ offerings brought great prosperity to the church of St. John of Beverley. But evil days were fast approaching, and in 1547 Royal Commissioners were sent to report on it. They reported that there were attached to the church a Provost, 9 Canons, 7 Parsons, 9 Vicars, 15 Chantry Priests, 4 Sacristans, 2 Incense Bearers, 8 Choristers, and 22 others, a total of 77 officers, who shared among them an income of £900 derived from lands and tithes. Two years later its revenues were declared confiscated to the Crown, and its inmates reduced in number to 1 Vicar and 3 Assistants.
* * * * *
Of the building as it was in its earliest days we know little. In Aethelstan’s time it was probably entirely of wood. The erection of a stone church is believed to have taken place in the reign of Edward the Confessor, but we know that in 1188 the chancel and transepts of this church were destroyed by fire.
Rebuilding was commenced shortly afterwards, and a lofty tower was built on the weak foundations of the older one. As a result the new tower soon fell, and about 1225 the building of an entirely new church was taken in hand. This was the time when what we call the _Early English_ style of building was in vogue, and there is nothing of this style in all England finer than the chancel and transepts of Beverley Minster.[34]
Footnote 34:
The name _Minster_ became attached in mediæval times to the great churches which were not parish churches but were governed by a _College_, or body of secular canons.
If you look at the old engraving of the Minster given on page 137 you will notice that this one style of building was not followed throughout the church. Just past the transepts the style changes into the _Decorated_ style. The reason is that there was a long interval of nearly one hundred years during which the canons had not enough money to continue their building operations, so that the work came to a standstill. Meanwhile the Norman nave was still standing; and when at last money again became plentiful, a larger nave in the new and fashionable style was built around the old one. A curious result of this mode of building is seen to-day in that the pillars of the nave are not exactly opposite to one another, because the builders were not able to measure directly across from one to the other.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
Part of the Arcading on the south side of the Nave in Beverley Minster, showing the change of style from ‘Early English’ to ‘Decorated.’
]
Another glance at the old engraving will show that a further change in men’s ideas of building took place before the church was finished. The ravages of the ‘Black Death’ stopped progress for a time; and when the great twin towers of the west end were built, the _Perpendicular_ style of building had become fashionable. Then, in order that the east window should be in fashion with the west window, it was rebuilt ‘in the latest style.’ Thus we have in the church three successive styles of building, quite different from one another, and yet so blended that they make one harmonious whole.
After the confiscation of the church property in 1549, the Minster fell, naturally, into sad disrepair. Its beautiful octagonal chapter house was sold and pulled down. One hundred and ten years ago the Minster was reported to be almost a ruin. So bad was its condition that the beautiful gable of the north transept had bulged outwards no less than four feet, and was saved from destruction only by the skill of a carpenter named Thornton, who erected a huge screen of timber, and forced the wall back to its upright position.
[Illustration:
‘_Hey-diddle-diddle, The cat and the fiddle._’
A WOOD-CARVING IN BEVERLEY MINSTER. ]
In 1886 a great architect, Sir Gilbert Scott, was employed to make necessary restorations. First of all he took down the dome-like roof, with gilded ball above it, seen in the old engraving of the Minster. True, the Minster still lacks the central tower which, like the cathedrals of York, Durham, and Lincoln, it was originally planned to have; but better none at all than the unsuitable dome which our ancestors built a century ago. The beautiful choir screen was designed also by Sir Gilbert Scott, and was carved by a Beverley craftsman, Mr. James Elwell.
Since 1886 the main work of restoration has been the filling in of the numerous niches around the walls, each of which before the Reformation had its statue, great or small. Only one of these ancient statues remains, a statue of one of the Percy family, on a buttress of the north face of the north tower. There are now in position on the walls of the Minster 182 statues—108 outside and 74 inside—most of which have been provided through the generosity of Canon Nolloth.
[Illustration: PLAN OF BEVERLEY MINSTER]
There is much of interest to see around the Minster. The best view of the great towers is obtained from the entrance to Minster Moorgate; that of the interior of the nave from the upper floor at the west end, which is reached by a staircase in the north tower.
Climb to the top of the tower and you will, if the day is fine, be rewarded with a wide-reaching view over Beverley Westwood and the Plain of Holderness. Go into the chancel and examine the Percy Tomb. You are looking at the most magnificent stonework of the fourteenth century in the whole of Europe. Lift up the seats in the canons’ stalls and you will see the best collection of carved _miserere_ seats in England. Sit in the ancient _Frith-Stool_ and you can imagine yourself to be either an innocent victim of oppression or a criminal of the deepest dye—whichever you prefer. Stand before the great east window, and admire the beauty of the old stained glass of which it is composed. Or stand before the great west window and you will see portrayed in its coloured glass Augustine and Aethelberht of Kent and St. John of Beverley, the marriage of Edwin and Ethelburga, the baptism of Edwin by Paulinus, and Coifi, the heathen high priest, with his broken idols—an epitome of the early church history of our country.
XVI. SANCTUARIES.
The Church in the Middle Ages had a tremendous hold over people’s minds, and this was largely due to the power which it wielded over their bodies. Foremost amongst the rights then possessed by it was the right of ‘Sanctuary,’ by which the poor and injured could gain safety from the attacks of their oppressors, and one who had unwittingly committed a crime might save himself from a criminal’s death. This right belonged, in greater or less degree, to all the churches scattered up and down the country.
Let us imagine a by-no-means uncommon event in the years just after the Black Death. A husbandman is working for his master as a free labourer and small cottager. His father before him had also been a free labourer, but his grandfather had in his youth been a serf of the lord of a neighbouring manor. This grandfather of his, because the serfs had increased beyond their lord’s requirements, had been allowed with others to go free; and taking advantage of his freedom he had sought and obtained work as a free labourer under a new master. But now, after the Black Death, labourers are scarce; and the present lord of the manor is causing to be looked up all the descendants of those serfs whom his ancestor had set free. Thus the lord’s bailiff has been making enquiries about our freeman, and has sent two servants to arrest him and take him back to the serfdom that his grandfather had once suffered.
But our freeman is a man of spirit, and will not be taken without resistance. Knives are drawn, and he defends himself. In the scuffle one of his assailants stumbles and falls, and unluckily for himself and for our freeman, he happens to fall upon his own weapon, which pierces his body and so causes his death. His comrade, chicken-hearted, fears to continue the struggle alone, and makes off to the village for help.
What is our freeman to do? If he remains where he is and allows himself to be taken, not only will he be claimed as a serf by the lord of the neighbouring manor, but he will also be charged with causing the death of the lord’s servant.
Little chance is there of his proving himself innocent of his assailant’s death; for the dead man’s companion will not fail to swear that the death-blow was struck by him. In any case he will be thrown into the town jail for an indefinite length of time, perhaps not to come out alive, or to come out maimed for life. Were not three prisoners, two men and a woman, thrown into the jail last year on suspicion of having been concerned in a murder, and were they not kept there till one of the men died, the other lost a foot, and the woman lost both feet, from disease produced by the foul condition of the cell into which they were cast?
So thinks our freeman to himself. It is little comfort to him to remember that when the two prisoners who remained alive were eventually tried, they were found ‘not guilty’ of the charge laid against them, and were told by the justices that they could depart.
* * * * *
What can our freeman do? In a short while the lord of the manor’s other servant will come up with help against him, and he must then be overpowered. He can only flee. But whither? In the distance he can just distinguish the outline of the great church of St. John of Beverley. If he can only reach that church and knock on the small door that holds the sanctuary knocker he will be safe.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] Sanctuary Cross at Bishop Burton. [_C. W. Mason_
]
So off he sets on a six-mile run, with life before him and death behind. He has a good start over his pursuers, whom he can just make out half-a-mile or so away, but will he be able to hold out till he reaches the goal set before him? Nearer and nearer becomes the church, and although his pursuers are gaining on him, yet his heart is cheered by the sight of the boundary cross which tells him he has little more than a mile now to run, and which in itself gives him a certain amount of protection. For should he now be taken, he is under the protection of St. John, and his pursuers will lay hands on him at the risk of a fine of eight pounds payable to the Church.
Spurred on by fresh hope he reaches his goal, and has just sufficient strength to clang the knocker before he falls heavily against the heavy door. ‘Oh that the door may be opened quickly!’ His prayer is answered; for a watching priest has seen the pursuit. He draws back the bolt, drags in the senseless form, and clangs to the door again just as the pursuers reach it.
For a space of thirty days our freeman will now be safe, and during these thirty days he will be fed and lodged by the canons of the Minster. But first he will be required, with his hand placed on the great written copy of the Bible possessed by the Minster, to take an oath read out to him by the Coroner in the following words:—
‘Sir, take hede on your oth—
Ye shalbe trew and feythfull to my Lord Archbisshop of York, Lord off this towne....
Also ye shall bere gude hert to the Baillie and xij governars of this town....
Also ye shall bere no poynted wepen, dagger, knyfe, ne none other wapen, ayenst the Kynges pece.
Also ye shalbe redy at all your power, if ther be any debate or stryf, or oder sothan case of fyre within the towne, to help to surcess it.
Also ye shalbe redy at the obite[35] of Kyng Adelstan ... at the warnyng of the belman of the towne, and doe your dewte in ryngyng....’
Footnote 35:
A service held in memory of the death of a benefactor.
Then having taken the oath he will be required to ‘kysse the book.’
But in the eyes of the law our freeman is a felon—a man over whose head there hangs a charge of murder, and who will have little chance of proving his innocence of this charge. He must avail himself of the law established of old and confirmed by King Edward II.—
Let the felon be brought to the church door, and there be assigned unto him a port, near or far off, and a time appointed to him to go out of the realm, so that in going towards that port he carry a cross in his hand, and that he go not out of the King’s highway, neither on the right hand nor on the left, but that he keep it always until he shall be gone out of the land; and that he shall not return without special grace of our lord the King.
Such were the rights of sanctuary possessed by the Minster at Beverley. For the space of a mile around the church in every direction the peace of St. John extended, and within this circle—the boundaries of which were marked by the erection of a ‘sanctuary cross’ on each of the roads entering Beverley—partial safety was assured to all fugitives. But the nearer a fugitive got to the high altar of the Minster the safer he became. Seated in the _Frith-Stool_ that stood by the side of the altar he was absolutely safe; for none—not even the King himself—dare violate its sacred peace.
The Beverley frith-stool now stands in the chancel near the north-east transept. A plain, massive seat of stone it is, so massive and so simple in design that its age seems greater than that of the Minster itself. Possibly it dates back to the days of the Saxon King Aethelstan. It was once engraved, we know, with a Latin inscription, the translation of which ran thus:
This stone seat is called FREEDSTOLL, that is, chair of peace, on reaching which a fugitive criminal enjoys complete safety.
A frith-stool very similar to the Beverley one exists at Hexham Abbey in Northumberland, and in the village church of Halsham in our East Riding there is what is thought to be another. Here, however, the ‘chair of peace’ is built into the wall of the chancel between the sedilia and the priests’ door. No other examples are known in Yorkshire.
[Illustration: THE BEVERLEY FRITH-STOOL.]
Of sanctuary knockers still existing the finest is the Norman one on the north door of Durham Cathedral, but nearer home there is a good example on a door of All Saints’ Church at York. That which once existed, and which was so freely used, on a door of Beverley Minster has long ago disappeared, nor is there any known example in the East Riding.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_W. Watson_
Sanctuary Knocker on a Door of All Saints’ Church, York.
]
As an instance of the protection afforded to the people by the existence of this right of sanctuary, and of the power of the Church over the minds of even such Kings as William the Conqueror, may be given the story told by Alured,[36] a priest of the Minster of St. John in the reign of William’s son, Henry I.:—
At the time when William was engaged on his ‘Wasting of the North’ he had once pitched his camp seven miles from Beverley, and had caused all the people of the district to flee to the church for protection. Certain soldiers coming up intent on plunder made their way to the church, and their leader, Toustain by name, did not hesitate to spur his horse within its open door. But the vengeance of St. John came down upon him for his impious deed, his horse stumbled on the threshold, and Toustain fell with broken neck. Moreover, when his men picked him up, his head was found to be twisted towards his back, and his feet and hands were distorted like those of a mis-shapen monster. Fear came upon all the Norman soldiers, and when William was informed of the miracle that had happened, fear came also upon him; so that he confirmed all the privileges of the church, gave it a grant of lands at Sigglesthorne, and decreed that the lands of the blessed Saint John should be everywhere spared from the ‘Wasting.’
Footnote 36:
An old spelling of ‘Alfred.’
In affording protection to the innocent, the injured, and the oppressed, the Church was carrying on a good work. But we must remember that the same protection was afforded to those actually guilty of all possible crimes. The registers kept at Beverley show that during a space of sixty years in the reigns of King Edward IV., Richard III., Henry VII. and Henry VIII., those who claimed the right of sanctuary included:—
186 who were charged with murder, 54 ” ” ” ” felony, 1 ” was ” ” horse-stealing, 1 ” ” ” ” treason, 1 who was charged with receiving stolen goods, 7 ” were ” ” coining, 208 ” ” ” ” debt, 35 ” ” ” ” other crimes. —-- 493 who were charged with various offences.
In the Beverley registers there are 469 entries, of which all but a few are written in Latin. One of the English entries will give an idea of the kind of record kept:—
John Spret, Gentilman.
Memorandum, that John Spret, of Barton upon Umber, in the Counte of Lyncoln, gentilman, com to Beverlay, the ferst day of October, the vij yer of the reen of Keing Herry the vij, and asked the lybertes of Saint John of Beverlay, for the dethe of John Welton, husbondman, of the same town, and knawleg[37] hymselff to be at the kyllyng of the saym John with a dagarth,[38] the xv day of August.
Footnote 37:
Acknowledged.
Footnote 38:
Dagger.
It is evident from these 469 entries that the Beverley Sanctuary must have been of special repute. For the criminals who asked the liberties of Saint John of Beverley came from parts of Britain as wide apart as Lowestoft, Honiton, Haverfordwest, Anglesey, and Durham. No fewer than thirty came from London, Beverley itself provided five, _Preston in Holdernes_ three, and _Kyngestone super Hull_ ten; while others came from _Heydon_, _Hezell_, _Hoton Cransewik_, _Hogett super le Wolde_, _Otteryngham_, _Wetherwyk_, and fifty other towns and villages in the East Riding.
All ranks and conditions of life are represented among these entries, from the _armiger_ or knight, and _generosus_ or person of noble birth, down to the common _laborer_. The _goldsmyth_, the _surgyon_, the _grosiar_—an alderman of London—the _yoman_, the _chapman_, the _shepard_, and the _husbondman_ are there. So, sad to relate, is the _capellanus_, or chaplain; and among the tradesmen there are the _berbrower_, _bocher_, _bowyer_, _brykemaker_, _capper_, _coke_, _flecher_,[39] _fysshemonger_, _payntour_, _pewterer_, _plommer_, _pursor_, _pynner_, _saddiler_, _salter_, _syngyngman_, and _tawlowchaunler_.
Footnote 39:
A _flecher_, or _fletcher_, was an arrow-maker.
* * * * *
Under such circumstances as these, it is not wonderful that complaints of the misuse of sanctuary rights became frequent. In 1324 ten prisoners escaped from Newgate Jail, of whom five took refuge in one or other of the London churches, and thence escaped out of the country. In 1376 Parliament complained to the King that certain people got money or goods on loan, made pretended gifts of all their property to their friends, then went into sanctuary, and stayed there till their creditors were glad to accept some small portion of the debt in payment for the whole; after which they came out, received back their pretended gifts, and lived merrily on their ill-gotten wealth. Cases even occurred in which thieves and murderers left their place of sanctuary at nightfall, committed fresh crimes during the night, and returned to the ‘chair of peace’ again before daybreak.
So great did the scandal of this misuse of the privileges afforded by sanctuaries eventually become, that in 1623 Parliament passed a law that:
No sanctuarie or priviledge of sanctuary shal be hereafter admitted or allowed in any case.
The law was again passed in 1697, but it was not until the reign of George I. that the last sanctuary in our country was demolished.
XVII. HOW TWO KINGS OF ENGLAND LANDED AT SPURN.
In the old Norse account of the life of Harold Hardrada it is stated that after the battle of Stamford Bridge Olaf, the King’s son, ‘led the fleet from England, setting sail from _Hrafnseyri_.’ This is the earliest mention that we have of the bank of sand and shingle which is known to-day as Spurn Point, and the name of the place—‘Hrafn’s gravel-bank’—is evidence of both its general appearance and its ownership in the year 1066.
For two centuries after this we have no mention of it, but in the meanwhile there had grown up two settlements to each of which the name Ravenser was attached. _Ald Ravenser_—that is, Old Ravenser—was ‘inland, distant both from the sea and the Humber’; while _Ravenserodd_, or as we should write it, Ravenser Point, lay ‘between the waters of the sea and those of the Humber,’ and was ‘distant from the main land a space of one mile and more.’ Connecting the two was a sandy road ‘covered with round and yellow stones, thrown up in a little time by the height of the floods, having a breadth which an archer can scarcely shoot across, and wonderfully maintained by the tides of the sea on its east side, and the ebb and flow of the Humber on its west side.’
Of the birth of the former of these towns we know nothing, but the birth of the latter was described by one of the jurors in a lawsuit brought in the year 1290 by the men of Grimsby against the men of Ravenserodd. Several years before a ship had stranded on a sand bank, and the wreck had been taken possession of by an enterprising fellow who used it as a store for meat and drink which he sold to sailors and merchants. Then others came to dwell on the sand-bank, and in 1235 or thereabouts the Earl of Albemarl, Lord of Holderness, began there the building of a town.
* * * * *
The growth of this town must have been rapid; for in 1251 the King granted to the Earl of Albemarl the right to hold in Ravenserodd a weekly market and a fair lasting sixteen days. Then trouble began between the men of the town and the men of Grimsby, and the latter complained that
the men of the said town of Ravenserodd go out with their boats into the high sea, where there are ships carrying merchandise, and intending to come to Grimsby with their merchandise. The said men hinder those ships from coming to Grimsby, and lead them to Ravenser by force when they cannot amicably persuade them to go thither.
So we see that ‘peaceful picketing’ was not altogether unknown in these parts six hundred years ago.
At intervals during the reigns of Edward II. and Edward III. the men of Ravenser were called upon to provide a ship for the King’s wars against Scotland. In each case the ship was to be furnished with from thirty to a hundred of ‘the stoutest and strongest men of the town, with armour, victuals, and other necessaries.’ In 1332, also, an expedition of five hundred men-at-arms and two thousand archers set sail from Ravenser for Scotland, having on board Edward Baliol, Lord Beaumont, Lord de Wake, and others who wished to see Baliol crowned as King of Scotland. Their wishes were fulfilled, for the expedition was successful and Baliol was crowned at Scone.
From about this time the fortunes of Ravenser began to decline. Probably the superior privileges granted by King Edward to his _Kyngstown-svper-Hvll_ provided very largely the cause of the decline. The climax of its misfortunes came with a succession of extremely high tides about the year 1356—tides which ‘sometimes exceeding beyond measure the height of the town, and surrounding it like a wall on every side,’ caused its absolute destruction. In 1400 Ravenserodd was recorded to be ‘altogether consumed,’ while nothing remained of Ald Ravenser but a single manor-house.
* * * * *
Such was the condition of the once prosperous port when in the month of June, 1399, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, and grandson of King Edward the Third, landed on its site with sixty followers. As Henry of Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford, he had in 1398 been banished by King Richard II. for a term of six years, in order that a duel between him and the Duke of Norfolk might be prevented. As Henry, Duke of Lancaster, he now returned to claim the estates of his father, John of Gaunt, which estates Richard had confiscated on their holder’s death.
When Henry of Lancaster landed at _Ravenserespourne_, he found its sole occupant to be a hermit, by name Matthew Danthorpe. This hermit was engaged in building a chapel on the desolate bank of shingle; and great must have been his surprise when a ship carrying a company of well-armed men bore down upon his hermitage instead of passing up the river, as ships were accustomed to do.
Still greater must his surprise have been when he found that the ship belonged to a royal Duke, and that its arrival was shortly followed by arrivals from inland of the great Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and the Earl of Westmorland. His surprise was, probably, not unmixed with fear. For he was building his chapel without having obtained a license from the King, and rumours were soon flying about that Henry of Lancaster had come to claim something more than the estates which were his by right of descent.
These flying rumours soon became certainties. Other lords and barons rallied round the standard of Henry, and before long his sixty followers had become as many thousands. At the time of his landing King Richard was in Ireland; and when, after being long delayed by contrary winds, he landed on the coast of Wales, he soon fell into the hands of Henry and was taken a prisoner to the Tower of London. On the 30th of September Henry, addressing the Members of Parliament, spoke as follows:
‘In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster, challenge this realm of England ... as I am descended by right line of the blood coming from the good lord King Henry the Third.’
Then Parliament declared the abdication of King Richard the Second and the accession of King Henry the Fourth.
And what meanwhile of the hermit of _Ravenserespourne_? Had Henry forgotten him? On the last day of September Henry was proclaimed King, on the first day of October he signed at Westminster a royal license making known that:
Of our special grace we have pardoned and remitted to the said Matthew all manner of trespasses and mistakes committed by him in this matter....
And moreover, of our more abundant grace, we have given and granted to the said Matthew the aforesaid place, to hold to his successors, the hermits of the aforesaid place, together with the chapel aforesaid, when it shall be built and finished, and also the wreck of the sea, and waifs, and all other profits and commodities contingent to the sands for two leagues round the same place, for ever.
The landing of King Henry IV. at Ravenser Spurn was commemorated by the erection of a cross at the place of landing. Was it a grateful Matthew Danthorpe who erected it? Very possibly. At any rate it was erected within fourteen years of Henry’s landing. Many years afterwards it was removed to Kilnsea; later still it was removed to Burton Constable, and finally to Hedon, where it stands to-day in the garden of Holyrood House.
* * * * *
The reign of Henry IV. was followed by that of his son and that of his grandson. Then came in 1471 one of the most curious parallels in history that it is possible to imagine. The ‘Wars of the Roses’ had been discomforting the land for sixteen years. Henry VI. had been deposed in 1461, and Edward IV. had been elected in his place. But in 1470 Henry had once more been placed upon the throne and Edward had fled to Holland. A year later the latter returned, and landed on the same spot where Henry Bolingbroke had landed seventy-two years earlier.
The parallel, however, does not end with his landing. As Henry of Lancaster proclaimed that he had come merely to claim his ancestral lands, so Edward of York proclaimed that he had returned for this same purpose only. As a Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was the chief supporter of Henry of Lancaster, so a Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, came to the support of Edward of York. And as Henry of Lancaster was fated to depose and put to death King Richard II., so Edward of York was fated to overthrow and cause to be murdered King Henry VI.
It had been Edward’s intention to land on the coast of Norfolk. But finding a landing there impossible because of the guard kept by the Earls of Warwick and Oxford, he had headed his four large and fourteen small ships for the mouth of the Humber. The following is part of the account of his landing given by Ralph Holinshed, a chronicler living in the reign of Queen Elizabeth:—
The same night following, a great storme of winds and weather rose, sore troubling the seas, and continued till the fourteenth day of that moneth being thursday, on the which day with greater danger, by reason of the tempestuous rage and torment of the troubled seas, he arriued at the head of Humber, where the other ships were scattered from him, each one seuered from other; so that of necessitie they were driuen to land in sunder where they best might, for doubt to be cast awaie in that perillous tempest. The king with the lord Hastings his chamberleine, and other to the number of fiue hundred men being in one ship, landed within Humber on Holdernesse side, at a place called Rauenspurgh, euen in the same place where Henrie erle of Derbie, after called king Henrie the fourth landed, when he came to depriue king Richard the second of the crowne, and to vsurpe it to himselfe.
Richard, duke of Glocester, and three hundred men in his companie, tooke land in another place foure miles distant from thence, where his brother king Edward did land. The earle Riuers, and with him two hundred men, landed at a place called Pole, fourteene miles from the hauen where the king came on land. The residue of his people landed some here, some there, in place where for their suerties they thought best. On the morrow, being the fifteenth of March, now that the tempest ceased, and euerie man being got to land, they drew from euerie of their landing places towards the king, who for the first night was lodged in a poore village, two miles from the place where he first set foot on land.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] [_C.W. Mason_
Henry of Lancaster’s Cross. Now in the garden of Holyrood House, Hedon.
]
The landing of Edward IV. at Ravenser Spurn was not entirely to the liking of the men of Holderness. At first he was opposed by forces raised by ‘Syr John Westerdale,’ the vicar of Keyingham, and by a certain Martin atte See, or Martin de la Mare, a descendant of the first inhabitant of Ravenserodd. The vicar of Keyingham was afterwards cast into a London prison for his opposition, but Martin de la Mare was won over to Edward’s side, and was knighted eleven years later.
By his will Sir Martin de la Mare directed that he should be ‘beried in the queere of the parissh churche of Alhalowes in Barneston in Holdernes;’ and on the left-hand side of the chancel in this church there is an altar tomb, with a beautiful alabaster effigy, which until recently was thought to be his. It is, however, now known to be that of another knight who was buried at Barmston some fifty years before the death of Sir Martin de la Mare.
XVIII. LIFE IN A MEDIÆVAL TOWN.
[Illustration:
PRESENT SEAL OF THE BOROUGH OF HEDON. ]
What sort of life did the townsfolk lead five centuries ago? Suppose the townsfolk of to-day could suddenly be transported back five hundred years, what would be the things likely to strike them as most strange?
One of these would certainly be the way in which the town was cut off, as it were, from the surrounding district. Thus Hedon was cut off by two Havens, one natural, the other artificial, and by another artificial watercourse called the Town Moat. Beverley was entirely surrounded by a similar moat, part of which remains in our own day, and entrance to the town was gained by _Bars_ spanning the roads. Those at Beverley were known respectively as the North Bar, Newbiggyn Bar, Keldgate Bar, Norwood Bar, and South Bar.
[Illustration:
_Photo by_] North Bar Without, Beverley. [_C.W. Mason_
]
How early these Bars were built we do not know, but there have recently been discovered the complete accounts for the rebuilding of North Bar in 1409. This is the Bar which exists to-day, and it has, in its five hundred years’ existence, undergone little change, except for the cutting through it of two side-passages for foot traffic. It still has the massive oak folding doors which were shut every night at sunset, and the groove can yet be seen in which the portcullis worked. If you ride on through the Bar to York, you will enter that city by the Walmgate Bar, and above your head as you pass through this you may see the bottom spikes of its still remaining portcullis.
Hull was defended even more strongly than Beverley; for in 1322 the King granted to its townsfolk leave to defend themselves with a wall as well as a moat. A portion of the wall which they built is represented on the old plan of Hull reproduced in part on the opposite page.
This plan shows the town as it was about the year 1380, and makes very clear the difference between a town and a village five centuries ago. On the left bank of the river Hull is the village of _Dripole_, with its church and few scattered houses; on the right bank is the town of _Kyngeston-upon-Hull_, with its churches, houses, and gardens closely packed together within a castellated wall, and protected by a riverside battery armed with three small cannon. The shipping on the river is seen to be also protected, and this with an iron chain drawn across the mouth of the river.
In the part of the plan not here given, there is shown a more ominous sign of authority. Outside the Beverley Gate stands a gibbet on which hang the bodies of three culprits as warnings of the fate that comes to evil-doers.
* * * * *
To those accustomed to the wide and well-paved streets of our modern towns, the streets of a mediæval town would appear very strange. On the plan of Hull the two main streets, then known as _Aldgate_ and _Lowgate_, are shown fairly wide. But _High Street_, which follows regularly in its course the windings of the river Hull, is much narrower; and the by-streets of the town are so narrow as not to appear at all.
[Illustration: PART OF A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PLAN OF HULL.]
[Illustration:
HIGH STREET, HULL. Showing the ancient _King’s Head Inn_, now pulled down. ]
Streets in mediæval times were astonishingly narrow. The ‘High Street’ of Hull has changed little during the last five hundred years, and to-day there are portions in which two carts cannot pass each other. The extreme width of the western half of Grimsby Lane, one of the by-streets connecting High Street and the Market Place, named after Simon de Grymesby, Mayor of Hull in 1391, is only nine feet. So also the main street in Beverley now barely allows two vehicles to pass each other, and some of the side lanes entering it, such as Laundress Lane and Tindall Lane, are even narrower than the Grimsby Lane just mentioned.
In all these cases the roadway has remained practically the same width for a space of five centuries. But five centuries ago the condition of the road and the amount of air-space above it were very different from what they are to-day. Mediæval houses were built of thick beams of timber, with the intervening spaces filled in with brick and plaster, and security of the floors was obtained by making the second story project a foot or two beyond the first, and the third project similarly beyond the second. The result was a very firmly built house, but a very narrowly confined roadway.
[Illustration: SECTIONS OF A MEDIÆVAL AND A MODERN STREET.]
The difference between the mediæval and the modern style of road planning is shown in the above diagram, which gives to scale the building-lines of High Street and King Edward Street—the oldest and the newest business streets in the city of Hull.
Mediæval streets were paved with round cobble stones—such stones as still form the pavement of the market-places of Beverley and Hedon. It is on record that in the year 1400 two Dutch ships brought into Hull cargoes of these stones amounting to 56,000 in number. But the method of drainage was then exactly the opposite of what it is to-day; for the middle of the road was the gutter, or _kennel_. If we imagine that there were then no ‘dust-carts,’ and that each householder got rid of refuse by the simple process of casting it out into the kennel for the next shower of rain to wash away, we shall come to some idea of the general condition of the streets in a mediæval town.
Little wonder that in mediæval towns were bred foul diseases that broke out at intervals and sometimes carried off half the population in the course of a few months. In 1349—the year of the ‘Black Death’—1361, 1369, and 1451 the _Plague_ visited the East Riding, and there are to be seen in the chancel floor of Holy Trinity Church, Hull, the tombstone and brasses of a merchant named Richard Byll, who was one of its victims in the last-mentioned year.
* * * * *
Five centuries ago one of the privileges of a free borough was the holding of a market for the sale of goods by people who were not burgesses of the town. Every free borough had its market-place, which usually lay under the shadow of the parish church, as it does to-day at Beverley, Driffield, Hedon, Howden and Hull. The markets were held on certain fixed days of the week, and Tuesdays and Fridays have been the market-days at Hull since the granting of King Edward I.’s charter in the year 1299.
While the position of the market, and probably also its general appearance, have not altered during all these centuries, certain of its adornments have entirely disappeared. Beverley is the only town in the East Riding that has preserved its market cross. From all the towns of the East Riding have disappeared the stocks, the pillory, and the ducking-stool.
[Illustration: PARISH STOCKS PRESERVED IN BEVERLEY MINSTER.]
To the stocks and the pillory went in former times such men and women as ‘John Fleshewer, butcher,’ of Hedon, who in 1420 was brought before the town bailiffs on the charge that he ‘did sell flesh not useable, old, useless, and worthless,’ and ‘Agnes, wife of John Piese, schipman,’ also of Hedon, who ‘did sell two penny wheat loaves of bread, not useable and fusty.’ In the ducking-stool went to the town moat or the river the scolding woman whose temper and tongue were equally beyond their owner’s control. So the stocks, pillory, and ducking-stool proved themselves to be not only ornamental but also very useful.
The daily work of wage-earners five hundred years ago was very different from what it is to-day. There were then no such things as our huge factories in which thousands of ‘hands’ are employed day after day at the same monotonous toil. Work was more varied and the conditions were much freer. But hours were longer and pay was considerably less. The legal hours of the day labourer from March to September were 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., with two hours allowed for breakfast and dinner. On the other hand, ‘Bank Holidays’—or Holy-Days, as they were then called—were far more numerous. _Holy-days_, in fact, reduced the working-days of the year to only 264 in number.
The building-accounts for the Beverley North Bar in 1409 give a record of all the wages paid; and from these we find that the wages of a bricklayer were 6d. per day, of a labourer 4d., and of a carter with his horse and cart 12d.[40] What would the ‘British workman’ of to-day think of the following scale of wages, which formed the _statute yearly wages_ in 1444:—
With food and clothing.
s. d. s. d.
Bailiff of husbandry 23 4 or 5 0
Hind, carter, shepherd 20 0 ” 4 0
Labourer 15 0 ” 3 4
Woman servant 10 0 ” 4 0
Child under 14 6 0 ” 3 0
Footnote 40:
The total cost of the building operations, from the surveying of the ground to the ‘roseynyng’ of the doors, was £96 17s. 4½d.—about £2000 in our money.
The work of the _Trade Gilds_ in regulating the trade and industries of a town will be described in another chapter, but here is the place to refer to the work of the RELIGIOUS or SOCIAL GILDS which were so prominent a feature of mediæval town life. These were voluntary associations of men and women, who undertook to pay sums of money into a common fund, on which all members could draw during old age or during periods of sickness. In other words they were the Friendly Societies—the ‘Hearts of Oak,’ ‘Ancient Order of Foresters,’ and ‘Oddfellows’—of our own times.
At Hull there were six of these Gilds, the most important being the Gild of St. John Baptist, the Gild of Corpus Christi, and the Gild of the Holy Trinity. In the case of the first of these a member undertook to pay two shillings of silver each year, in four instalments, and derived the following benefits, on becoming ‘infirm, bowed, blind, deaf, dumb, maimed, ... either in youth or age.’:—
(1) weekly, one halfpenny of silver;
(2) at the Festival of St. Martin in winter 5s. of silver for one garment.
The entrance fee to this Gild was 13s. 4d., but that to the Gild of Corpus Christi was 3 lbs. of silver. Here, however, the ‘sick pay’ was correspondingly higher, being 14d. weekly; and if any brother or sister was in need 20s. was ‘granted on loan.’
In the reign of Edward VI. nearly all the Religious Gilds came to an end. Henry VIII. had intended their suppression, but it fell to the lot of Protector Somerset to be their actual destroyer. On the plea that they were engaged in religious services not in accordance with Government ideas, they suffered the fate of the monasteries; and their property in lands, houses, and plate—their invested funds we should call it to-day—was diverted to other purposes.
Of the Gilds at Hull the sole one to survive was the _Gild of the Holy Trinity_, which was founded in 1369 and later became identical with the _Shipman’s Gild_. This identity with the Shipman’s Gild in 1547 saved its life, and in place of being swept away its privileges were increased. It had many private benefactors, chief among whom was Thomas Ferries, who in 1631 gave it the estate of the Whitefriars on which its buildings now stand. King Charles II. granted it a charter in which it is stated that the Gild
hath much tended to the furtherance of Navigation, the increase of shipping, and the well breeding of Seamen in that Town and Port.
[Illustration: ARMS OF THE HULL TRINITY HOUSE.]
The Corporation of the HULL TRINITY HOUSE consists of twelve Elder Brethren, six Assistants, and an indefinite number of Younger Brethren. From the Elder Brethren two Wardens are chosen annually. They maintain several almshouses for mariners and their dependents, and one of the best navigation schools in the country; they also grant out-pensions to a large number of worn-out seamen.
* * * * *
We have dealt with the work of the townsfolk in the fifteenth century, but what of their amusements? Here they were certainly nothing like so well off as their descendants of the twentieth century. Of theatres and kinematograph shows they had none. Football matches they had occasionally. But it was with this difference—that a football match then was not one in which thirty men played while thirty thousand looked on and yelled their applause or disapproval. A football match in those days meant one in which the ‘field’ was the main street of the town, the ‘goals’ were the town wall or moat at either end of the street, and the ‘players’ were the whole body of townsfolk. Such a match is still played annually in at least one town of Northern England.
For the rest the people had their Church-Ales, their Miracle Plays, and their Fairs. CHURCH-ALES were parish feasts held in and around the church on the eve of the church’s saint’s-day; and to them each parishioner contributed his share—a dozen loaves, a cheese, or a few gallons of ale—the whole being then sold as required, while all present made merry. Church-Ales were, in other words, the ‘Parish-Teas’ and the ‘Knife-and-Fork Suppers’ of our own degenerate days.
As has been said, there were in mediæval towns no theatres. Still the townsfolk had their plays. In very early times the play-house was the church, the plays were representations of events recorded in the Scriptures, and the performers were the clergy.
In the thirteenth century, however, it became the custom for these MIRACLE-PLAYS, as they were called, to be performed no longer in the church, but on moveable platforms, known as ‘pageants,’ in streets and market-places, or on village greens, at the different fairs and festivals throughout the country. Yorkshire seems to have taken a prominent share in their creation; for we have to-day a manuscript of forty-eight plays performed regularly at York for two hundred years, and another of thirty plays performed at Wakefield. We know also that at Beverley such plays were produced each year on the festival of Corpus Christi—the Thursday after Trinity Sunday—from 1407 to 1604, and that at Hull the play of _Noah_ was performed in the streets once each year for a space of three centuries.
[Illustration: A MIRACLE PLAY IN THE OLDEN TIME.]
What the performance of a Miracle Play was like may be judged pretty well from the accompanying illustration. The pageant was a large ‘two-decker’ vehicle, which could be drawn by men or horses from one ‘station’ to another.
[Illustration:
NOAH’S ARK. (_From an old French Miracle Play_). ]
It was the custom at York for the first play in the series—_God the Father Almighty Creating and Forming the Heavens_—to begin on Corpus Christi morning at 5 o’clock. This was at the gates of the Priory of Holy Trinity. When this part of the Creation had been satisfactorily got through, its pageant passed on to take up its second station ‘at the door of Robert Harpham’; while another play showing _God the Father Creating the Earth_ took its place. And so on through the whole series, each play being thus performed at twelve different stations during the course of the day.
The performers of these plays were the members of the various Trade Gilds of a town. So far as the number of plays allowed, each Gild might have its own play, and the plays were as far as possible appropriately distributed. Thus at York the Goldsmiths had allotted to them _The Three Kings Coming from the East_, the Vintners had _The Turning of Water into Wine_, and the Butchers had _The Crucifixion_. At both York and Hull the Shipmen, or Mariners, had the play of _Noah_.
Stage properties were well looked after. The ‘ark’ used in a French performance of _The Deluge_ is here shown, while that used in the corresponding play produced each ‘Plough Monday’[41] by the Hull Shipmen was equally elaborate though built more in resemblance to an ordinary ship. It had mast and rigging, and pictures of the animals that ‘went in two by two’ hung round its sides painted on boards. From one festival to another it remained suspended from the roof of Holy Trinity Church.
Footnote 41:
The first Monday after ‘Twelfth Night,’ _i.e._ the Monday following January 6th.
Some curious items occur in the old accounts of the Hull Trinity House in this connection:—
To Robert Brown, playing God 6d.
To Noah and his wife 1s. 6d.
To a shipwright for clinking Noah’s ship, one day 7d.
For three skins for Noah’s coat, making it, and a rope to hang the ship in the kirk 2s. 5d.
When, in 1494, the Gild of the Holy Trinity had to purchase a new Ark, the accounts show also that the cost amounted to the tremendous sum of £7 4s. 11d.
The lower stage of the pageant is, in the illustration, shown to be curtained off. This lower stage was the actors’ dressing-room, and also served very conveniently as the ‘lower regions’ from which through a trap-door the Devil would emerge with horns and tail complete. God was stationed on a raised platform at the back of the upper stage, and appeared in the full dress of a Pope, saints had gilded hair and beards, and angels were dressed in white surplices through which their gilded wings projected.
Most impressive and realistic these must have seemed in the eyes of the beholders. But there were also ‘realistic effects’ to be seen—lightning, earthquakes, and the destruction of the world by fire—as the following items show:—
Payd for the baryll for the yerthequake iiij_d._ Payd for starche to make the storm vj_d._ Payd for settynge the world of fyer v_d._
How realistic also must have been the crossing of the Red Sea! For the children of Israel did actually cross it in the sight of all. ‘Halfe a yard of Rede Sea’—there it is down in black and white among the properties belonging to _Israel in Egypt_.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
A FOURTEENTH CENTURY ‘SHOW.’ (_From an old Manuscript_). ]
The mediæval Miracle Plays have long been dead in our country, but we still have with us the remains of the great mediæval FAIRS. In the days when few people travelled if they could possibly stay at home, and when for the whole of the winter months the state of the country roads prohibited all travelling except that on horseback, fairs were a necessity. The right to hold an annual fair was therefore an eagerly sought privilege.
Thus Beverley, Bridlington, Hedon, Howden, Hull—all these towns very early obtained the right to hold annual fairs. The Hedon townsfolk had their fair every year ‘on the feast of St. Mary Magdalen, and for seven days after,’ from the year 1162; and this fair continued to be held on Magdalen Hill down to 1878. The charter for the holding of a fair at Hull was granted in 1299, and the eleventh day of October, 1911, saw Hull Fair still in full swing.
To these mediæval fairs would come a large concourse of merchants, minstrels, pedlars, jugglers, and rogues. To them would come also householders and the stewards of manor-house and castle, eager to buy cloth, silks, ribbons, pots and pans, boots and shoes, wine, wax, malt, a store of butter to last over the winter, or a store of salt for preparing the winter meat supply.
[Illustration:
BEAR-BAITING. A fifteenth century wood-carving in St. Mary’s Church, Beverley. ]
Among the entertainment providers would come the owner of the ‘wild beast show’—the show consisting of a solitary elephant or dromedary, or, much more frequently, an ape and a bear. If it is a bear that is the showman’s stock-in-trade, then there will be a chance for dogs that have grown sated with indulgence in the sport of bull-baiting to experience a new sensation.[42]
Footnote 42:
The old ‘bull ring’ to which bulls were tethered at a bull-baiting in the market-place of Kilham is now built into the bank of the churchyard wall.
Hither also would come that strange product of the middle ages—the pardoner. He professes to have from the Pope power to grant pardons for sins committed, or even for sins to be committed, if only satisfactory payment is forthcoming. To prove his genuineness he has a wallet full of parchments, brought straight from Rome, and all duly stamped with large seals. And if that is not enough for his credulous audience he has holy relics to show—a piece of the sail of St. Peter’s boat, and a feather from the wing of the angel Gabriel.
He has also the shoulder bone of a holy Jew’s sheep, which is guaranteed to cure disease in any cow, calf, ox, or sheep, if the bone be but washed in a bucket of water and the sick animal’s tongue well cleaned with this water. ‘One penny’ is all his charge. ‘Bring your buckets full of water. Now’s your chance! If you lose it, your sick cow, calf, ox, or sheep may be dead in the morning, and you’ll be sorry ever afterwards that you didn’t take my advice.’
Thus does the rascal do a roaring trade.
XIX. THE TRADE UNIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
With the Trade Unions of our days almost everyone is to some extent acquainted. Certainly everyone who lives in a town is acquainted with them. For, in the first place, most workmen in a town belong to a trade union; and, in the second place, many who are not ‘workmen’, in the usual meaning of the word, are made uncomfortably aware of the existence of one or other of the Trade Unions when what is called a ‘Strike’ takes place.
Many people, if asked their opinion, would say that Trade Unions are a purely modern institution—that it is only in our own times that workmen have found the usefulness of binding themselves together in a ‘Union’ for the obtaining of benefits which singly they could not expect to gain. But such an opinion would be wrong. Trade Unions, though called by a different name, existed in our country six, seven, and even eight hundred years ago.
What we call by the name of Trade Unions were in former times known as CRAFT GILDS. They had this name because they were clubs, or fraternities, or brotherhoods, of men who were engaged in some branch or branches of handicraft, and who paid a fine—originally known as _gildi_—to obtain the privileges of membership.
In all towns there were found these Craft Gilds. Thus in 1406 Beverley had thirty-eight, and the Craft Gilds of Kingston-upon-Hull in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included those of the Weavers, the Tailors, the Glovers, the Joiners, the Carpenters, the Shipwrights, the Bricklayers, the Cobblers, the Shoemakers, the Coopers, the Brewers, the Innholders, the Bakers, and the Barber Chirurgeons. Each of these crafts had its own Gild. But, on the other hand, the Goldsmiths, Pewterers, Plumbers, Glaziers, Painters, Cutlers, Musicians, Stationers, Bookbinders, and Basketmakers had to be content with one Gild among them; and a strange medley their Gild must have been.
There was one great difference between these Craft Gilds and our Trade Unions. Whereas the men who belong to the latter are the employed workmen, those who belonged to the former were both the employers and the employed, both the masters and the men. Hence the rules of the Gilds were framed not only to protect the workmen against hard and unjust masters, but also to protect the masters against dishonest and careless workmen, and, in addition, to protect the public from being defrauded by either dishonest masters or idle workmen. How each of these good results was effected will be seen from the following extracts, taken from the rules of different Craft Gilds belonging to Kingston-upon-Hull.
* * * * *
First, we will consider the protection of the workman. Before a _Weaver_ might set up in business for himself he must pay xij_d._ to the Alderman of his Gild for the inspection of his workhouse by the searchers, who would search whether his workhouse were ‘good and able’ or not. If they were satisfied on this point, then the owner was permitted to begin business on payment of an ‘upsett’ of iij_s._ iiij_d._ No woman was allowed to work at this trade within the town upon pain of xl_s._ Nor might a _Tailor_ keep any manner of workman tailor employed within his dwelling-house. Again, no _Joiner_ might withhold his servant’s wages over the space of six days after the same were due. If he did, the servant could get from the Warden an order for their payment, and the master’s penalty for disobeying this order was xij_d._
For the protection of the masters there were corresponding laws:—
If any of the brotherhood of the _Bricklayers_, being at work with any man, do, in the time of his work, resort unto the alehouse or do play at dice, cards, or any other unthrifty game, he shall forfeit and pay for every time so doing viij_d._
So also, in the rules of the _Shipwrights_, a very heavy penalty was imposed upon the workman who for mere caprice threw down his tools and left his work unfinished:—
If any person shall be lawfully retained in work by the day, and shall unjustly and unlawfully leave or depart from the same until such time as the same work shall be fully finished, he shall forfeit and pay to the master warden for every such offence forty shillings of lawful money of england.
The protection of the public was equally well looked after. No person might set up or keep an Inn, unless he could make and furnish four comely and decent guest beds; and every _Innholder_ was obliged to have in his house, ready-made, four bottles of hay, to be shown to the searchers at all times when they came to make search. Thus the comfort of both man and beast was ensured to travellers.
All manufactured goods were to be open to inspection by the searchers of the particular Gild, and any scamped or fraudulent goods were ‘seized and forfeited.’ Thus a rule of the _Shoemakers’ Gild_ stated that—
The searchers shall well and diligently search and try all boots, shoes, buskins, slippers and pantoufles,[43] whether they be made of leather well and truly tanned and curried, and well and substantially sewed with good thread, well twisted and made and sufficiently waxed with wax well rosined, and the stitches hard drawn with hand leathers.
Boots and shoes made under these regulations were intended to last in wear for a substantially long time, and brown paper inner soles and wooden heels would stand a poor chance of passing the inspection of the searchers. On the shelves of the Hull Museum may be seen some pairs of boots made and worn two hundred and fifty years ago, and still almost ‘as good as new.’
Footnote 43:
The French name for slippers.
A rule of the _Brotherhood of Cobblers_ reads quaintly. But, doubtless, it proved a very useful rule:—
If any cobbler shall keep any work brought to him longer than two days, without consent of the owner, he shall forfeit for every offence the sum of two shillings and sixpence.
One is bound to imagine that there was in those days a brisk trade in ‘Boots Mended While You Wait.’
Prices were also well looked after. ‘That no one presume to sell a pound of candles for more than one penny, or a gallon of the best ale for more than the same, or a gallon of small ale for more than a half-penny’—so runs one of the laws as to prices. Bakers’ charges were regulated according to the price of wheat. A farthing and a half-penny were fixed as the price of loaves, but the weight of the loaf varied. Thus in 1267, when wheat was one shilling a quarter—
White bread cost ½d. per 13 lbs. Wheat bread ” ” ” 20 ” Horseloaves[44] ” ” ” 27 ”
Footnote 44:
Horse loaves were coarse bean bread, something like the modern dog-biscuit, and used as a winter food for horses.
The employment of cheap unskilled labour was expressly guarded against. In general, no master might keep more than one or two apprentices, and each apprentice must serve for a space of seven years. By the latter rule there was a kind of guarantee that an apprentice would learn his craft thoroughly before becoming a journeyman. No alien might be taken as an apprentice, and in many towns night-work was forbidden, as being usually inferior to day-work.
* * * * *
When an apprentice had ‘served his time’ and learned his craft, he might, in his turn, become free of his Gild and so earn the right to sell the product of his hands. But this right to sell was carefully guarded, as the following regulations of the _Coopers_ and the _Bakers_ show:—
No cooper, unless he be first free burgess of this town and free of this company, shall keep any shop in this town upon pain of 5s. weekly.
No person or persons dwelling without this town shall sell any bread or cakes within this town otherwise than on the Tuesdays and Fridays, market days, in open market.
If a craftsman was thus protected against undue competition from outsiders, so he was protected against undue competition from those who had a desire to encroach on someone else’s preserves. Carpenters might not work as joiners or as shipwrights, cobblers might not work as shoemakers, nor might shoemakers work as cobblers. ‘Every man to his own trade’ was a maxim of the middle ages, and there was then no call for a ‘William Whiteley’ or a ‘Selfridge’s, Ltd.’
Sunday labour and Sunday trading were expressly forbidden in all Gilds:—
No shopwindows of the fraternity of _Shoemakers_ shall be opened upon the sabbath days in pain of every default viij_d._
No brother exercising the crafts or mysteries of a _Barber_ or _Peruke-maker_ shall upon the Lord’s day, commonly called Sunday, either out or in time of divine service, work, or keep open his shop, on pain to forfeit for every time he shall be found so doing the sum of ten shillings.
Again, it is interesting to find that ‘Sunday Closing’ was provided for in the following regulation:—
No _Vintner_ or _Aleseller_ shall sell any ale or wine unto any one before 11 o’clock on Sunday, unless to strangers, under penalty of vj_s._ viij_d._
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Most interesting of all the thirty-eight Craft Gilds of Beverley is that of the Minstrels. The charter of this Gild was confirmed by ‘the gracious goodness of our most virtuous sovereign Lord and Lady, King Philip and Queen Mary,’ and is said to date ‘from the time of King Aethelstan, of famous memory.’
[Illustration: THE BEVERLEY MINSTRELS.]
In 1520 the tower of St. Mary’s Church, Beverley, fell, and destroyed in its fall the greater part of the nave of the church. Various families of the town undertook the rebuilding of some portion of this, and one portion—the north-east pillar and the wall and roof above it—was rebuilt at the expense of the _Gild of the Minstrels_. This fact is recorded on a tablet placed high up on the pillar, where may be read these words:—
THYS PYLLOR MADE THE MEYNSTYRLS.
Attached to the east face of the pillar are also figures of five ‘meynstyrls,’ each gaudily coloured and holding his particular musical instrument—a tabor and pipe, a large viol, a shawm, a cittern, and a wait or hautboy.
Besides these numerous Craft Gilds there were MERCHANT GILDS, or, as we should call them to-day, ‘Trading Companies.’
The distinction between the two kinds of Gilds is not always clear, and in some cases a trader belonged to both. But in general the Craft Gilds contained men who by their daily work changed the form of a thing, while the Merchant Gilds contained those whose daily work consisted of trading in a thing without changing its form. Thus, the Merchant Tailors bought and sold cloth, but the Tailors made the cloth into clothes. And just as to-day it is ‘much more respectable’ to be an egg-merchant than to be a pastry-cook, so, five centuries ago, it was equally ‘more respectable’ to be a merchant-tailor than a tailor pure and simple.
[Illustration:
ARMS OF THE HULL MERCHANTS’ COMPANY. ]
Chief among the Merchant Gilds of Kingston-upon-Hull were the _Gild of the Merchant Adventurers_, originally known as the ‘Brotherhood of St. Thomas of Canterbury,’ and the _Hull Merchants’ Company_. During the reigns of the Tudor and Stuart Kings, these did much to foster the trade of Hull with the great ports on the other side of the North Sea.
A charter was granted to the Hull Merchants’ Company by Queen Elizabeth, and King Charles II. renewed it on receipt of ‘fifty pounds of good and lawful money of England.’ The members of the Company met in the Merchants’ Hall—the upper story of the red-brick building on the south of the Market Place, now known as the Choir School—and a ‘merchant’s mark’ is still to be seen cut in three stone panels in the front wall of the building. They were a wealthy Company, and at one time had much power. Fines or ‘upsetts’ for the privilege of membership ranged from 6s. 8d. to £20.
It is interesting to find that the Hull Merchants’ Company acted as a Post Office for foreign correspondence. ‘Masters of ships’—so ran one of the laws governing their Exchange—must
hang up a bagg a week before their sailing, that merchants may putt their letters therein, and soe the masters to take the same away the night before they intend to saile.
Equally interesting is it to find that the Hull merchants of the seventeenth century were, evidently, firm believers in the modern doctrine of ‘Protection.’ For, by one of the statutes regulating the trade of the port, all alien merchants must bring their goods to the Exchange and must pay one penny in the pound for the privilege of sale.
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What an insight into the working-lives of the townspeople, whether traders or craftsmen, we have given us in the ancient documents of the Merchant Gilds and Trade Gilds! As Canon Lambert says in his _Two Thousand Years of Gild Life_, they ‘bring back into view the everyday life of the town in the centuries of which they treat. As we study them we can mingle again in the vigorous life of the narrow streets. We can learn how it was that the men of that time built houses of which the mortar stands to-day as hard as stone; we can picture the barber looking askance at the upstart man who presumed as surgeon to molest his ancient right of letting the blood of his customers at the fall of the leaf; we can look into the mysteries of the brewing-vat as it was before tea had usurped the time-honoured place of the pewter at the breakfast tables of society; we can see the shipwrights who made the ships of Elizabeth at work; we can walk, as it were, along the small booths and shops, and judge of the quality of the goods which had come from Hamburg or Muscovy, or which had been fashioned with such care in the workshop behind the parlour.’
Of the _Religious_ or _Social Gilds_, which existed at even earlier times than the Merchant and Craft Gilds, something was said in