Part 4

A great portion of the Minster is in the Decorated style; not, however, conceived in the inspired vein of the west window. The nave and chapter-house cover the period of the sixty years during which Decorated Gothic flourished, and making the round of the exterior we find its characteristic mouldings and traceries repeated in a long range of seven bays, interrupted by the beautiful compositions of north and south transepts, entirely dissimilar from one another, but individually perfect, and the most entirely satisfactory features of the exterior. The architects of that period were more fully endowed with the artistic sense than those who went before, or those who succeeded them, and their works, and the more daring and ambitious, but something braggart, designs of their successors, remain to prove the contention. Eastward, beyond the transepts, extends the long, nine-bayed choir, the view of it obscured from the north by the protruding octagonal chapter-house, but well seen on the south, where the soaring ambition of its designers may advantageously be compared with the more modest but better ordered art of the unknown architect who built the south transept. The architects of the choir would seem to have dared their utmost to produce the largest windows with the smallest proportion of wall-space, and to have at the same time been emulative of height. With these obvious ambitions, they have succeeded to wonderment in rearing a building that is nearly all windows, with an apparently dangerously small proportion of walling to hold them together, but a building which has already survived the storms of five hundred years structurally and essentially sturdy and unimpaired. A great engineering feat for that time, rather than a masterpiece of artistry, as those who stand by and compare south transept and choir, visible in one glance, can see. That the perceptions of those who built the choir were blunted is proved by the almost flat roof their ambition for lofty walling has necessitated. With their side walls carried up to such a height, abutting against the central tower, they could not obtain the steep pitch of roof which is seen on the transepts, for a higher pitch would have committed the architectural solecism of cutting above the sills of the great tower windows, into the windows themselves. Thus their lofty choir is robbed of half its effect and looks square-shouldered and ungraceful by comparison.

An odd and entirely inexplicable device is found outside the four eastern windows of the choir clerestory, north and south, in the placing of the triforium passage outside the building, and the screening of it and the windows with a great skeleton framework of stone. The reason of this—whether it was a mistaken idea of decoration, or for some structural strengthening purpose—is still to be sought. But the east end is an equally crude and artless piece of work, almost wholly given up to the east window; the small flanking windows looking mean and pinched by comparison, and the abundant decoration characterised by stupid repetition and want of invention. Here we see the Perpendicular style at a very low ebb, and thus it is not altogether a disadvantage that the road is so narrow at this point that a full view of the east end is difficult to obtain.

Criticism is at once disarmed on entering. One enters, not by the great portals in the west front, but by the south porch, the most impressive entrance, as it happens. For this is at once the noblest and the earliest portion of the great church, and here, in one magnificent view from south to north we obtain one of the finest architectural vistas in England. Majesty personified, these Early English transepts are in themselves broad and long and lofty enough to furnish a nave for many another cathedral. Spaciousness and nobility of proportion are the notes of them, and even the beautiful nave, with its aisles, light and graceful, loftier and broader than almost any other in the land, dwindles by comparison. They produce in the surprised traveller who first beholds them the rare sensation of satisfaction, of expectations more than realised, and give an uplifting of spirit as thrilling as that caused by some inspiring passage of minstrelsy. To stand at the crossing and gaze upwards into that vast tower which looks so clumsy to the outward view, is to receive an impression of beauty, of combined strength and lightness, which is not to be acquired elsewhere, for it is the finest of lantern towers, and, open to the vaulting of its roof, a hundred and eighty feet above the pavement, its great windows on all sides entrap the sunbeams and shed a diffused glory on arcade and pier. Perhaps one of the most daring attempts at effect is that which confronts the visitor as he enters by the south porch. Daring, not from the constructional, but from the decorative point of view, the five equal-sized lancet windows, the “Five Sisters” that occupy three parts of the space in the wall of the north transept, might so easily have been as glaring a failure as they are a conspicuous success. Their very prominence has doubtless given them their name, and caused the legend to be invented of their having been the gift of five maiden sisters. The beauty of the original Early English glass which still remains in these lancets has a considerable share in producing this successful effect. That the unearthly beauty of that pale green glass is preserved to us, together with much more in the Minster, is due to Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentary general, himself a Yorkshireman, who kept the pious but narrow-minded and mischievous soldiery in order, who otherwise would have delighted in flinging prayer-books and missals through every window in this House of God, and have accounted it an act of religious fervour.

We cannot explore the Minster in greater detail, for the road yet lies in many a league before us; nor recount how York, city and shire, broke into rebellion when the old religion was suppressed by Henry the Eighth, and the Minster’s treasures, particularly the head of St. William, stolen. The Pilgrimage of Grace was the result, in which the Yorkshire gentlemen and others assembled, with Robert Aske at their head, and taking as their badge the Five Wounds of Christ, prepared to do battle for their Faith. Aske ended on a gallows from the height of Micklegate Bar. The same troubles recurred in the time of Elizabeth, and Yorkshire, the last resort of Roman Catholicism, was again in arms, with the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland conspiring with the Duke of Norfolk to release the captive Queen of Scots and restore the old religion. The movement failed, and Northumberland was executed on the Pavement, others being put to death or deprived of their estates. That was the last popular movement in favour of the old faith, and although the city had been prelatical and Royalist during the first years of Charles the First’s reign, public opinion at last veered completely round, so that shortly after the Parliamentary victory of Marston Moor in 1644, and the consequent surrender of the Royalist garrison of York, the city became as Puritan and republican as it had been the opposite. Gifts made by Charles to the Minster were torn down and dispersed, the very font was thrown out, and dean and chapter were replaced by four divines elected by an assembly. Many of the York parish churches were wrecked by fanatics carrying out an order to destroy “superstitious pictures and images,” and nearly all were without incumbents. When the restoration of the monarchy and the church was effected together in 1661, York became “one of the most factious and malignant towns in the kingdom,” and two years later broke into a revolt for which twenty-one rebels were executed. The final outburst occurred in 1688, when James the Second was suspected of an intention to appoint the Roman Catholic Bishop of Callipolis to the vacant see of York. The bishop was taking part in a religious procession through the streets when an infuriated mob set upon him and seized his silver-gilt crozier, which was taken as a trophy to the vestry, where it may yet be seen. The bishop fled. A few days later James the Second ceased to reign, and with that event ended these religious contentions.

[Picture: All Saints’ Pavement]

IX

BUT the stirring history of the Minster itself was not yet completed, for the final chapter in a long record of events was not enacted until the early years of the nineteenth century.

The roads in the neighbourhood of York on February 2, 1829, were thronged with excited crowds hurrying to the city. Dashing through them came the fire-engines of Leeds, and others from Escrick Park. Far ahead, a great column of smoke hovered in the cold February sky. York Minster was on fire.

It was no accident that had caused this conflagration, but the wild imaginings of one Jonathan Martin, which had prompted him to become the incendiary of that stately pile. A singular character, compacted of the unlovely characteristics of Mawworm and the demented prophet, Solomon Eagle, this was the crowning act of a life distinguished by religious mania. Jonathan Martin was born at Hexham in 1782, and apprenticed to a tanner. His parents were poor, and he had only the slightest kind of education. At the expiration of his apprenticeship he found himself in London, and was speedily entrapped by the press-gang and sent to serve his Majesty as an able seaman. It seems to have been at this period that the unbalanced state of his mind first became noticeable. He was with the fleet at many places, and often in action, from Copenhagen to the Nile. At times he would exhibit cowardice, and at others either indifference to danger or actual bravery. He would be religious, dissolute, industrious, idle, sulky, or cheerful by turns: a pretended dreamer of dreams and communicant with angels. “Parson Saxe,” his shipmates named him; “but,” said one, years afterwards, “I always thought him more rogue than fool.”

Martin was paid off in 1810. He settled to work for a farmer at Norton, near Durham, and shortly afterwards married. He became a member of the Wesleyan Methodist body at Norton, and began those religious exercises which he claims to have converted him and to have emancipated him from the law, being “justified by faith” only. How dangerous such views of personal irresponsibility can be when held by the weak-minded his after-career was only too plainly to show. He immediately conceived an abhorrence of the Church of England, as a church teaching obedience to pastors and masters, and of the clergy for their worldliness. In this last respect, indeed, Martin—as we think now—had no little justification, for the Church had not then begun to arise from the almost Pagan slough of laziness, indifference, and greed of wealth and good living which throughout the previous century had marked the members of the Establishment, from the country parson up to the archbishops. When clergymen could find it in them to perform the solemn rite of the burial service while in a state of drunkenness; when, under Martin’s own observation at Durham, the Prince-Bishop of that city enjoyed emoluments and perquisites amounting to £30,000 per annum, there is little cause for surprise that hatred and contempt of the cloth should arise.

This basis of justification, acting upon a mind already diseased, and not rendered more healthy by fasting and brooding over the Scriptures, resulted in his attempting to preach from church pulpits, in writing threatening letters to the clergy, and eventually to a silly threat to shoot the Bishop of Oxford when at Stockport. For this he was rightly confined in a lunatic asylum at Gateshead. Some months later he managed to escape, and after wandering about the country took service with his former employer at Norton, the magistrates consenting to his remaining at liberty. In 1822 he left for Darlington, where he lived until 1827. His wife had died while he was in the asylum, and in 1828, while engaged in hawking a pamphlet biography of himself at Boston, he made the acquaintance of a young woman of that town and married her. By this time his religious mania had grown worse, and when, on December 26, 1828, he and his wife journeyed to York, it would appear that he went there with the design of burning the Cathedral already half-formed. He haunted the building day by day, leaving denunciatory letters from time to time. One, discovered on the iron grille of the choir screen, exhorted the clergy to “repent and cry For marcey for know is the day of vangens and your Cumplet Destruction is at Hand for the Lord will not sufer you and the Deveal and your blind Hellish Docktren to dseve the works of His Hands no longer. . . . Depart you Carsit blind Gides in to the Hotest plase of Hell to be tormentid with the Deveal and all his Eanguls for Ever and Ever.”

Violent language! but one may hear harangues very like it any day within Hyde Park, by the Marble Arch. There are many incendiaries in the making around us to-day, and as little attention is paid to them as to Martin’s ravings.

Undoubtedly mad, he possessed something of the madman’s cunning, and with the plan of firing the Cathedral fully formed, set out with his wife for Leeds, as he gave out, on the 27th of January. At Leeds he remained a few days, and was remarkable for his unusually quiet and orderly behaviour. He left on Saturday morning, ostensibly for Tadcaster, saying he should return on the Monday; but went instead to York. Here the madman’s cunning broke down, for he stayed at a place where he was well known; at the lodgings, in fact, that he had left a few days before. He prowled about the Cathedral the whole of the next day, Sunday, and attended service there, hiding behind a tomb in the north transept; overheard the notes of the organ—the finest in England—thundering and booming and rolling in echoes amid the fretted roofs. The sound troubled the brain of the maniac. “Buzz, buzz,” he whispered; “I’ll teach thee to stop thy buzzing,” and hid, shivering with religious and lunatic ecstasy, in the recess until the building was empty.

[Picture: Jonathan Martin, Incendiary]

The short February day closed, and left the Cathedral in darkness; but he still waited. The ringers paid their evening-visit to the belfry, and he watched them from his hiding-place. He watched them go and then began his work. The ringers had left the belfry unlocked. Ascending to it, he cut a length of about a hundred feet off the prayer-bell rope, and, with his sailor’s handiness, made a rough ladder of it, by which to escape. Those were the days before lucifer matches. He had come provided with a razor, which he used as a steel; a flint, tinder, and a penny candle cut in two. Climbing, then, into the choir, he made two piles on the floor of prayer-books, curtains, hassocks, and cushions, and taking a candle from the altar, cut it up and distributed it between the two. Then, setting light to them, he set to work to escape. He had taken a pair of pincers from the shoemaker with whom he lodged, and breaking with them a window in the north transept, he hauled his rope through, and descended into the Minster Yard, soon after three o’clock in the morning.

The fire was not discovered until four hours later. By that time the stalls were half-consumed, and the vestry, where the communion plate was kept, was on fire. The plate was melted into an unrecognisable mass. By eight o’clock, despite the exertions of many willing helpers, the organ-screen was burnt, and the organ-pipes fell in thunder to the pavement, to the accompaniment of a furious shower of molten lead from the roof, which was now burning. The city fire-engines, those of the Cathedral, and others from Leeds and Escrick were all playing upon the conflagration that day, and the 7th Dragoon Guards and the Militia helped with a will, or kept back the vast crowds which had poured into the city from far and near. It was not until evening that the fire was quenched, and by that time the roof of the choir, over 130 feet in length, had been destroyed, and with it the stalls, the Bishop’s throne, and all the mediæval enrichments of that part of the building. Curiously enough, the great east window was but little damaged. The cost of this madman’s act was put at £100,000. A singular coincidence, greatly remarked upon at the time, was that on the Sunday following this disaster, one of the lessons for the day was the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, the Church’s prayer to God, of which one verse at least was particularly applicable: “Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is burned with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste.”

Martin was, in the first instance, connected with the outrage by the evidence of the shoemaker’s pincers he had left behind him. They were identified by his landlord. Meanwhile, the incendiary had fled along the Great North Road; first to Easingwold, thirteen miles away, where he drank a pint of ale; and then tramping on to Thirsk. Thence he hurried to Northallerton, arriving at three o’clock in the afternoon, worn out with thirty-three miles of walking. That night he journeyed in a coal-cart to West Auckland, and so eventually to a friend near Hexham, in whose house he was arrested on the 6th of February. Taken to York, he was tried at the sessions at York Castle on March 30th. The verdict, given on the following day, was “not guilty, on the ground of insanity,” and he was ordered to be kept in close custody during his Majesty’s pleasure. Martin was shortly afterwards removed from York Castle to St. Luke’s Hospital, London, in which he died in 1838. Two years later, the Minster was again on fire, this time as the result of an accident, and the western tower was burnt out.

[Picture: York Minster on Fire, May 20th, 1840]

Insanity in some degree ran through the Martin family. His brother John, who died in 1854, was a prominent artist, whose unbalanced mind did not give way, but led him to paint extraordinary pictures, chiefly of Scriptural interest and apocalyptic horrors. He was in his day considered a genius, and many of his terrific imaginations were engraved and must yet be familiar: such pictures as “Belshazzar’s Feast,” “The Eve of the Deluge,” “The Last Man,” and “The Plains of Heaven”: pictures well calculated to give children nightmares.

X

WE must now leave York for the North. To do so, we proceed through Bootham Bar, where the taxis linger that ply between the city and the railway station.

Let us glance back upon the picturesque sky-line of City and Minster and read, maybe, the modern explanatory historical inscription placed on the ancient Bar. Thus:—

“Entry from North through Forest of Galtres. In old times armed men were stationed here to watch, and to conduct travellers through the forest and protect them against the wolves.

“The Royal Arms were taken down in 1650, when Cromwell passed through, against Scotland. Heads of three rebels exposed here, for attempting to restore Commonwealth, 1663.

“Erected on Roman foundation, probably early in 13th centy.

“Interior rebuilt with freestone, 1719.

“The portcullis remains.”

So, in those ancient times when the Forest of Galtres lay immediately before you on passing out of Bootham Bar and going North—the forest with wolves and bandits—you stepped not into a suburb, but came directly off the threshold into the wild.

[Picture: Bootham Bar]

To-day, outside the walls we come at once into the district of Clifton, after Knavesmire the finest suburb of York; the wide road lined with old mansions that almost reek of prebendal appointments, J.P.’s, incomes of over two thousand a year, and butlers. It is true that there are those which cannot be included in this category, but they are here on sufferance and as a foil to the majesty of their superiors, just as the Lunatic Asylum a little farther down the road gives, or should give, by contrast a finer flavour to the lives of those who have not to live in it. There is another pleasing thing at Clifton, in the altogether charming new building of the “White Horse” inn, which seems to hint that they have at last begun to recover the lost art in Yorkshire of building houses that are not vulgar or hideous. It is full time.

Would you see a charming village church, a jewel in its sort? Then, when reaching Skelton, three miles onward, explore the bye-road at the back of the village, over whose clustered few roofs its Early English bell-cote peeps. But a moment, please, before we reach it. This “bye-road” is the original highway, and the “back” of the village street its old front. There is a moral application somewhere in these altered circumstances for those who have the wit, the inclination, and the opportunity to seek it.

[Picture: Skelton Church]

The improved road, a hundred years old, is carried straight and level past the rear of the cottages, and the rugged old one goes serpentining past the front doors, where the entrance to the “Bay Horse” looks out across a little green to where the church stands, the faded old Bay Horse himself wondering where the traffic that use to pass this way has all gone to. The signs of the “Bay Horse” and the “Yorkshire Grey” are, by the way, astonishingly frequent on the Great North Road.

But the church. It is an unpretending building, without a tower, and only a bell-cote rising from its broad roof; but perfect within its limits. Early English throughout, with delicately-cut mouldings, beautiful triple lancets at the east end, and fine porch, the green and grey harmonies of its slate roof and well-preserved stonework, complete a rarely satisfying picture. A legend, still current, says it was built from stone remaining over after the building of the south transept of York Cathedral, in 1227. The Church in the Wood it was then, for from the gates of York to Easingwold, a distance of thirteen miles, stretched that great Forest of Galtres, through which, to guide wandering travellers, as we have already seen, the lantern-tower and burning cresset of All Saints in the Pavement, at York, were raised aloft.

Red deer roamed the Forest of Galtres, and bandits not so chivalrous as Robin Hood; so few dared to explore its recesses unarmed and unaccompanied. But where in olden times these romantic attendants of, or dissuading circumstances from travel existed, we have now only occasional trees and an infinity of flat roads, past Shipton village to Tollerton Cross Lanes and Easingwold. This country is dulness personified. The main road is flat and featureless, and the branch roads instinct with a melancholy emptiness that hives in every ditch and commonplace hedgerow. A deadly sameness, a paralysing negation, closes the horizon of this sparsely settled district, depopulated in that visitation of fire and sword when William the Conqueror came, in 1069, and massacred a hundred thousand of those who had dared to withstand him. They had surrendered on promise of their lives and property being respected, but the fierce Norman utterly destroyed the city of York and laid waste the whole of the country between York and Durham. Those who were not slain perished miserably of cold and famine. Their pale ghosts still haunt the route of the Great North Road and afflict it, though more than eight hundred years have flown.