SUMMARY OF TOUR IN MID-YORKSHIRE

Distances.

Roads.

No very serious hills except at Rievaulx.
Surface: main roads excellent; by-roads poor.

III

CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES

It is hard to turn away from the sea so soon. If we find it too hard to bear we may stay at Scarborough for a couple of nights, and, taking a short run down the coast, may see Filey, and the white cliffs of Flamborough, and the beautiful priory church of Bridlington, in a few hours. Then we can turn westwards with less discontent, especially if we make a short dÉtour by Scalby, Hackness, and the Forge Valley.

Hackness lies in a nest of trees. Every road that leads to it is lovely. As we run down through glades and woods to this sheltered, still retreat, this green bower of sweeping boughs, it is easy to understand how deeply restful it must have seemed to St. Hilda of Whitby and to the monks of a later day. Hilda founded the tiny community here, and made it a cell of her own great abbey, hoping, perhaps, to come here herself sometimes when she was tired of living in the teeth of the wind. The little grey church, wrapped and hidden in the trees, is partly Norman, partly Early English, but has various relics in it belonging to the Saxon life of Hilda's nunnery: a broken cross or pillar inscribed with runes, and a Saxon stone built into a Norman arch. A tablet on the wall tells how "the Lady Hilda of royal descent did for the sake of security and retirement establish a nunnery or cell for 8 nuns at Hackness." The fortunes of the place rose and fell with those of its parent abbey, for when Whitby was destroyed by the Danes in the ninth century, Hackness, too, was utterly wiped out. Then came the Norman revival. But "thieves and robbers coming out of the forests and dens where they lurked, carried away all the monks' substance, and laid that holy place—Whitby Abbey—desolate. In like manner pirates, void of all compassion, landing there, came and plundered the monastery." So the monks' benefactor, William de Percy, gave them this retreat, already sacred to the memory of their great predecessor, where, like her, they might find security and retirement. Even to-day those priceless boons are to be found at Hackness. Even on an August afternoon, when the Forge Valley may almost be described as crowded, there are security and retirement in the green nest at Hackness.

Two miles of moderately pretty country lie between these two places. We see the thick woods before us like a wall across the landscape, and the archway of trees that spans the road is the gate into the Forge Valley. This little glen is too famous for its own good; but not a word of its fame is undeserved. In the early morning it must be quite perfect in its own gentle way, with its little river winding under the trees beside the road, and the grassy banks, and the cool woods rising on each side, and the paths that leave the wayside and disappear alluringly into the shadows. But in the afternoon of a summer's day, when the grass is strewn with bowler hats, and every birch-tree is the background of a family group, flight is best. The flight is quite a short one, for the valley is on a miniature scale.

At its mouth, in a field beside the Derwent, is the ruin that was once Ayton Castle, a shattered tower that seems to have had many owners in turn, Attons and St. Johns and Euers and Cliffords, and was no doubt very useful in defending the narrow defile through which we have just driven. It came to the Cliffords with Margaret Bromflete, who was descended from one of the Attons, and was the wife of Clifford the Butcher. This was the Lady Clifford who saved her son's life by sending him away into hiding when the cause of the Red Rose seemed altogether lost: so this fragment of masonry is probably one of the many castles that were restored to the Shepherd Lord when Henry VII. became king. It is a place after the Shepherd's own heart, for in his day no doubt the valley of the Forge was as peaceful as Hackness. Indeed, only a hundred years ago, a writer described the neighbourhood of Ayton as "grotesquely rural."

The beauty of the scenery ends rather suddenly as we drive through the two Aytons, East and West, and go on our way to Pickering. However, the road is level and has an excellent surface, and if the landscape is a little dull the villages are pretty. We pass through a series of them, all more or less alike and all built mainly of grey stone, for we are near the moors. On the outskirts of Brompton is Gallows Hill, whence, from her brother's farm, "the phantom of delight," Mary Hutchinson, came out one autumn morning to marry Wordsworth in the church whose spire rises on our left. With the bridegroom was Dorothy, a little sad-hearted we may guess; and with the "perfect woman" was her sister Joanna, that "wild-hearted" girl who found her brother-in-law's "dear friendships with the streams and groves" so comical that her laughter on the subject once raised echoes from all the hills of Grasmere. The church in which this wedding took place is interesting for its own sake, and contains, I have read, a memorial to a sixteenth-century soldier, "who in wars to his greit charges sarved oin kyng and tow quenes with du obediens and died without recumpens." I did not see this, but quote it for the sake of those who collect curious epitaphs.[5]

Beyond Brompton the road skirts Ebberston and Allerston, and passes through Thornton-le-Dale, where a stream of some size runs by the wayside from end to end of the village, and an old cross stands among flowers. This village has a name for beauty, and like some other beauties takes a little too much pains to keep that reputation. It is certainly a pretty village, but it has rather a self-conscious air. Pickering is about two miles away.

Pickering is not particularly beautiful, but its ruined castle, and above all its wonderful church, should certainly be seen, for one rarely finds a church whose relics represent so many dates. The font is Saxon, the pulpit Chippendale, and between these two extremes of craftsmanship—the roughly hewn stone and the delicately chiselled wood—are the fourteenth-century tombs and the fifteenth-century frescoes, and the Elizabethan chest. When Leland was here he saw and noted this figure of Sir William Bruce, and the "cantuarie bering his name," and that other effigy, of alabaster, with the "garland about his helmet," which represents Sir David Roucliffe and no Bruce, though Leland calls him one. Of these strange frescoes above our heads, which make the special fame of Pickering Church, there is no word in Leland's record. Possibly these pictured saints and virtues—St. Christopher and St. George and the Corporal Acts of Mercy—were so often to be seen in churches of his day that they did not call for comment, or it may be that they were already hidden under the thick coat of plaster that covered them for hundreds of years. They were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, and promptly whitewashed without fear or favour. The most elaborate of the pictures is the Feast of Herod, which shows that king dressed in mediÆval garments suggestive of Mrs. Markham's History, while John the Baptist is being horribly beheaded in the corner.

The remains of the castle are above the town; but the names of Rosamund's tower and the Devil's are more romantic than their appearance, and the inevitable lawn-tennis court can be more easily forgiven here than in the baileys of more beautiful ruins. This castle belonged to the house of Lancaster, and therefore in his day to that Lancaster, "the Actor," whom Piers Gavestone in his last moments besought for mercy, the Lancaster who so shortly afterwards was crying "Have mercy on me, King of Heaven!" when his turn came to be beheaded. It belonged, too, to the "time-honoured Lancaster" whose son imprisoned Richard II. for a little while within these very walls. All the prisons, it seems, to which Henry IV. committed Richard—Knaresborough, Pickering, Pontefract—were his own Lancastrian castles, and at Henry's accession, of course, became crown property. This one, which held for the King in the Civil War, still belongs to the Duchy of Lancaster.

Not many miles from Pickering, at the very brink of the moors, is a village whose name is familiar to lovers of old buildings and students of church history, and whose charms of seclusion and quietness are so endearing that even the unlearned are likely to think of it again and again with affection. I do not think "excursions" ever go to Lastingham. There is nothing there to attract those who visit a sacred ruin to play games in its aisles, or to sit on the high altar till it becomes necessary to enclose it with a railing, or to photograph their fiancÉes under its arches. These are only drawn by a famous name. The fame of Lastingham is hidden in a few ancient books, and in the works of archÆologists, and in the memories of those who have sought peace and found it there. To reach it we must turn to the right a couple of miles beyond Pickering, and drive by winding ways and on rather an indifferent surface to the foot of the moors.

It is at Cropton that the moors first come into sight. The scenery has been uninteresting since we left the Forge Valley, and it is with all the more delight that we suddenly, at a turn of the road, find the landscape filled with colour and warmth and beauty, with hills green in the foreground and gloriously crimson against the sky. The road curves and twists and curves again, as though hunting for Lastingham among the little valleys. It seems to be altogether lost, and then suddenly we find it.

About twelve hundred and fifty years ago, when its history began, it was not so easily found. Ethelwald, king of the Deiri, wished to have a monastery in his own Northumbrian country—some peaceful spot to which, when he had a mind, he might retire for prayer and quietness during his life, and in which he might be buried when he died. So he summoned to him that "holy, wise, and good man," Cedd, Bishop of the East Angles and brother of St. Chad, and offered him a piece of land. Cedd "chose himself a place among craggy and distant mountains which looked like lurking-places for robbers ... to the end that the fruits of good works should spring up where before beasts were wont to dwell, or men to live after the manner of beasts." Such is Bede's rather overdrawn description of this green hollow among the rounded hills; yet some say that Bede visited the place himself. Having chosen the spot it was necessary "to cleanse the place for the monastery from former crimes," so Cedd and his brother Cynebil kept between them a forty days' fast upon that little knoll where the church stands, uplifted above the village. There the monastery rose, and thither the bishop often came to see that all was well. Once he came at a time "when there was a mortality there," and, catching the epidemic, he died. And so it happens that the dust of this Saxon saint lies beneath the crypt of Lastingham Church.

Cedd's brother, the famous Chad, to whom so many churches are dedicated, succeeded him as abbot, and was often here. In connection with him Bede tells a poetical story of a monk of Lastingham. Oswini was a practical man, and felt himself unfitted for the contemplative life, yet greatly longed to renounce the world. So "quitting all he had"—he had been a Queen's Prime Minister—he came to St. Chad here on this little hill, and, pointing to the hatchet and axe that he had brought in his hand, put himself and them at the service of the monks. So while the others prayed Brother Oswini worked. And it was he, the humble worker with his hands, and not the monks upon their knees in the church, who heard the voices of the heavenly choir. He was "doing such things as were necessary" in the house when, "on a sudden," as he afterwards said, "he heard the voice of persons singing most sweetly and rejoicing, and appearing to descend from heaven." This sound of singing surged round the oratory where Chad was at prayer, then returned to heaven, "the way it came, with inexpressible sweetness." None heard it but the saint and the man of labour. Chad knew the meaning of it. "They were angelic spirits," he said, "who came to call me to my heavenly reward, which I have always longed after." Seven days later, says the historian, the bishop died.

This gate and path will lead us to the knoll where all these things happened, except the actual death of Chad. Here Brother Oswini worked and heard the angels sing: here Cedd fasted and died. Here in this little crypt, which we reach through the strange walled opening in the nave, his dust lies on the right of the altar. Some say that these Saxon stones with the fishes and dragons carved upon them have been here ever since the days of Cedd; but the sturdy piers and vaulted ceiling of the miniature chapel are, of course, Norman. They, and the apse above them, were probably the work of those monks of Whitby who founded the Abbey of St. Mary at York, and seem to have paused here for ten years on their way thither.

The street by which we entered Lastingham winds down the slope to the foot of the hollow; on the right of it is the restored Well of St. Cedd in its stone basin. The heather of the huge Cleveland moors is hardly more than a stone's-throw distant; and high upon the hill that overlooks the site of the Saxon monastery is a cross, not ancient, but very striking in this place. The tiny inn is close under the church. It is extremely small, and of the homeliest kind; but I think that any one who is not daunted by the simple life—the very simple life, be it plainly understood—will carry away pleasant memories of the quietness and cleanliness and kindliness within its doors. It has, unfortunately, not even a shed wherein to shelter a car, but only a grass plot where a car may spend a fine night.

We climb out of Lastingham by a road that passes close to the cross. This cross was set up in commemoration of Queen Victoria's accession, but there must surely have been another thought in the minds of those who placed it so symbolically in this particular spot. Let us pause for a moment and look down. The village lies below us in its little hollow, with the church of the early saints raised in its midst; and just above us, conspicuous on its height and clearly outlined against the sky, stands the cross. It seems to guard the boundary between the poetry of Lastingham and the prose of the ordinary world, for the beauty that makes such a perfect setting for the place ends suddenly on the brow of the hill, and we speed away among commonplace fields and hedges to join the high-road by way of Appleton-le-Moor.

At Keldholme, though the priory is marked on the map as though still in existence, only some stones built into a wall are left to show where de Stutteville's nunnery stood. As for the de Stutteville's own castle, which once rose proudly on the hill to our right, the stones of it form the walls of the neighbouring prison, and the site of it is a pasturage for the neighbouring cows.

The prison in question—a dark, repellent spot in a pretty street—is in the market-place of Kirbymoorside. Nearly facing it is the "Black Swan," whose pretty red-tiled porch bears the date 1632; but it was the "King's Head," further up the street, to which Pope alluded when he said, neither truthfully nor politely, that the second Duke of Buckingham died at Kirbymoorside "in the worst inn's worst room." This trim, modern-looking house with the sober front of grey, so unsuggestive of the rakish duke, has never formed a part of the inn, and it was in its best room that Buckingham, on his deathbed, declared he had always had the greatest veneration for religion and reason. We may not cross the threshold of the room into which the dying man was carried—and, indeed, even penitent upon his deathbed, George Villiers the second was hardly an object for pilgrimages!—but here is its little window overlooking the street, the middle window of the three that are next the inn. Many writers, following Macaulay and Pope, assume that Buckingham died in this house because he had squandered his fortune so thoroughly that he could not secure a more comfortable place to die in. But some tell a more likely, if less edifying, tale. The duke was injured or taken ill, they say, while hunting near this town, and as his own castle of Helmsley was several miles away he was carried hither, to the house of one of his tenants. It seems certain that the estate of Helmsley was still his at his death, since his executors received nearly ninety thousand pounds for it from Charles Duncombe, banker and goldsmith. A man who had once possessed all that the Buckinghams had taken from their kings might be said to have squandered his fortune without being actually in want of a roof to die under. He had at one time a very fine roof of his own here at Kirbymoorside, but this may have been one of the many things he had lost, or possibly the Civil War had left it in a state even less luxurious than this little grey house. By following a stony lane we may see, in a farmyard above the town, the few fragments of masonry that are the last remains of the castle of the Nevilles and the Buckinghams. Queen Elizabeth took it from the Nevilles, and her successor gave it to the man of whom he said: "You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than any one else."

The second duke, who died so humbly, was buried with his betters—among whom, I think, we may include his father—in Westminster Abbey. His body was embalmed, and the oft-quoted line in the register of burials at Kirbymoorside refers only to the viscera: "1687 April 17th. Gorges vilaus Lord dooke of bookingam."

About a mile beyond Kirbymoorside there is a little valley, not far from the high-road, of which perhaps the greater number of us have never heard. The appeal of Kirkdale, like that of Lastingham, is not to the many, and for that very reason it is irresistible to some; not only to the man of science and the historian, but to all those who can best hear the voices of the dead in places where there are no voices of the living. There is silence in Kirkdale.

A steep hill with a preposterous surface leads down to Hodge Beck; to the wooden footbridge among the trees, and the quarry where the hyÆnas used to live, and the splash that we must cross. Those limestone rocks to the right are famous in the world of science, for that dark cave whose entrance we may see was discovered, about a hundred years ago, to be strewn with the bones of strange beasts. It was a veritable treasury for geologists, for the hyÆnas who lived and died here in such quantities not only bequeathed their own bones to us, but also many bones of the uncouth creatures they were in the habit of eating, creatures most happily no longer with us. There were once tigers and elephants, it appears, in quiet Kirkdale.

We climb out of the beck and turn to the right. The narrow glen is thickly wooded, after the manner of Yorkshire dales both large and small, and in a clump of firs stands the Minster of St. Gregory. This is a fine name for so small a building; but it was called a minster nearly nine hundred years ago, and we need not deny it the distinction in its venerable age. It is not for its beauty that we come to see it, though it is picturesque enough in its setting of trees; but chiefly it is for the sake of one stone in its wall, and of the names inscribed upon it—names familiar yet remote, the names of Edward the King and Tosti the Earl. Here they are, carved in the lifetime of those who bore them. It is plain that this great stone was not always, as it is now, under a porch; for it was once a sundial, and here it is always in the shadow. The words upon it are deeply and clearly graven, easily distinguished, and, except for a few words, easily understood. This is the whole inscription, carved in two columns, with one line below the dial:—

"Orm Gamal Suna Bohte STS Gregorius Minster Wonne Hit Wes AEl Tobrocan & Tofalan & He Hit Let Macan Newan From Grunde XPE & STS Gregorius In Eadward Dagum CNG & In Tosti Dagum Eorl, & Hawarth Me Wrohte & Brand, PRS."

(Orm Gamal's son, bought St. Gregory's Minster when it was all tobroken and tofallen, and he it let be made new from ground to Christ and St. Gregory, in Edward's days, the King, and in Tosti's days, the Earl, & Howarth me wrought, and Brand, Priests.)

The sundial has its own legend:—

"This is Daeges Solmerca Aet Ilcum Tide.'
(This is Day's sunmarker at every time.")

This church, then, was made new from the ground in the middle of the eleventh century; for it was in 1056 that Tosti, the son of the famous Godwin, obtained the earldom of Northumbria; and it was in 1065 that he "impelled the Northumbrians to rebel, by the asperity of his manners," and so lost his earldom. In using these words William of Malmesbury is really most moderate, for Tosti seems to have been a terrible swashbuckler. He murdered, among many others, the son of the very man who rebuilt this church and set up this inscription: "All the sons of the traitor Godwin," says an old chronicler, "were men of such wickedness that if they saw any beautiful town belonging to any one they caused the lord of it to be slain by night, and his offspring to be destroyed, that they might obtain his property." On one occasion Tosti seized his brother Harold by the hair in the king's presence, while he was actually drinking his Majesty's health; whereupon Harold lifted Tosti "up on high, and dashed him down on the floor." Such was the asperity of their manners.

Edward the King is, of course, the Confessor, the "harmless king."

Within the church there are two carved stones round which much discussion circles. Until lately they were in the outer wall, where they naturally suffered much from the climate. One of them—the one that has a cross engraved upon it—once bore the words "Cyning Æthilwald," or "King Ethelwald," in runic letters. Upon the slender foundation of this somewhat vague inscription it has been argued that this is the coffin lid of King Ethelwald: therefore Ethelwald was buried at Kirkdale: therefore Cedd's monastery, where Ethelwald wished to be buried, was at Kirkdale and not at Lastingham. This last conclusion is then turned into a premise, with a view to suggesting that the beautiful stone with the Celtic design upon it may be the coffin lid of Cedd himself. Yet Bede says that Cedd was buried at "Lestingau."

The door of St. Gregory's Minster is locked. We may see the "sunmarker" and its clear lettering without entering the building, and also a slab of stone with an interlaced Celtic pattern which is let into the outer wall; but to see the reputed coffin lids of Ethelwald and Cedd—which are beautiful specimens of Celtic work, whatever their story—we must drive to Nawton village, a mile away, and fetch the key from the Vicarage. This seems hard; and if hard for motorists, a hundred times harder for bicyclists and others. The Yorkshire churches are in the main very kind to the public. Many of them are left open, with a suggestive money-box close to the door, and often with a guide-book that may be borrowed. By this method the church probably gains rather than loses, since it is pleasanter to give half a crown to an old building that deserves it than to give sixpence to an old man who has learnt a few facts by rote, and learnt them wrongly. If it is possible, however, to forgive a church for being closed we must forgive this church of Kirkdale. It has again and again been defaced and desecrated by those curious folk who love their own insignificant initials more than any fairer sight. It is certain that those who care so little for a building as to treat it thus will not journey very far to fetch the key.

The fine high-road that skirts the eastern moors, the road on which we have been travelling since we left Scarborough, comes to an end, in a sense, at Helmsley; for here it splits up into two roads, each of which we must follow for a time. Helmsley itself has its attractions. Among them are an open market square and an ancient cross, pretty houses and an inn covered with flowers, a tiny stream running through the town from end to end, and a castle-keep upon the hill. This is that castle which was "once proud Buckingham's delight," and now stands within the park whose name is borrowed from Duncombe the banker. Helmsley has passed through many hands, of which some helped in the making of history, and some were not over clean. The first name we hear of in connection with the place is no less a one than William the Conqueror, for he, having given Helmsley to one of his followers, chose it on one occasion for his own resting-place, after a heavy march and much hard work of the destructive kind he affected. His host, Earl Morton, lost these lands in the losing cause of Robert Curthose, and they fell to the famous Walter of Espec, one of the leaders in that strange semi-religious victory, the Battle of the Standard, whose heroes were summoned by an archbishop, absolved upon the field by a bishop, and actually overshadowed through the fight by the consecrated Host and the banners of three saints. Just such a mixture as this, of religion and bloodshed, was Walter himself, with his splendid presence, his gigantic height, his bright eyes and noble forehead, his voice "like the sound of a trumpet," his life as a warrior, and his death as a monk. Walter's sister Adeline married Peter de Ros, and it was their great-grandson, Robert de Ros, who built this much dilapidated tower of Helmsley Castle. After long centuries of ownership by unimportant Williams and Roberts and Georges the place came into the fair hands of Katherine, the daughter of the Earl of Rutland, and the wholly undeserved wife of the first Duke of Buckingham. Lady Katherine Manners was not, as is sometimes said, the granddaughter of Sir Philip Sidney, for it was her Uncle Roger, not her father, who married Sidney's daughter. The Duchess of Buckingham inherited all the wealth of her father's house, for her two little half-brothers died "by wicked practice and sorcery": so Helmsley came to Steenie, whose angel-face brought him so much beside his nickname. All his honours and his riches were won, says Clarendon, "upon no other advantage or recommendation than of the beauty and gracefulness and becomingness of his person." Yet something more truly lovable than this, we may be sure, was needed to win his Kate and her broad lands; and indeed the romance that gives this castle of Helmsley its chief interest remained romantic to the end, even though the duchess lived to write: "I pray God never woman may love a man as I have done you."

James I.'s slave-dog, as he called himself, was too busy in court and camp to visit Helmsley much, if ever, but it must have been a fine sight when it was his. The keep, not then a crumbling fragment, rose high above walls and many towers. Here are still the two moats that surrounded them, and the two gateways that once made a double defence. How strong the defences were we may gather from the trouble they gave to Sir Thomas Fairfax when he besieged the castle in the time of the second Duke of Buckingham, and won it at last, not only for the Parliament, but for himself. His grateful country gave him the lands of Helmsley, but at the same time took the precaution of reducing the castle to ruins, so that this shattered keep and gatehouse should never again defend royalist or rebel. The Buckinghams were ever humorists, and the second duke, pondering how he might regain some of his lost possessions, bethought him of marrying Mary Fairfax. After he had been embroiled in many plots and suffered many imprisonments he settled down here within sight of the tower that his father-in-law had reduced to so sad a state.

There, beyond the lawn-tennis court, is the house he lived in. Some of it seems to be older than his day, but he probably was obliged to repair it rather thoroughly after the siege. We may climb those steps, if we will, and enter.

These are haunted rooms. They are not haunted by a very worthy ghost, I fear—not even by Steenie of the dainty leg and the lovely complexion, the gallant adventurer whom many loved much and whom we all love a little—but only by his handsome, vicious son, the son who was born to the sound of all the joy-bells of Westminster, and died in the humble little bed at Kirbymoorside. These rooms were once proud Buckingham's delight; now they tear at one's heart. It is a thing to be glad of, no doubt, that Lord Mayor Duncombe found Buckingham's home too small to hold his vaulting ambitions and so built the palace in the park, leaving us this pitiful relic of departed glory. Yet one marvels that any man should have allowed so much beauty to go to wrack. These great oak panels with their rare design, this splendid moulded ceiling wrought so elaborately with Tudor roses, that frieze of shields and fleurs-de-lys, of mermaids and winged dragons, once made an appropriate setting for the man whom a contemporary called the "finest gentleman of person and wit" he ever saw. Now, in their decayed grandeur, they are appropriate still; a dramatic—almost a melodramatic—symbol of his fate. Half the panelling is gone; shred by shred the plaster of the ceiling is falling on the uneven floor; bare laths and gaping holes disfigure the Tudor roses over our heads; of the mermaids and winged dragons only a few are left. Lumber is piled upon the floor where "all mankind's epitome" was wont to walk; cobwebs and dust deface the windows. Such is the symbol of proud Buckingham, than whom "no man was ever handsomer," yet who was, in the last year of his life, "worn to a thread"; and up there in the park is the symbol of the city knight who bought his property with money not always well-gained, and flourished like a green bay-tree. We see the unromantic, prosperous house of the thrifty Duncombe as we drive away to Rievaulx.

Motorists will find it their best plan to visit the terrace of Rievaulx before seeing the abbey itself. The way lies through a gate on the left at the top of an extremely steep hill; a winding lane leads among trees to a second gate, and here the car may safely be left. A few steps bring us to the famous terrace cut on the hillside by a Duncombe of the eighteenth century. For half a mile the wide and level turf is stretched between the woods that overshadow it on the left, and the woods that fall steeply away from it on the right to the foot of the hill. Beyond the valley another wooded hill rises; to the south are moors. If we stand at the brink of the terrace and look down through a gap in the trees we see, far below us, the pointed arches of Rievaulx Abbey.

At each end of the terrace is a classical temple. At the north end, where we are standing, is the one described in the local guide-book as "a beautiful temple with an Ionic portico." At first sight it gives one a shock. Eighteenth-century buildings so often do give one a shock.

If, however, we forget for a few minutes that Rievaulx Abbey lies down there in the valley, if we forget Walter of Espec and his monks, and remember only the days when this temple was built, the Ionic portico has its uses. It gives us a vision of the age of powder and hoops, of the fair ladies who rustled here on the soft turf when George was king. The closely cropped sward was suited to the dainty feet, the scenery not so "savage" as to wound the dainty susceptibilities. Indeed, in any century, this scene could only heal.

There is a path that winds down the hill to the abbey, and if our car is independent of us this is the best way to go. But if she is unattended and cannot meet us in the valley we must drive down the steep hill to the village. The surface of this hill is composed of ruts and loose stones, but the beauty of the woods is compensation for nearly anything.

If Fountains Abbey speaks of power, Rievaulx breathes peace. Taking everything into consideration, I think its beauty has only one rival in England. The valley of the Rye is far lovelier than Studley Park; the building itself is far lovelier than Bolton. Only Tintern can rival it; not even Tintern can eclipse it. For at Tintern the feeling of Cistercian seclusion can only be acquired through the imagination: a high-road is close at hand; a brisk trade in picture postcards and Goss china is carried on at the abbey door; to be alone is almost impossible. But here at Rievaulx we may chance to stand in perfect solitude, perfect stillness, under the mighty archway that soars in dignified simplicity so far above our heads, and separates us as though by invisible gates from the world. No imagination is needed here to conjure up the aloofness of the white monks—the actual fact is here. Through the empty windows—once filled, in defiance of the early Cistercian ideals, with some of the first efforts of English glass-stainers—we see the wild hillside rising from the very walls, and above it the rampart of trees; the grass under our feet grows like the grass of the field; the world makes no sign, and on each side of us the slender arches point to heaven. There is something here that is more than beauty; the very air seems charged with the prayers of holy men long dead. The weather-worn slab of the high altar is unfortunately enclosed by a railing, which is doubtless needed, in this Christian country, to save it from desecration. Not near this stone, as one might expect, but in the ruined chapter-house, lies the dust of the monk who came here in his old age to hide his "broad but well-featured face" under the shadow of a cowl, and to subdue his trumpet-like voice to the singing of psalms—the monk who had founded this abbey in the days when he was a famous soldier—Walter of Espec.

Walter founded three monasteries: one at Kirkham, which we shall presently see; one here; one at Wardon in Bedfordshire. Incorporated with Leland's Itinerary is a document which tells us how Walter's only son fell from his horse and broke his neck upon a stone cross, and how in consequence Walter founded the monasteries of Kirkham and Rievaulx with some of the wealth for which he had now no heir. Dugdale, the seventeenth-century antiquarian, believed the tale, and told it for truth in his "Monasticon." Yet now we are bidden to reject the story of the younger Walter's sad end; nay, even to doubt that he ever lived! He is not mentioned, say those who know, in the foundation-charter of the abbey; there is nowhere in any document a statement that Walter of Espec ever had a son. However, till we find a definite statement that he had none, we shall probably continue to accept or reject the story according to temperament.

There are still some fragments of the actual church that was built by the eager hands of the monks from Clairvaux, the monks sent by St. Bernard himself to live their austere lives in this valley; but, of course, this rich triforium, these corbels of elaborate carving, these lancets and moulded arches and clustered columns were never seen by Norman Walter. Nor, indeed, would they have met with approval from the saintly abbot of Clairvaux, whose aspirations, like those of all the early Cistercians, tended to severe simplicity in architecture as in life. The vanished nave, it is thought, was part of the Norman work of Bernard's missionary monks, but this glorious chancel and the refectory with the strange doorway belong entirely to the thirteenth century.

Beautiful as are the details it is by the great chancel-arch that we shall always remember Rievaulx. It is the reposefulness of its simple grandeur that strikes the keynote of peace. Its quiet, stately lines rest the eye, and the memory of it rests the heart whenever we think of this fair daughter of Citeaux and mother of Melrose.

Long ago there was a second Cistercian abbey on the banks of Rye. The bells of Old Byland and the bells of Rievaulx clashed with one another, which for some reason shocked the Byland monks. Those who live in towns to-day, and Sunday by Sunday hear the bells of seven or eight churches ringing simultaneously in varying keys, will sympathise with them; but there seems to have been some idea in their minds beyond the obvious one, an idea strong enough to make them migrate first to Stocking and then to the spot where we may see the ruins of their abbey. Those who can spare the time will find that the beautiful west front of the second Byland repays them well for driving the few miles between the two ruins. The community that finally settled on this spot had been through a great deal. When they came here it was more than fifty years since the thirteen monks necessary to found a new house had left Furness to wander in their ox-waggon from place to place—from Furness to Cumberland, from Cumberland to Thirsk, from Thirsk to Byland-on-the-Moor, from Byland-on-the-Moor to Stocking, and from Stocking to their final home at last. None of the original thirteen can have seen the trefoiled door and gigantic wheel-window of the west front; for this, the most striking part of the existing ruin, was probably the finishing touch to a very splendid church.

Those who reach Byland may perhaps like to drive about a mile and a half beyond it, to see the interesting church at Coxwold, and the house where Laurence Sterne lived for some time and wrote the greater part of "Tristram Shandy," alternated with many sermons. From Coxwold a series of byways will take them to the high-road at Brandsby.

Those, however, who are unable to go beyond Rievaulx, must return to Helmsley. They may follow the Rye for a little while, and then, turning to the left with a last and lovely view of the abbey, may mount the hill through the woods, the fairy-haunted woods of Rievaulx, where the stems are not wrapped about with a confusion of undergrowth, but rise unhampered from a carpet of ferns and creepers. This climb among the dusky trees is very short, but adds to one's sense of Rievaulx's remoteness. The shadowy stillness of these woods is like a veil dropped between the valley and the world.

After driving through Helmsley we cross the Rye, and presently pass the upper entrance of Duncombe Park, the "Nelson Gate," erected as we see "to the memory of Lord Viscount Nelson, and the unparallelled gallant achievements of the British Navy." Between Helmsley and Sheriff Hutton, whither we are bound, lies some very pretty country of a pastoral kind, and a series of picturesque villages, several of which deserve more attention than we are likely to give them.

Here, for instance, is Oswaldkirk, which might well tempt us to pause. It is scattered along the side of a hill, with its little houses half smothered in trees. The tiny church is open, and in it are some fragments of Saxon and Norman work, and a Jacobean pulpit which once held the famous John Tillotson, who began life in a tailor's shop and ended it as Archbishop of Canterbury. His success was chiefly due, I believe, to his eloquence, so we may regard this spot as the cradle of his fortunes, since the sermon he preached here was his first. And here in Oswaldkirk was born another man of mark, the antiquarian to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the ruined monasteries, Roger Dodsworth. He collaborated with Dugdale in the "Monasticon," which was not published till after his death. The younger man inherited the fruit of his researches, and has more or less eclipsed his name.

A little more than a mile beyond Oswaldkirk is Gilling, one of the prettiest villages in the county. Its wide street is bordered by bright gardens; a tiny stream runs through it under a row of miniature bridges; on the left is a church with some interesting tombs; and on the right, entirely hidden by the trees, is the castle of the Fairfaxes. Only those who have secured special permission are admitted to see this castle and its splendid Elizabethan Hall, of which the fame has reached many who were never in it. It is, according to all accounts, a marvel of rich ornament, of oaken panels and delicate inlay, of carved mouldings and stained glass and armorial shields.

A road with a perfect surface carries us out of the village to the top of a hill—where one patch of heather by the wayside reminds us that we are on Grimston Moor—and on through Brandsby to Stillington. The church we leave behind us as we turn sharply to the left has no special interest beyond the fact that Laurence Sterne preached many of his sermons in it, while he was living at Sutton-in-the-Forest and at Coxwold. Here in Stillington we leave the fine high-road for a very poor one—one that is a mere lane in fact—which leads us past the strange little church of Marton-on-the-Forest, with its crow-stepped gables and tower, to the village of Sheriff Hutton.

"What is this forest call'd?" we may be inclined to ask with Archbishop Scrope in "Henry IV." "'Tis Gaultree Forest, an't shall please your grace." Even in Leland's time there was very little wood in the neighbourhood of Sheriff Hutton, and now the Forest of Galtres, so "impenetrable and swampy" when the Romans set to work to drain it, has practically vanished. A good proportion of it, I think, must always have been forest only in the technical sense, for we hear of it in the reign of Elizabeth as the scene of a yearly horse-race, wherein the prize for the winning horse was a little golden bell. Moreover, there is a tradition that wanderers in the Forest of Galtres, which reached to the outskirts of York, were guided by a light hung in the lantern tower of All Saints Church. Unless a great part of the country were open—"low medows and morisch ground"—this light would not have greatly aided the belated traveller. Be that as it may, the country is now so open that as we draw near Sheriff Hutton we may see with a thrill, if we look very intently along the far horizon, the faint, elusive gleaming of York Minster.

The castle of Sheriff Hutton is more impressive at a distance than close at hand. It is visible miles away across the flat country, and the jagged outlines of its cluster of towers stand up so imposingly against the sky that one is led to expect something rather vast and effective. But these gaunt remnants are all there is to see. They stand in a farmyard and are surrounded with haystacks. Once upon a time this castle was fine enough. It had eight or nine great towers, "and the stately staire up to the haul" was very magnificent, and so was "the haul it self, and al the residew of the house." It owed its splendour to the splendid Nevilles, to the great Warwick among others, who seems always to have lived in a state of kingly magnificence, as befitted one who made kings. When he died it passed, with his other castles, to his son-in-law Richard III., who used it as a prison for such claimants of the throne as he did not trouble to murder. There was humour in this plan of sending the two young cousins to keep each other company—Edward IV.'s daughter, Elizabeth of York, and the youthful Warwick, son of that Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a butt of Malmsey. They were not here very long, for hardly had their Uncle Richard's ill-gotten crown fallen under the hawthorn on Bosworth Field, before the new king's emissary was riding in all haste to Sheriff Hutton. There was a crowd that day about this gate that still bears the arms of the Nevilles and of England, for from all the country round the people gathered to do honour to their future queen; and as she was led out from her prison to share Henry's throne, the gentry of the neighbourhood, an eager bodyguard, pressed forward to escort her to London. Poor cousin Warwick went to London too, with a bodyguard of a sterner sort; for since his claims could not, like Elizabeth's, be merged in those of the new king, he was destined for the Tower and the block.

There is no record, apparently, of how this stately castle was transformed in the course of one century from a "Princely Logginges" to a mere shell. The usual death sentence of castles, "dismantled by order of the Parliament," was never pronounced in this case, for the mischief was done before Charles I. was king. In Henry VIII.'s reign this was for a time the home of that Duke of Norfolk who was the uncle of two queens, and lived to see them both upon the scaffold. He was a witness at Anne Boleyn's wedding and a judge at her trial, and was himself only saved from the block by Henry's death. His son Surrey, the sweet singer, has walked here too, where now the hay is stacked.

Richard III. was here at least once, in the year before his death. He and his sad wife—sad all her life, but now heart-broken—came here to bury their little son. At the end of the sloping village street is the old church where they laid him; and there we may still see, not the place of his burial, for that is unknown, but the little alabaster figure that once lay upon his tomb. It has the air of being a good portrait. The features are still faintly visible; the pathetic down-drawn mouth suggests that Anne Neville's son was not much happier than herself. Circling the boyish head is a heavy crown, the only crown it ever wore. The reason that the Prince of Wales was buried here does not appear. Some suggest that his mother, who was with Richard at Nottingham, could not bear to return to Middleham, and so met the funeral procession here; but there is at least one historian[6] who describes her despair when she saw her dead son in his own home. Elizabeth of York was probably at Sheriff Hutton when her little cousin Edward was brought here to his grave. She must have remembered another Edward, nearer and dearer to her, whose grave, not yet discovered, had been so lately made at the foot of the dark staircase in the Tower of London.

This ancient church has some fine brasses in it. One of them is hidden beneath a trap-door in the floor; another bears the figures of two babies in swaddling clothes. The church's patron saint is St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, and the discoverer, through a vision, of the Holy Cross. The historians give us a good deal of choice in the matter of this lady's origin. Some declare that she was the daughter of a British king, a woman of surprising beauty and intelligence; but it seems to be more likely that her father was an innkeeper.

Sheriff Hutton is only about ten miles away from York, but if possible we should add a few miles to the distance by making a dÉtour to Kirkham Priory. All that there is to be seen there is comprised in one picture, so to speak, a picture of an old gateway and the base of a cross; but it is a picture that one remembers.

To reach it we pass through country that is sometimes moderately pretty, sometimes dull. There is a little church at Foston that is pleasant to the eye, with a red-tiled roof, and a miniature bell-tower, and a pathway where the yew-trees nearly meet. But we are now on the borderland between the beautiful part of Yorkshire and the uninteresting south-eastern plain. After we leave Kirkham we shall see little more of the beauties of nature. We shall see some beautiful architecture, and various things that are more appealing to the imagination than to the eye. And here, too, as is so often the case where the scenery is tame, the roads are sufficient in themselves for the pleasure of the day's journey.

About a mile beyond Foston we turn on to the high-road from Scarborough to York; but after a few moments leave it again for a road on the right, by which we slowly descend into the valley of the Derwent. The hillside is thickly wooded, and as we pass beyond the overarching trees we see Kirkham lying below us: the little village, and the wooded hill beyond it, and the beautiful gateway that is so entirely unlike all others, and, fringed with rushes, the wide, smooth river—the Derwent, which we last saw at Ayton, shadowed by the birches of the Forge Valley and overlooked by the ruins of Margaret Bromflete's castle.

This was the first of the monasteries founded by Walter of Espec. In front of the gateway is the base of an old cross, of which the top step is carved with an almost illegible design. Local tradition, in its courageous way, declares that there is incorporated with these steps a fragment of the "little stone cross" that caused the death of Walter of Espec's son. The truth of this tale seems to depend a good deal on whether Walter ever had a son.

It is this gateway that we have come to see. The fragment of wall in which it is framed was probably built in the twelfth century, but all this wealth of ornament and heraldry belongs to a much later date. The quiet valley and the stream would suggest to one that this, like Walter's Rievaulx, was a Cistercian house; but there was never a Cistercian community that would have countenanced all this display of tracery and crockets and statuary, and all these worldly coats of arms. They were Augustinian Canons who made their gate so fine, and carved upon it these ten shields of men with sounding names—Clare and Vaux, Scrope, Ros, Plantagenet—and set these saints in their niches, and above them the seal of the priory; and who passed to their meals in the refectory under all the varied mouldings of this magnificent Norman door south of the cloister-garth; and who chanted their Credo with their eyes fixed on that lovely lancet window, once part of the east-end of their church.

And now we are at last bound for York. We cross the Derwent and climb the hill again to the high-road, and there before us, very far away, lies our goal. Faintly shining, York Minster shows like a pale opal hanging above the horizon.

The very thought of York and all that it stands for makes the heart beat faster. Let us open the throttle then, and speed to it as quickly as we may; for the road lies broad and level between the fields, and nearly as straight as an arrow's path, and never, if we love our engine and our England as we should, shall we forget this flight of ours to the city of all our kings.