Read Ebook: Glimpses of Three Coasts by Jackson Helen Hunt

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Fitton. He delivered his speech to the king; presented to him a "standing cup with a cover double gilt, and therein a hundred jacobins of gold;" likewise delivered to him the city's sword, and afterward bore it before him, in the procession. But when King James proposed, in return for all these civilities, to make a knight of him, Charles Fitton sturdily refused; which was a thing so strange for its day and generation that one is instantly possessed by a fire of curiosity to know what Charles Fitton's reasons could have been for such contempt of a knight's title. No doubt there is a story hanging thereby,--something to do with a lady-love, not unlikely; and a fine ballad it would make, if one but knew it. The records, however, state only the bare fact.

Then there was, a hundred years later than this, a man who got to be mayor of Chester by a very strange chance. He was a ribbon-weaver, in a small way, kept a shop in Shoemaker's Row, and lived in a little house backing on the Falcon Inn. All of a sudden he blossomed out into a rich silk-mercer; bought a fine estate just outside the city, built a grand house, and generally assumed the airs and manners of a dignitary. As is the way of the world now, so then: people soon took him at his surface showing, forgot all about the mystery of his sudden wealth, and presently made him mayor of Chester. Afterward it came out, though never in such fashion that anything was done about it, how the mayor got his money. Just before the mysterious rise in his fortunes, a great London banking-house had been robbed of a large sum of money by one of its clerks, who ran away, came to Chester, and went into hiding at the Falcon Inn. He was tracked and overtaken late one night. Hearing his pursuers on the stairs, he sprang from his bed and threw the treasure bags out of the window, plump into the ribbon-weaver's back-yard; where the disappointed constables naturally never thought of looking, and went back to London much chagrined, carrying only the man, and no money. None of the money having been found on the robber, he escaped conviction, but subsequently, for another offence, was tried, convicted, and executed. I take it for granted that it must have been he who told in his last hours what he did with the money bags: for certainly no one else knew,--that is, no one else except Mr. Samuel Jarvis, the ribbon-weaver, who, much astonished, had picked them up before daylight, the morning after they had been thrown into his back-yard. It is certain that he kept his mouth shut, and proceeded to turn the money to the best possible account in the shortest possible time. But an evil fate seemed to attach to the dishonestly gotten riches; Jarvis dying without issue, his estate all went to a man named Doe, "a gardener, at Greg's Pit," whose sons and grandsons spent the last penny of it in riotous living. So there is now "nothing to show for" that money, for the stealing of which one man was tried for his life, and another man made mayor of Chester; which would all come in capitally in a ballad, if a ballad-monger chose.

Of the famous Chester Rows, nobody has ever yet contrived to give a description intelligible to one who had not seen them. The more familiarly they are known, the more fantastic and bewildering they seem, and the less one is sure how to speak of them. Whether it is that the sidewalk goes upstairs, or the front second-story bedroom comes down into the street; whether the street itself be in the basement or the cellar, or the sidewalk be on the roofs of the houses;--where any one of them all begins or leaves off, it would be a courageous narrator that tried to explain. They appear to have been as much of a puzzle two hundred years ago as to-day; for the devout old chronicler of the Vale-Royale, essaying to describe them, wrote the following paragraph, which, delicious as it is to those who know Chester, I think must be a stumbling-block and foolishness to those who do not. He says there is "a singular property of praise to this city, whereof I know not the like of any other: there be towards the street fair rooms, both for shops and dwelling-houses, to which there is rather a descent than an equal height with the floor or pavement of the street. Yet the principal dwelling-houses and shops for the chiefest Trades are mounted a story higher, and before the Doors and Entries a continued Row, on either side the street, for people to pass to and fro all along the said houses, out of all annoyance of Rain, or other foul weather, with stairs fairly built, and neatly maintained to step down out of those Rowes into the open streets: almost at every second house: and the said Rowes built over the head with such of the Chambers and Rooms for the most part as are the best rooms in every one of the said houses.

"It approves itself to be of most excellent use, both for dry and easy passage of all sorts of people upon their necessary occasions, as also for the sending away, of all or the most Passengers on foot from the passage of the street, amongst laden and empty Carts, loaden and travelling Horses, lumbering Coaches, Beer Carts, Beasts, Sheep, Swine, and all annoyances, which what a confused trouble it makes in other cities, especially where great stirring is, there's none that can be ignorant."

He also suggests another advantage of this arrangement, which seems by no means unlikely to have been part of its original reason for being; namely, that "when the enemy entered they might avoid the danger of the Horsemen, and might annoy the Enemies as they passed through the Streets." Probably in this writer's day the marvel of the construction of the Rows was even greater than it is now; in many instances the first story was excavated out of solid rock, so you began by going downstairs at the outset. These first stories of the ancient Cestrians are beneath the cellars of the Rows to-day; and every now and then, in deepening a vault or cellar-way, workmen come on old Roman altars, built there by the "Legyons" of Julius, or Claudius Caesar, dedicated to "Nymphs and Fountains," or other genii of the day; baths, too, with their pillars and perforated tiles still in place, as they were in the days when cleanly and luxurious Roman soldiers took Turkish baths there, after hot victories. Knowing about these lower strata adds a weird charm to the fascination of strolling along in the balconies above, looking in, now at a jeweller's window, now at a smart haberdashery shop, now at some neat housekeeper's bedroom window, now into a mysterious chink-like passage-way winding off into the heart of the building; and then, perhaps, presto! descending a staircase a few feet, to another tier of similar shop-windows, domiciles, garret alleys, and dormer-window bazars; and the next thing, plump down again, ten feet or so more, into the very street itself. Indeed are they, as the "Vale-Royale" says, "a singular property of praise to this city, whereof I know not the like of any other."

One manifest use and enjoyment of this medley of in and out, up and down, above and below, balconies, basements, attics, dormer windows, gables, and casements, the old chronicler failed to mention, but there can never have been a day or a generation which has not discovered it, and that is the convenient overlooking of all that goes on in the street below. What rare and comfortable nooks for the spying on processions, and all manner of shows and spectacles! To sit snug in one's best chamber, ten feet above the street, ten feet out into it, with windows looking up and down the highway,--what vantage it must have been in the days when the Miracle Plays went wheeling along from street to street, played on double scaffolded carts; the players attiring themselves on the lower scaffold, while the play was progressing on the upper! They began to do this in Chester in the year of our Lord 1268. There were generally in use at one time twenty-four of the wheeled stages; as soon as one play was over, its stage was wheeled along to the next street, and another took its place. The plays were called Mysteries, and were devised for the giving of instruction in the Old and New Testament, which had been so long sealed books to the people. Luther gave them his sanction, saying, "Such spectacles often do more good and produce more impression than sermons."

The old chronicles are full of quaint and interesting entries in regard to these plays. The different trades and guilds of the city represented different acts in the holy dramas:--

In 1574 these plays were played for the last time. There had been several attempts before to suppress them. One Chester mayor, Henry Hardware by name, being a "godly and zealous man, caused the gyauntes in the mid-somer show to be broken up, not to go; and the devil in his feathers he put awaye, and the caps, and the canes, and dragon and the naked boys."

But it was reserved for another mayor, Sir John Savage, Knight, to have the honor of finally putting an end to the pageants. "Sir John Savage, knight, being Mayor of Chester, which was the laste time they were played, and we praise God, and praye that we see not the like profanation of holy Scriptures, but O, the mercie of God for the time of our ignorance!" says an old history, written in 1595.

At intervals between these pious suppressions, carnal and pleasure-loving persons made great efforts to restore the plays; and there are some very curious accounts of expenditures made in Chester, under mayors less godly than Hardware and Savage, for the rehabilitation of some of the old properties of the sacred pageants:--

"For finding all the materials with the workmanship of the four great giants, all to be made new, as neere as may be, lyke as they were before, at five pounds a giant, the least that can be, and four men to carry them at two shillings and sixpence each."

These redoubtable giants, which could not be made at less than five pounds apiece, were constructed out of "hoops, deal boards, nails, pasteboard, scale-board, paper of various sorts, buckram size cloth, old sheets for their bodies, sleeves and shirts, tinsille, tinfoil, gold and silver leaf, colors of different kinds, and glue in abundance." Last, not least, came the item, "For arsknick to put into the paste to save the giants from being eaten by the rats, one shilling and fourpence."

It is at first laughable to think of a set of city fathers summing up such accounts as these for a paper baby show, but upon second thought the question occurs whether city funds are any better administered in these days. The paper giants, feathered devils, and dragons were cheaper than champagne suppers and stationery now-a-days in "hede and chefe" cities.

"Zeal produced it, love devized it, boyes performed it, men beheld it, and none but fools dispraised it.... The chiefest part of this people-pleasing spectacle consisted in three Bees, that is, Boyes, Beastes, and Bels."

Allegory, mythology, music, fireworks, and ground and lofty tumbling were jumbled together in a fine way, in the sheriff's show. Envy was on horseback with a wreath of snakes around her head; Plenty, Peace, Fame, and Joy were personated; Mercury came down from heaven with wings, in a cloud; a "wheele of fire burning very cunningly, with other fireworks, mounted the Crosse by the assistance of ropes, in the midst of heavenly melody;" and, to top off with, a grotesque figure climbed up to the top of the "Crosse," and stood on his head, with his feet in the air, "very dangerously and wonderfully to the view of the beholders, and casting fireworks very delightfull." Truly, the sheriff's language seems hardly too strong, when he says that none but fools dispraised his spectacle.

These secular shows never attained the popularity of the old Mystery Plays. That mysterious halo of attraction which always invests the forbidden undoubtedly heightened the reputed charm of the never-more-to-be-seen sacred pageants, and led people to continually depreciate the value of all entertainments offered as substitutes for them. Probably in the midst of the heavenly melodies and "fireworks very delightfull," at the sheriff's grand show, old men went about shaking their heads regretfully, and saying, "Ah, but you should have seen the gyaunts we used to have forty years ago, and the way they played the Fall of Lucifer in 1574; there's never been anything like it since;" and immediately all the young people who had never seen a Miracle Play began to be full of dissatisfied wonder as to what they were like.

But what the shows and pageants lacked in the early days of the seventeenth century, grand processions went a long way towards making up. It is evident that Chester people never missed an occasion for turning out in fine array; and there being always somebody who took the trouble to write a full account of the parade, we of to-day know almost as much about it as if we had been on the spot. The old chronicles in the Chester public library are running over with quaint and gay stories of such doings as the following:

"Came to Chester, being Saturday, the Duchess of Tremoyle, from France, mother-in-law to the Lord Strange: and all the Gentry of Cheshier, Flintshier, and Denbighshier went to meet her at Hoole's Heath, with the Earl of Derby; being at least six hundred horse. All the Gentle Men of the artelery yard lately erected in Chester, met her in Cow Lane, in very stately manner, all with greate white and blew fethers, and went before her chariot, in march, to the Bishop's Pallas, and making a yard, let her thro the middest, and then gave her three volleys of shot, and so returned to their yard.... So many knights, esquires, and Gentle Men never were in Chester, no, not to meet King James when he went to Chester."

This Cow Lane is now called Frodsham Street; and on one of its corners is the building in which William Penn, in his day, preached more than once, setting forth doctrines which the Duchess of Tremoyle would have much disrelished in her day, as would also the "artelery Gentle Men" with their "greate white and blew fethers." King James himself is said to have once dropped in at this Quaker meeting-house when Penn was preaching, and to have sat, attentive, through the entire discourse.

And so we come down through the centuries, from the pasteboard "gyaunt" and glued dragon, winged Mercury with fire-wheel, Duchess of Tremoyle with her plumed horsemen, to the grim but gentle Quaker, holding feathers pernicious, plays deadly, and permitting to the people nothing but plain yea and nay. Of all this, and worlds more like it, and gayer and wilder,--sadder, too,--is the Chester air so brimful that, as I said in the beginning, it seems perpetually to go lilting about one's ears.

Leaving the library, with its quaint and fascinating old records, and turning aside at intervals from the more ancient landmarks of the streets to observe the ways and conditions of the Cestrians now, the traveller is no less repaid. Every rod of the sidewalk is a study for its present as well as for its past. The venders are a guild by themselves, as much to-day as they were in the sixteenth century. They build up their stuffs, their old chairs, chests, brooms, crockery and tinware, in stacks of confusion, in shelf-like balconies, on beams hanging overhead and in corners and nooks underfoot, all along the most ancient of the Rows. It is a piece of good luck to walk past half a dozen doors there without jostling something on the right or left, and bringing down a clattering pile on one's heels. From shadowy recesses, men and women eager for trade dart out, eying the stranger sharply. They are connoisseurs in customers, if in nothing else, the Cestrian dealers of to-day. They know at a glance who will give ten shillings and sixpence for a cream jug without any nose, and with a big crack in one side, on the bare chance of its being old Welsh. There is much excuse for their spreading out their goods over the highway, as they do, for the shops themselves are closets,--six by eight, eight by ten; ten by twelve is a spacious mart, in comparison with the average. Deprived of the outside nooks between the pillars of the arcade, the dealers would be sorely put to it for room. It is becoming, however, a disputed question whether the renting of these shops includes any right to the covered ways in front of them; and there is great anxiety among the inhabitants of the more dilapidated portions of the Rows in consequence.

"There's a deespute with the corporation, mem, as to whether we hown the stalls or not," said an energetic furniture-wife to me one day, as I was laughingly steering a cautious passage among her shaky pyramids of fourth or twentieth hand furniture. "It's lasted a while now, an' they've not forced us to give 'em hup as yet; but I'm afeard they may bring it about," she added, with the dogged humility of her class. "They've everything their own way,--the corporation."

It is worth while to take a turn down some of the crevice-like alleys in these Rows, and see where the people live; see also where the nobility gets part of its wherewithal to eat, drink, and be clothed.

Often there is to be seen at the far end of these crevices a point of sunlight; like the gleaming point of light seen ahead, in going through a rayless tunnel. This betokens a tiny court-yard in the rear. These court-yards are always well worth seeing. They are paved, sometimes with tiles evidently hundreds of years old. The different properties of the dozens of families living in tenements opening on the court are arranged around its sides, apparently each family keeping scrupulously to its own little hand's-breadth of room; frequently a tiny flower-bed, or a single plant in a pot, gives a gleam of cheer to the place. In such a court-yard as this, I found, one morning, a yellow-haired, blue-eyed little maid, scrubbing away for dear life, with a broom and soap-suds, on the old tiles. She was not over nine years old; her bare legs and feet were pink and chubby, and she had a smile like a sunbeam.

"I saw the sun shining in here so brightly that I walked up the alley to see how it got in," I said to her.

"Yes, mem," she said, with a courtesy. "It do shine in here beautiful." And she looked up at the sky, smiling.

"Have you lived here long?" I asked.

"About nine months, mem. I'm only in service, mem," she continued with a deprecating courtesy, modestly anxious to disclaim the honor of having any proprietary right in the place.

"We've five rooms, mem," she went on. "It's a very nice lodging, if you'd like to see it." And she threw open a door into an infinitesimal parlor, out of which opened a still smaller dining-room, lighted only by a window in the parlor door. There were two bedrooms above, reached by a nearly upright stairway, not over two feet wide. The fifth room was a "beautiful washroom," which the little maiden exhibited with even more pride than she had shown the parlor. "It's three families has it together, mem," she explained. "It's a great thing to get a washroom. And we've a coal-hole, too, mem," she said eagerly; "you passed it, coming up." And she stepped a few paces down the alley, and threw open a door into a rayless place possibly five by seven feet in size. "It used to be a bedroom, mem, to the opposite house; but it's empty now, so we gets it for coal." I could not take my eyes from the child's face, as she prattled and pattered along. She looked like an angel. Her face shone with loyalty, pride, and happiness. I envied the poverty-stricken dwellers in this court their barefooted handmaiden, and would have taken her then and there, if I could, into my own service for her lifetime. As we stood talking, another door opened, and a grizzled old head popped out.

"Good-morning, mem," said the child cheerily, making the same respectful courtesy she had made to me. "I'm just showin' the lady what nice lodgin's we've 'ere in the court."

"Humph," said the old woman gruffly, as she tottered out, leaving her door wide open; "they're nothin' to boast of."

Her own lodging certainly was not. It was literally little more than a chamber in the wall: it had no window, except one small square pane above the door. You could hardly stand upright in it, and not much more than turn around. The walls were hung full: household utensils, clothes, even her two or three books, were hung up by strings; there being only room for one tiny table, besides the stove. In one corner stood a step-ladder, which led up through a hole in the ceiling to the cranny overhead in which she slept. This was all the old woman had. She lived here alone, and she paid to the Duke of Westminster two shillings and sixpence a week for the rent of the place. "It's dear at the rent," she said; "but it's a respectable place, an' I think a deal o' that." And she sighed.

The name of the Duke of Westminster and the value of that two and sixpence to his grace meant more to me that morning than it would have done twenty-four hours earlier; for on the previous afternoon we had visited his palace, the famous Eaton Hall. We had walked there for weary hours over marble floors, under frescoed domes, through long lines of statues, of pictures, of stained-glass windows, hangings, carvings, and rare relics and trophies innumerable. We had seen the duchess's window balcony, one waving mass of yellow musk. "Her ladyship is very fond of musk. It is always to be kept flowering at her window," we were told.

We had walked also through a glass corridor three hundred and seventy-five yards long, draped with white clematis and heliotrope on one side, and on the other banked high with geraniums, carnations, and all manner of flowers. Opening at intervals in these banks of flowers were doors into other conservatories: one was filled chiefly with rare orchids, like an enchanted aviary of hummingbirds, arrested on the wing; gold and white, purple and white, brown and gold, green, snowy white, orange; some of them as large as a fleur-de-lis. Another house was filled with ferns and palms, green, luxuriant, like a bit of tropical forest brought across seas for his grace's pleasure. The most superb sight of all was the lotus house. Cleopatra herself might have flushed with pleasure at beholding it. A deep tank, sixty feet long, and twenty wide, filled with white and blue and pink blossoms, floating, swaying, lolling on the dark water; while, seemingly to uphold the glass roof canopying this lotus-decked sea, rose slender columns, wreathed with thunbergia vines in full bloom, yellow, orange, and white; the glass walls of the building were set thick and high with maiden-hair and other rare ferns, interspersed at irregular intervals with solid masses of purple or white flowers. The spell of the place, of its warm, languid air, was beyond words: it was bewildering.

All this being vivid in my mind, I started at hearing his grace's name from the old woman's lips.

"So these houses belong to the Duke of Westminster, do they?" I replied.

"Yes, 'ee's the 'ole o' 't," she answered; "an' a power o' money it brings 'im in, considerin' its size. 'Ee 's big rents in this town. Mebbe ye've bin out t' 'is 'all? It's a gran' sight, I'm told. I've never seen it."

I was minded then to tell about the duke's flowers. It would have been only a bit of a fairy story to the little maid, a bright spot in her still bright horizons; but I forebore, for the sake of the old woman's soul, already enough wrung and embittered by the long strain of her hard lot, and its contrast with that of her betters, without having that contrast enforced by a vivid picture of the duke's hothouses. My own memory of them was darkened forever,--unreasonably so, perhaps; but the antithesis came too suddenly and soon for me ever to separate the pictures.

"The king, mem, stood just where you're standin' now," she says over and over and over, in a mechanical manner, as long as you remain in the tower. I wondered if she said it all night, in her sleep; and if, if one were to spend a whole day in the tower, she would never stop saying it. She was an enthusiastic show-woman of her little store; undismayed by any amount of indifference on the part of her listeners. "'Ere 's a face you know, mem, I dare say," producing from one corner of the glass case a cheap newspaper picture, much soiled, of General Grant. "'Ee was in this tower last summer, and 'ee was much hinterested."

Next to General Grant's portrait came "a ring snake from Kentucky." "It's my brother, mem, brought that over: twenty years ago, 'ee was in Hamerica. You must undustand the puttin' of 'em hup better than we do, mem, for 'ere's these salamanders was only put hup two years ago, an' they've quite gone a'ready, in that time."

She had a statuette of King Charles, Cromwell's chaplain's broth bowl, a bit of a bedquilt of Queen Anne's, a black snake from Australia, a fine-tooth comb from Africa, a tattered fifty-cent piece of American paper currency, and a string of shell money from the South Sea Islands, all arranged in close proximity. Taking up the bit of American currency, she held it out toward us, saying inquiringly, "Hextinct now, mem, I believe?" I think she can hardly have recovered even yet from the bewilderment into which she was thrown by our convulsive laughter and ejaculated reply, "Oh, no! Would that it were!"

In a clear day can be seen from this tower, a dozen or so miles to the south, the ruins of a castle built by Earl Randel Blundeville. He was the Earl Randel of whom Roger Lacy, constable of Cheshire in 1204, made a famous rescue, once on a time. The earl, it seems, was in a desperate strait, besieged in one of his castles by the Welsh; perhaps in this very castle. Roger Lacy, hearing of the earl's situation, forthwith made a muster of all the tramps, beggars, and rapscallions he could find,--"a tumultuous rout," says the chronicle, "of loose, disorderly, and dissolute persons, players, minstrels, shoemakers and the like,--and marched speedily towards the enemy." The Welsh, seeing so great a multitude coming, raised their siege and fled; and the earl, thus delivered, showed his gratitude to Constable Roger by conferring upon him perpetual authority over the loose, idle persons in Cheshire; making the office hereditary in the Lacy family. A thankless dignity, one would suppose, at best; by no means a sinecure, at any time, and during the season of the Midsummer Fairs a terrible responsibility: it being the law of the land that during those fairs the city of Chester was for the space of one month a free city of refuge for all criminals, of whatsoever degree; in token of which a glove was hung out at St. Peter's Church, on the first day of the fairs.

There is another good tale of Roger Lacy's prowess. He seems to have been a roving fighter, for he once held a castle in Normandy, for King John, against the French, "with such gallantry that after all his victuals were spent, having been besieged almost a year, and many assaults of the enemy made, but still repulsed by him, he mounts his horse, and issues out of the castle with his troop into the middest of his enemies, chusing rather to die like a soldier, than to starve to death. He slew many of the enemy, but was at last with much difficulty taken prisoner; so he and his soldiers were brought prisoners to the King of France, where, by the command of the king, Roger Lacy was to be held no strict prisoner, for his great honesty and trust in keeping the Castle so gallantly.... King John's letter to Roger Lacy concerning the keeping of the said castle, you may see among the Norman writings put out by Andrew du Chesne, and printed at Paris in 1619." Of all of which, if no ballad have ever been written, it is certain that songs must have been sung by minstrels at the time; and the name of the brave Roger's lady-love was well suited to minstrelsy, she being one Maud de Clare. Plain Roger Lacy and Maud de Clare! The dullest fancy takes a leap at the sound of the two names.

In the same old chronicle which gives these and many other narratives of Roger Lacy is the history of a singular, half-witted being, who was known in Vale-Royale, in the fifteenth century, as Nixon the Prophet. How much that the old records claim for him, in the way of minute and minutely fulfilled prophecies, is to be set down to the score of ignorant superstition, it is hard now to say; but there must have been some foundation in fact for the narrative. Robert Nixon was the son of a farmer in Cheshire County, and was born in the year 1467. His stupidity and ignorance were said to be "invincible." No efforts could make him understand anything save the care of cattle, and even in this he showed at times a brutish and idiotic cruelty. He had a very rough, coarse voice, but said little, sometimes passing whole months without opening his lips to speak. He began very early to foretell events, and with an apparently preternatural accuracy. When he was a lad, he was seen, one day, to abuse an ox belonging to his brother. To a person threatening to inform his brother of this act, Robert replied that three days later his brother would not own the ox. Sure enough, on the next day a life inheritance came into the estate on which his brother was a tenant, and that very ox was taken for the "heriot bond to the new owner." One of the abbey monks having displeased him, he exclaimed,--

"When you the harrow come on high, Soon a raven's nest will be."

The couplet was thought at the time to be simple nonsense; but as it turned out, the last abbot of that monastery was named Harrow, and when the king suppressed the monastery he gave the domain to Sir Thomas Holcroft, whose crest was a raven.

It was also one of Nixon's predictions that the two abbeys of Vale-Royale and Norton should meet on Orton bridge and the thorn growing in the abbey yard should be its door.

When the abbeys were pulled down, in the time of the Reformation, stones taken from each of them were used in rebuilding that bridge; and the thorn-tree was cut down, and placed as a barrier across the entrance to the abbey court, to keep the sheep from entering there.

This courier, when he returned to court, recounted Nixon's predictions; and King Henry was so impressed by them that he at once sent orders to have him brought to the palace.

Before this messenger arrived, Nixon ran about like a madman, weeping and crying that the king was about sending for him, and that he must go to court to be starved to death.

In a few days the royal messenger appeared. Nixon was turning the spit in his brother's kitchen. Just before the messenger came in sight, he shrieked out, "He is on the road! He is coming for me! I shall be starved!"

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