The electric tramways, without which no town nowadays considers itself fully furnished, run far out to the north, through the extended boundaries of “Greater Northampton” to the village of Kingsthorpe: the prosperity of the town certified to every beholder in the long lines of newly completed streets butting on to the fields, and in the new boot and shoe factories, from which you do not indeed hear the noise of the lapstones—such things being obsolete in these days of machinery—but the purr and the humming of wheels.

Just outside the borough boundaries are even more factories, built there for the frugal purpose of avoiding the borough rates; and so, in one way and another, Kingsthorpe, which was not so long since a rural village, with quiet village green, has now been invaded by the restless spirit of the age. Even the village inn has been rebuilt by the inevitable Phipps & Co., and might now, to all appearance, save for the sign of it, be a Jacobean mansion, renovated.

The apparent prodigality of the highway authorities at Kingsthorpe, in the matter of milestones, is a standing wonder to all wayfarers, for there, side by side, are two cast-iron “stones,” each giving sixty-seven miles to London, with distances to other places. The explanation of this singularity is that here, in the old days, the Kingsthorpe and Welford Trust and the Northampton and Market Harborough Trust met. The “stone” erected by the first gives thirteen miles to Welford, twenty-nine to Leicester, and one to Northampton: the other indicates sixteen miles to Market Harborough and one to Northampton.

To the right of the road on to Brixworth rises among a group of trees on the skyline a tall obelisk that piques curiosity. Traversing muddy lanes to the base of it, the explorer afflicted with an inquiring mind discovers, to his disgust, that it bears no inscription, and local inquiries result only in vague rustic talk of its being a monument to the great Duke of Wellington. Research proves it to be to a Duke of Devonshire; but although the rustics are thus proved to be wrong, the attitude of mind that leads them astray is, it will be allowed, entirely in order. From father to son the story has been handed down that it is in memory of a Duke: what other Duke, therefore, should be possible than the great warrior who still bulks so large in their imagination? They rightly cannot conceive that a Duke who has merely succeeded to a dukedom, and just existed in that state, has a claim to such recognition. But the thing is not without its sardonic irony. Built to keep alive the memory of an obscure dead Duke, it is known in all the countryside as a monument to one whose fame will not die, and needs no such memorial.

This monument that has missed its mark stands at the parish of Boughton (locally pronounced “Bowghton”), famous, together with the adjoining Boughton Green, for the exploits of “Captain Slash.” There was once a church, dedicated to St. John Baptist, at Boughton Green, but the tower and spire fell in 1785, and the district becoming gradually depopulated, the body of the church has long been a roofless ruin. The green is nowadays, except for one annual occasion, merely a desolate common. In former days, however, it was bordered by the cottages of more or less virtuous and contented peasantry, who did so excellently well during the old three-days’ horse-fair held here in June that they lived in comfort all the rest of the year. To the old horse-fair resorted horsey blackguards from many a shire, who swindled the innocent and each other, and fought and got drunk and slept in the ditches, whereupon the simple rustics, recognising that it was harvest-time, promptly went over their pockets. But the good old days are done. The police established a lock-up on the ground for the drunken and for other offenders, and then by degrees the fair itself decayed, until to-day it is but a one-day ghost of itself. The brick hut used as a lock-up still stands on the green.

But we must not forget “Captain Slash,” whose real name was George Catherall, a desperado of the highwayman type, who did a little rick-burning and general rural outraging in the ’20’s of the nineteenth century, and brought his lawless career to a dramatic close in 1826. He attempted, with the gang he captained, to let loose the lions in the menagerie on the fairground, hoping in the confusion to make away with a rich haul; but this desperate proposal was defeated on the eve of accomplishment. Very ancient gaffers at Boughton still tell the tale of dread as they heard it in their youthful days: how “Haaron Gardner ‘it’n auver th’ yed with a nedge stake,” and so brought about his capture, and how “Slash” was sentenced to death, and on July 21st was duly executed at Northampton Gaol, and the land had peace. It was certainly very late in the day for outlaws, but not too late for superstition, for newspaper reports of the execution tell how “a number of females immediately ascended the drop and had their wens rubbed.”

And so, passing the site of the old “Bowden” or Boughton Inn of coaching days, to Brixworth, meeting, possibly, on the way, a straining field of the Pytchley Hunt, in whose country we now are. You must be careful how you enunciate “Pytchley.” John Bright once mentioned it in the House of Commons. He called it the “Pitchley,” and stood aghast at the howl of derision which arose from the assembled fox-hunters masquerading as legislators. It was a fox-hunting House then, and “Labour” (i.e. well-paid agitators acting the part) was not dreamt of. Pytchley is your only way, although to be sure there are heretics who call it the “Patchley.” But they are worse barbarians than Bright, who knew no better.

Brixworth is an old, old place, truly “old arnshunt,” as the rustics say; but the latter-day discovery that it is profitable to work the ironstone beds situated here is just beginning to hustle the grey Roman and Saxon antiquity of it, with a fringe of red-brick cottages. Red brick in a country where building stone is of the plentifullest!

Many evidences of the presence here of the Romans have been discovered, and the great grim church of Brixworth, built largely of Roman brick and tile, has been thought by antiquaries to be, in fact, a Roman basilica. Roman coins have also been found in fairly large numbers; but history tells of no camp or town of that people here; and this is no Roman road. The church, locally said to be the “oldest in England,” appears to have been built or adapted by the Saxons so far back as A.D. 690, and thus “Briclesworde,” as it is styled in Domesday Book, was of a hoary antiquity even when that genuine antique, William the Conqueror, “came over.” The church was then a dependency of the great monastery of Medehamsted—the “Peterborough” of to-day—and until the vicarage was rebuilt, some fifty years since, remains of a monastic house were visible in its cellars.

The exterior and interior of the church are alike very striking, and the curious staircase tower added to the west side of the original tower is of particular interest, having been built on to the early Saxon tower in later and unsettled times, for the purpose of putting the church in a defensible condition against the forays of the Danish rovers then laying waste the country. The entrance was formerly by a door in the western face of the tower, but this semi-circular addition abolished all access that way. The upper stages and the spire are, of course, very much later, having in fact been built in the Decorated style of the fourteenth century. Rude masonry and irregularly disposed herring-bone patterns of Roman tile form the walls.

The interior, as of most other Saxon churches, is more curious than beautiful, however archÆologically rare it may be. It consists nowadays of nave, chancel, semi-circular apse, and south chapel; but there were formerly narrow north and south aisles, as the walled-in nave arcades show. At what period these were destroyed does not appear. The apse is a modern rebuilding of the original, destroyed about 1460, but the ambulatory around it was not rebuilt. Large Gothic windows at various periods replaced the original Saxon small round-headed windows of the nave, but they have been abolished, and replicas of the Saxon work placed in their stead; which, however pleasing to sticklers for uniformity in matters architectural, was archÆologically a crime demanding the penalty of peine forte et dure, or something especially excruciating. To destroy a genuine Decorated or Perpendicular window for the purpose of inserting a modern “Saxon” one—probably framed in with specially made “Roman” tiles—is distinctly Grimthorpian, and not playing the game according to the rules understood by the most enlightened. Recent excavations have brought to light the bases of Roman columns in the churchyard and in the church itself, and in short, ever since about a century ago, when people grow curious about antiquities, the building has been a kind of archÆological lucky-bag. You scrape the plaster off a pier and discover a stone sculptured with a Roman eagle; disregarding spiders and immemorial dust, you thrust a hand into an ancient hole in the nave wall, and lo, out comes a reliquary containing the “Adam’s apple” that once waggled in the holy throat of Bishop Boniface. In fact, anything is possible at Brixworth:

as Peter Pindar might say; while many intimate anatomical belongings of the saints are doubtless even yet secreted on the premises.

The road in the centre of Brixworth street dips down steeply in a tree-shaded hollow, and is very narrow, with stone walls on either side. In one of these may still be seen, recessed slightly, the spring representing “Bartlet’s Well,” opened in 1631 by Margaret Bartlet “for the use of travellers.” But although the spring is in going order, I observe that the travellers who pass this way prefer the tipple kept at the inn, hard by.

Two miles and a half ahead, and then less than a quarter of a mile to the right hand, lies Lamport, but so hidden that none would suspect its existence. The wayside “Swan” inn, opposite the by-road, derives its sign from the Swan crest of the Ishams, the ancient owners of Lamport (whose name, by the way, is pronounced I-sham, not Ish-am). Lamport is a village of whose kind there are still, happily, many hundreds in England, in spite of the hurry and fever of the age. It is small, it is beautiful in a mild way, it is quiet, and no celebrated or merely notorious person has ever done it the honour to be born within its bounds. A little more beauty, a slight connection with history, and it would become a place of resort. I suspect that this something less than a quarter of a mile remove from the road must in these latter days be a profound source of congratulation to the inhabitants, who live, by virtue of it, “the world forgetting and by the world forgot,” or at least by those undesirables who thunder along the main road in motor-cars, enveloped, and enveloping others, in clouds of dust. Such an one passed me on the road, equipped with some damnable new contrivance in place of the usual horn: a shrieking something like a soul in torment. As the yelling abomination died away and the dust began to settle down, and the trees could again be seen and the birds heard, I wondered why such things could be permitted to exist.

Lamport church stands by the wayside, and opposite is Lamport Park, the seat of the Ishams. The Hall, though by no means remarkable for its architecture, is curious by reason of the family mottoes and pious sentiments carved on the exterior, by which you gather that the Ishams have always been amiable persons, and prone to find amusement in small things. Even their name seems ever to have afforded them a perennial source of enjoyment. It suggested to some remote forbear the idea of a punning Latin motto, Ostendo non ostento; Englished as “I show I sham not.” This is duly set forth along the front of the Hall, together with “In respect of things etarnal, life is vayn and mortal,” and “In things transitory resteth no glory.”

Most amiable of all this amiable race was the late Sir Charles Isham, who did indeed give Lamport a kind of minor celebrity. I think he was the gentlest and courtliest of creatures, who, if indeed he left the world in no respect better than he found it, at least left it none the worse, and, ending at a ripe old age a rather aimless life, was regretted in perhaps a derogatory way as “a harmless old gentleman.” Thus lived and died the tenth Baronet, defeating the superstition that all baronets are bad.

For over forty years he busied himself in constructing a miniature rock-garden at one side of the Hall. Amid boulders piled up to represent a mountain-range, with gullies, rock-pools and caves, he planted dwarf-trees and rare shrubs of the stunted kind the Japanese know so well how to grow; and there he placed among the caves and on the miniature cliffs, groups of little gnomes: fairy miners, with wheelbarrows and pickaxes, with the verse:

Day after day he would sit contemplating this life-work, with one of his pet hawks on his wrist, and his tame owls in the holes he had constructed for them overhead. And now the hawks and the owls are gone, and the rock-garden is uncared for.

In Lamport church a monumental brass with long inscription to his wife reveals the man he was:

Emily
Wife of the
tenth Baronet
commenced real life
Sept. 6th, 1898, aged 74 years,
after an union of 51 years with her
thankful husband, who through spiritual light
finds that joy is triumphant over grief.
Thoughtful towards others,
Kindness itself,
Beloved by all,
At her dear wish is added
this Message,—
“Bear ye one another’s burdens.”

The last words were: “I’m dying” No! my wife, This is the Portal of the Higher Life:

I spoke no more, and neither did I weep. Next morn at nine she passed in sweetest sleep.

Sleep on! Sleep on, my Dearest; sleep your best; After such years of weariness now rest.

Or are you full awake? It may be so; Or in some happy dreamland? who doth know,

That home-made elm casket deftly wrought, Betokens love: also inspired the thought.

Although at times we might not quite agree, All knew I lived for you, and you for me.

Oh! lovely Lamport, now she’s gone from here, I have consigned thee to my cousin Vere.

I spake these words in truth, I show I sham not, Isham I am, and Isham yet I am not.

The second motto “In things transitory Resteth” (and not without some truth) “No glory,”

But still, may gifts from Heaven on thee rest, And thus that house be glorified and blest.

Whatever there may still remain of life, At night and morn I contemplate my wife,

And at the time appointed may we meet, And her sweet Spirit be the first to greet.

Reader, observe, the life inscribed above, Evinced much happiness, more pain, most love.

Charles Edmund survived his beloved until
April 7, 1903, aged 83.
This also is his monument, he objects to more.

The living of Lamport is held jointly with that of Faxton, a good three miles away: a place with no road to it for the best part (or? “worst part”) of one of those three miles. Why, then, does the explorer explore in such forbidding circumstances? Aye, why indeed? I ask myself as, quartering a succession of phenomenally water-logged meadows in search of spots free from the fathomless mud, I make slow and painful progress, horribly aware that the way I have come is the only route back. Well, there is a reason in all things; even in this. In Faxton church there is a monument to Sir Augustine Nichols, Justice of the Common Pleas, who formerly resided here, and was poisoned in 1616, when on circuit at Kendal, by four women, to prevent him passing sentence of death on one of their relatives. Another monument is in Kendal church, where he is buried.

The effigy of him is kneeling at a desk, and on either side he is supported by figures representing Justice and Fortitude, with Temperance and Prudence above. Justice once held her appropriate scales, but they have been broken off. The villagers, to whom classic imagery was unknown, were firmly convinced that the scales represented the weighing of the poison that put an end to the judge.

The little church of St. Denis, Faxton, stands on the edge of a wide, common-like expanse showing many traces of old foundations of buildings, and bordered by half-a-dozen cottages, most of them far gone in decay and deserted. There is no semblance at all of any roadway into the place. The church itself is rotting with damp and mildew, and giant fungoid growths, unreal and fantastic-looking as the imaginings of pantomime, fasten themselves upon its walls, and heave up the stones of the floor. An afternoon service every Sunday more than fulfils the needs of the few inhabitants. But the church, of the interesting period between the Early English and Decorated styles, shows many traces of beauty, and there are finely sculptured corbels, an ancient font, and a sand-table—on which, in the quaint educational methods of over a century ago, children were taught to form the letters of the alphabet with finger-tips in the sand.

Returning to the main road from the muddy hazards and chances of Faxton, a steep descent leads down to the railway level-crossing at Lamport station, and thence steeply up again to the crest of Hopping Hill, where a “Traveller’s Rest” in the form of an elaborate wooden seat stands on the grass, inscribed, “Rest ye, wearie traveller. Jubilee, 1897. Reginald Loder.” It was the squire of the adjoining Maidwell Hall who placed the seat. They do not all jubilate who rest here, for I perceive the inscription, among others, “Sat here, pennyless, June 1st, 1906. J. West, stoney-broke. Pray for me.”

A fine elm avenue conducts into the well-cared-for village of Maidwell, and thence out again. On the left hand is Kelmarsh with church floridly restored and its chancel elaborately lined with beautiful (but incongruous) marbles which the squire, one Naylor, brought home in his yacht from old villas in Rome. At a loss what to do with them, he eventually gave them to the church. He lies outside, in the churchyard, under a tomb of polished granite of the gigantesque and vulgarian orders of architecture. All other tombstones have been abolished, and he lies in a solitude that looks truly imperial.

Away on the left, three miles and a half distant, is the field of Naseby, on the ridge yonder, crowned by the obelisk for remembrance. There, on that lofty plateau, on June 13th, 1645, in shock of battle, the cause of King Charles was finally ruined, and the pursuit that followed the fight tailed away in slaughter towards the north-west. The unfortunate King showed to better advantage at Naseby than at almost any other period in his career. Clad completely in armour, he was in the thick of the fight, and would have rallied his disheartened cavalry for a last effort, had he not been restrained. “Face about once more: give one charge more and recover the day,” he cried, and was placing himself in advance, when the Earl of Carnwath laid his hand upon the bridle of his horse, and restrained him. “Will you go upon your death in an instant,” he said, and turned the horse’s head into the flight that then became general. It is a fine incident, but it had been better, after all, had the Earl let the unhappy King have his way, and go to his death in arms for his cause.

The road, descending from Kelmarsh by Clipston railway station, passes the unremarkable village of Oxendon, and thence comes into the growing town of Market Harborough, where we finally leave the district of the good Northants building-stone and come across the river Welland, into the clays of Leicestershire, and towns and villages of red brick.