Leicestershire is pre-eminently a hunting county. To name the Quorn among hounds is to name the best known, and to mention Melton Mowbray is to name the metropolis of fox-hunting; while the hunting-field is so largely composed of peers that the rustics commonly address the wearer of pink as “my lord,” leading to the well-known retort of a sporting commoner that they “don’t know a gentleman when they see him.”

It is the county of pork-pies, and once claimed to rear the largest sheep and grow the heaviest fleeces. Not so much has been said of Leicestershire as an industrial county, but its hosiery trade is the largest in England. Despite the stockingers, the bootmakers, and in some districts the coal-miners, Leicestershire is nevertheless a very agricultural and rural county. “Bean-belly” Leicestershire Drayton calls it, and there is a “Barton-in-the-Beans” near Gopsall; but there is, on the other hand, also a “Barton-in-Fabis,” or “Barton-in-the-Beans,” in Nottinghamshire. The corollary of being “bean-bellied” seems to be dull-witted; but, if we are to judge from Leicestershire folklore, the people are gifted with exceptional humour, of the saturnine kind, as witness this reproof to the boastful:

And here is another example:

“Like Hudson’s pig?”

“Yais. ’Niver hard on ’em, ’a s’pose?”

“No.”

“Whoy, ’a thowt, th’ silly feller, as they wer a-gwine ter kill ’en, and they wuz on’y arfter putten a ring trew ’is noaze.”

There is a tragical variant of this, in which “Joe Stokes’s” pig is the unfortunate hero—“Ye’re loike Joe Stokes’s pig: ’e thowt as how ’e wer a-gwine ter hev ’is brekfuss, but they wuz a-gwine ter mek poark on ’en.”

The days when Market Harborough was a little market-town, interested in nothing else but agriculture and hunting, are done. It is now, indeed, a busy little place, and, with its various industrial enterprises, not so little as it was. Chief of these is Symington’s corset factory, employing 580 hands; but elsewhere may be noticed manufactories of rubber soles and heels, pea-flour, and numerous other articles of commerce. Its remarkably broad chief street, where the cattle-markets and the October Fair have been held for many centuries, is still, however, on ordinary days singularly empty; and now that a Cattle Market, costing £28,000, has been built, is less characteristic than of old. But it is a magnificent picture, this of Harbro town, that unfolds itself before the traveller as he comes in along the road. There, peaking up grandly, are the exquisite tower and crocketed spire of the ancient church, very lovely and worshipful, with the old timber-framed Grammar School humbly beneath, founded in 1614 by Robert Smyth, an old City of London official, its sides decorated with plaster panels and its stout timbers adorned with pious mottoes: the open space beneath designed for use as the Butter Market.

The church is dedicated to St. Dionysius the Areopagite. No one need be very greatly ashamed of not knowing precisely what that was, by way of a profession. The Oblate Fathers suggest a problem in Euclid, and to be an Areopagite suggests a performer on the flying trapeze; but really St. Dionysius was not so flighty a character. He was the judge of the Areopagus in Athens, before whom St. Paul disputed on the subject of worshipping the Unknown God, and whom he converted. Dionysius became Bishop of Athens, and suffered martyrdom in A.D. 95.

The interior of the great building disappoints expectations aroused by the beauty of the outward view.

It was not until 1614 that this became the parish church of the town. Magnificent though it be, it was formerly only a “chapel-of-ease,” and the mother-church was that of St. Mary-in-Arden, a mile distant. The remains of that church may yet be seen, in its grim, crowded, and disused churchyard, woefully overhanging the railway sidings, busy night and day, and noisy always.

as Tennyson says.

Here the inquisitive stranger may find the epitaph of “Susanna Wells, Cook of the Three Swans in Market Harborough, Forty-one Years. She died 19 June 1774. Aged 59 Years.” A simple calculation proves that she began to cook early. I had rather have partaken of the cooking of her fifty-eighth year than of her eighteenth.

In two miles from Market Harborough, as proclaimed by the milestones—which spell the name of the town and Leicester, “Harbro” and “Lester”—one comes to Gallow Hill, with a fragment of old road, rugged and sunken, on the right hand, where the highwaymen used to lurk under the shadow of the gibbet-tree. At the cross-roads below stands what was once an inn, now divided into squalid tenements; and on the tall ridge to the right stand the villages of East, or Church, Langton, Thorpe Langton, and Tur Langton, remarkable for the doings of a former incumbent.

William Hanbury, born 1725, died 1778, rector of East Langton early in the time of George III., was a forceful person. He became rector in 1753, his father, a wealthy man, having purchased the advowson; but he had already, two years earlier, begun his huge planting operations in the neighbourhood. He introduced plants and seeds from all parts of the world, but was particularly enthusiastic in the cultivation of fruit-trees, and the neighbourhood is still, as a result of his labours, and the example he set, exceptional in fruit-growing. In 1758 he wrote and published “An Essay on Planting, and a Scheme for Making it Conducive to the Glory of God and the Advantage of Society.” He was a man of ideas that grew steadily larger and more impracticable. The first proposal, to annually dispose of the produce of the fruit-trees and thus to create a fund of £1,500, of which the interest was to provide for the decoration of the church, developed into a plan for amassing a £4,000 fund for the building of a hospital and schools, and this in its turn became a grandiose scheme for a series of Church Musical Festivals to be held in the surrounding districts. The income from all these sources was to accumulate until it reached a total sum sufficient to produce an income of £10,000 or £12,000, which was to be expended in founding a minster, a choral establishment, a public library, picture-galleries, a hospital, schools, a printing office, and many other things. The minster was to be in relation to all other cathedrals what cathedrals are to chapels. A central tower was to rise to a height of 493 feet, and its other dimensions were to be in proportion: the western towers themselves to be 399 feet high. No other cathedral that ever was, or would be, should rival this. St. Paul’s? Pooh! The most magnificent buildings yet known were to be squalid beside its walls, floors, and columns of marble, and the porphyry and jasper that were to decorate its choir.

A city, so this odd projector anticipated, would spring up around these institutions, and included in it were to be, in his own words, “two pompous inns.” If any difficulty were experienced in the carriage of building materials, a canal from quarries in the neighbourhood of Stamford was to be dug to Market Harborough, and if possible the quarries of Ketton and Weldon were to be purchased.

When he anticipated all these things would come to pass does not appear. A capital sum of at least a quarter of a million sterling would be required, to yield the income he considered sufficient: and you could not, even with £12,000 per annum, make much headway with such a cathedral, to say nothing of these expensive sideshows.

In 1770, the income of the trust was £190 17s.; and by 1863 it had risen to £900, when the trustees successfully applied to the Court of Chancery to vary the trust deed, for the purpose of expending a sum of £5,000 upon necessary repairs to the three Langton churches, and of applying a further sum to school purposes.

The church of Church Langton is a massive Early English structure on a large scale, containing monuments of this singular projector and successors of his kin. It has been very thoroughly renovated from the funds released by sanction of the Court. Hanburys still preside here.

There is a good deal of interest in the immediately surrounding country. Away across the meadows on the other side of the road are Foxton Locks, on the Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Union Canal. Every visitor to Harbro hears of Foxton Locks, and is bidden go see them; and indeed they are remarkable achievements in modern engineering, putting those of the old canal engineers to the blush. They are visible quite a long way off, looking like the gear at the mouth of a colliery, and consist of an elevated engine-house installed with powerful machinery that raises or lowers the modern lock—practically a large tank—with barges floating in it. This replaces the remarkable old series of ten locks that scale the hill like some Jacob’s ladder, and are now discarded. The new lock, completed in 1898 at a cost of £37,000, was undertaken for the purpose of saving water, wasted in large quantities in the old order of things, but a great deal of time is also incidentally saved by the new methods.

Proceeding again along the road, the church tower of Kibworth appears among clustered woods on a height above the railway station of that name. The Midland Railway and other moderns call the place “Kibworth” merely, but it is properly Kibworth Beauchamp, while adjoining is the infinitely more handsome twin-village of Kibworth Harcourt, which, however, has no church of its own.

A quaint memorandum in the register of Kibworth Beauchamp, under date of 1641, seems to have been made by the parson as the readiest means of absolving himself from blame for not properly keeping his books. It runs:

“Know all men that the reason why little or nothing is registered from this year 1641 until the year 1649, was the Civil Wars between Charles and his Parliament, which put all into a confusion till then; and neither minister nor people could quietly stay at home for one party or the other.”

There is a suspicion, in the wording of this, that the parson was heartily sick of both sides.

The Rev. James Beresford was presented to the living by Merton College, and held it for very many years, dying in 1840, aged seventy-seven. He was author of a book on the “Miseries of Human Life,” published in 1826, which, in spite of its doleful title, is not the work of one who has surveyed existence and found all to be vanity; but is cast in a humorous form, as humour was then understood. He possessed a pretty wit, and a quaint sarcastic manner, showing prominently in the story told of him and some junior fellows of Merton whom he observed prospecting over his garden wall, in view of his possible decease, and the living falling vacant.

He went out to them and politely said, “Walk in, gentlemen, walk in and take stock, not only of the parsonage, but of the present incumbent. Most happy at all times to do anything to oblige you—except die.”

An epitaph in the churchyard to “Mr. Lewis Powel Williams, Surgeon,” who died in 1771, aged forty, declares “He was the first that Introduced into Practice; Inoculation without Preparation.” A similar claim is made at Worth Matravers, in Dorset, for Benjamin Jesty in 1774, but with the careful proviso that he was the first “known” to have practised it.

Glen Magna, three miles onward, more commonly known by the English form, “Great Glen,” is said by the villagers (of neighbouring villages) to contain “more dogs than honest men.” The sting of this saying is supposed to reside in the alleged fact that Great Glen has ever been singularly deficient in dogs. And so it remains to this day; and, so far as the observation of the present writer goes, the deficiency extends to houses and inhabitants as well. Great Glen, in short, is one of those many places that are great in name and ludicrously small in fact. The wayside church is almost all the wayfarer sees. It has a Norman south porch with carvings of weird horses whose tails stand erect over their backs, like Scotch pines: a kind of horse not known outside the region of nightmare.

At Oadby, in another two miles, the influence of the great and still rapidly growing town of Leicester begins to be felt. The old church stands in the centre of the village, and narrows the road almost into the semblance of a lane. The east window of the north aisle, looking upon the road, is of the Decorated period of Gothic and is enriched with the comparatively rare “ballflower” moulding. An epitaph on three brothers and three sisters Davenport, “who lived together in a state of Celibacy in the same House 54 years, deservedly esteemed for their suitable demeanour and punctual integrity,” and died in the years 1820-7, seems to show that their “race suicide” was more approved then than it would be now apostles of increase are raising their voices.