Читать книгу From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England. - Katharine Lee Bates, Katharine Lee Bates, Bates Katharine Lee - Страница 1

The dominant interest of the northwestern counties is, of course, the Lake District, with its far-famed poetic associations; yet for the student of English history and the lover of Border minstrelsy the upper strip of Cumberland has a strong attraction of its own.

An afternoon run on the Midland brought us from Liverpool to Carlisle. Such are the eccentricities of the English railway system that the "through carriage" into which guard and porter dumped us at Liverpool, a third-class carriage already crowded with one sleeping and one eating family, turned out not to be a through carriage at all; and a new guard, at Hellifield, tore us and our belongings forth and thrust us into an empty first-class, lingering in the doorway until we had produced the inevitable shilling. But the freedom of an empty carriage would have been well worth the honest price of first-class tickets, for as the train sped on from the Ribble into the Eden Valley, with the blue heights of the Pennine range and the long reaches of the Yorkshire moors on our right, and on our left the cloud-caressed summits of Lakeland, we needed all the space there was for our exultant ohs and ahs, not to mention our continual rushing from window to window for the swiftly vanishing views of grey castle and ruined abbey, peel tower and stone sheep-fold, grange and hamlet, and the exquisite, ever-changing panorama of the mist.

Carlisle, "the Border City," a clean, self-respecting, serious town, without beggars, with no superfluous street courtesies, but with effectual aid in need, is the heart of one of the most storied regions of England. The River Drift man and the Cave man seem to have fought the mammoth and the elk and gone their shadowy way untraced in this locality, but the museum in Tullie House contains hammers and axes, found in Cumberland soil, of the Stone Age, and spear-heads and arrow-heads, urns for human ashes, incense cups, food vessels and drinking vessels of the Bronze Age, – mute memorials of life that once was lived so eagerly beneath these same soft, brooding skies.

As for the Romans, they seem here like a race of yesterday. A penny tram took us, in the clear, quiet light of what at home would be the middle of the evening, out to Stanwix, originally, it is believed, an important station in the series of fortresses that guarded the northern boundary of Roman Britain. These frontier lines consisted of a great stone wall, eight feet thick and eighteen feet high, ditched and set with forts and towers, running straight from the Solway to the Tyne, a distance of some seventy-three miles, and a little to the south of this, what is known as the vallum, a fosse with mounds of soil and rock on either side. The local antiquaries, urged on by a committee of Oxford men, have recently discovered a third wall, built of sods, between the two, and excavation and discussion have received a fresh impetus. Was the vallum built by Agricola, – earthworks thrown up by that adventurous general of the first Christian century to secure his conquest? Was the turf wall the erection of the great emperor Hadrian, who visited Britain in the year 120, and was the huge stone rampart constructed, early in the third century, by the Emperor Severus? Or does the stone wall date from Hadrian? Or did he build all three?

While the scholars literally dig for truth, we may sit on the site of this mighty, well-nigh perished bulwark at Stanwix, with what is perhaps the wrinkle left on the landscape by the wall's deep moat dropping, under a screen of hawthorns and wind-silvered poplars, sheer at our feet, and thence we may look out across the Eden, with its dipping gulls and sailing swans, its hurrying swifts and little dancing eddy, to the heights of Carlisle. For the city is built on a natural eminence almost encircled by the Eden and its tributaries, the Petteril and the Caldew. It is a fine view even now, with the level light centred on the red sandstone walls of the grim castle, though factory chimneys push into the upper air, overtopping both the castle and its grave neighbour, the cathedral; but for mass and dignity, for significance, these two are unapproachable: these are Carlisle.

We must not see them yet. We must see a lonely bluff set over with the round clay huts of the Britons, and then, as the Roman legions sweep these like so many mole-hills from their path, we must see in gradual growth a Roman town, – not luxurious, with the tessellated marble pavements and elaborate baths that have left their splendid fragments farther south, but a busy trading-point serving the needs of that frontier line of garrisons which numbered no less than fifteen thousand men. Some few inscribed and sculptured stones, remnants of altars, tombs, and the like, may be seen in the museum, with lamps, dishes, and other specimens of such coarse and simple pottery as was in daily use by common Roman folk when the days and the nights were theirs.

The name Carlisle – and it is said to be the only city of England which bears a purely British name – was originally Caer Lywelydd, British enough in very sooth. This the Romans altered to Lugubalia, and when, in 409, the garrisons of the Wall were recalled for the protection of Rome herself, the Britons of the neighbourhood made it their centre, and it passed into Arthurian tradition as Cardueil. Even the ballads vaguely sing of a time when

But although the Britons sometimes united, under one hero or a succession of heroes, to save the land, now abandoned by the Romans, from the Saxons, they were often at war among themselves, and the headship of their northern confederacy was wrested from Carlisle and transferred to Dumbarton on the Clyde. The kingdom of the Cumbrian Britons, thenceforth known as Strathclyde, fell before the assault of the English kingdom of Northumbria, in which the Christian faith had taken deep root. For though the Britons, in the fourth century of Roman rule, had accepted Christianity, the Angles had come in with their own gods, and a new conversion of the north, effected by missionaries from Iona, took place about the sixth century. Sculptured crosses of this period still remain in Cumberland and Westmoreland, and the Carlisle museum preserves, in Runic letters, a Christian epitaph of "Cimokom, Alh's queen."

is the eloquent record, and from her grave-mound she utters the new hope:

For a moment the mists that have gathered about the shelving rock to which we are looking not merely across the Eden, but across the river of time, divide and reveal the figure of Cuthbert, the great monk of Northumbria, to whom King Egfrith had committed the charge of his newly founded monastery at Caerluel. The Venerable Bede tells how, while the king had gone up into Scotland on a daring expedition against the Picts, in 685, Cuthbert visited the city, whose officials, for his better entertainment, took him to view a Roman fountain of choice workmanship. But he stood beside its carven rim with absent look, leaning on his staff, and murmured: "Perchance even now the conflict is decided." And so it was, to the downfall of Egfrith's power and the confusion of the north. After the ravaging Scots and Picts came the piratical Danes, and, about 875, what was left of Carlisle went up in flame. A rusted sword or two in the museum tells the fierce story of the Danish sack. At the end of the tenth century Cumberland was ceded to Scotland, but was recovered by William Rufus, son of William the Conqueror. Carlisle, the only city added to England since the Norman conquest, was then a heap of ruins; but in 1092, says the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," the king "went northward with a great army, and set up the wall of Carluel, and reared the castle."

No longer but there is still the castle, which even the most precipitate tourist does not fail to visit. We went in one of those wild blusters of wind and rain which are rightly characteristic of this city of tempestuous history, and had to cling to the battlements to keep our footing on the rampart walk. We peeped out through the long slits of the loop-holes, but saw no more formidable enemies than storm-clouds rising from the north. The situation was unfavourable to historic reminiscence, nor did the blatant guide below, who hammered our ears with items of dubious information, help us to a realisation of the castle's robust career. Yet for those who have eyes to read, the stones of these stern towers are a chronicle of ancient reigns and furious wars, dare-devil adventures and piteous tragedy.

The Norman fortress seems to have been reared upon the site of a Roman stronghold, whose walls and conduits are still traceable. After William Rufus came other royal builders, notably Edward I and Richard III. It was in the reign of the first Edward that Carlisle won royal favour by a spirited defence against her Scottish neighbours, the men of Annandale, who, forty thousand strong, marched red-handed across the Border. A Scottish spy within the city set it on fire, but while the men of Carlisle fought the flames, the women scrambled to the walls and, rolling down stones on the assailants and showering them with boiling water, kept them off until an ingenious burgher, venturing out on the platform above the gate, fished up, with a stout hook, the leader of the besiegers and held him high in the air while lances and arrows pierced him through and through. This irregular mode of warfare was too much for the men of Annandale, who marched home in disgust.

During Edward's wars against Wallace he made Carlisle his headquarters. Twice he held Parliaments there, and it was from Carlisle he set forth, a dying king, on his last expedition against the Scots. In four days he had ridden but six miles, and then breath left the exhausted body. His death was kept secret until his son could reach Carlisle, which witnessed, in that eventful July of 1307, a solemn gathering of the barons of England to mourn above the bier of their great war-lord and pay their homage to the ill-starred Edward II. A quarter century later, Lord Dacre, then captain of Carlisle Castle, opened its gates to a royal fugitive from Scotland, Balliol; and Edward III, taking up the cause of the rejected sovereign, made war, from Carlisle as his headquarters, on the Scots. After the Wars of the Roses, Edward IV committed the north of England to the charge of his brother Gloucester, who bore the titles of Lord Warden of the Marches and Captain of Carlisle Castle. Monster though tradition has made him, Richard III seems to have had a sense of beauty, for Richard's Tower still shows mouldings and other ornamental touches unusual in the northern architecture of the period.

But the royal memory which most of all casts a glamour over Carlisle Castle is that of Mary, Queen of Scots. Fleeing from her own subjects, she came to England, in 1568, a self-invited guest. She landed from a fishing-boat at Workington, on the Cumberland coast, – a decisive moment which Wordsworth has crystallised in a sonnet:

Mary was escorted with all courtesy to Cockermouth Castle and thence to Carlisle, where hospitality soon became imprisonment. Her first request of Elizabeth was for clothing, and it was in one of the deep-walled rooms of Queen Mary's Tower, of which only the gateway now remains, that she impatiently looked on while her ladies opened Elizabeth's packet to find – "two torn shifts, two pieces of black velvet, and two pairs of shoes." The parsimony of Queen Bess has a curious echo in the words of Sir Francis Knollys, who, set to keep this disquieting guest under close surveillance, was much concerned when she took to sending to Edinburgh for "coffers of apparell," especially as she did not pay the messengers, so that Elizabeth, after all, was "like to bear the charges" of Mary's vanity. The captive queen was allowed a semblance of freedom in Carlisle. She walked the terrace of the outer ward of the castle, went to service in the cathedral, and sometimes, with her ladies, strolled in the meadows beside the Eden, or watched her gentlemen play a game of football, or even hunted the hare, although her warders were in a fever of anxiety whenever she was on horseback lest she should take it into her wilful, beautiful head to gallop back to Scotland.

But these frowning towers have more terrible records of captivity. Under the old Norman keep are hideous black vaults, with the narrowest of slits for the admission of air and with the walls still showing the rivet-holes of the chains by which the hapless prisoners were so heavily fettered.

Rude devices, supposed to be the pastime of captives, are carved upon the walls of a mural chamber, – a chamber which has special significance for the reader of "Waverley," as here, it is said, Major Macdonald, the original of Fergus MacIvor, was confined. For Carlisle Castle was never more cruel than to the Jacobites of 1745. On November 18 Bonny Prince Charlie, preceded by one hundred Highland pipers, had made triumphal entrance into the surrendered city, through which he passed again, on the 21st of December, in retreat. Carlisle was speedily retaken by the English troops, and its garrison, including Jemmy Dawson of Jacobite song, sent in ignominy to London. Even so the cells of the castle were crammed with prisoners, mainly Scots, who were borne to death in batches. Pinioned in the castle courtyard, seated on black hurdles drawn by white horses, with the executioner, axe in hand, crouching behind, they were drawn, to make a Carlisle holiday, under the gloomy arch of the castle gate, through the thronged and staring street, and along the London road to Harraby Hill, where they suffered, one after another, the barbarous penalty for high treason. The ghastly heads were set up on pikes over the castle gates (yetts), as Scotch balladry well remembers.

But not all the ballads of Carlisle Castle are tragic. Blithe enough is the one that tells how the Lochmaben harper outwitted the warden, who, when the minstrel, mounted on a grey mare, rode up to the castle gate, invited him in to ply his craft.

So he stole into the stable and slipped a halter over the nose of a fine brown stallion belonging to the warden and tied it to the grey mare's tail. Then he turned them loose, and she who had a foal at home would not once let the brown horse bait,

When the loss of the two horses was discovered in the morning, the harper made such ado that the warden paid him three times over for the grey mare.

"And verra gude business," commented our Scotch landlady.

The most famous of the Carlisle Castle ballads relates the rescue of Kinmont Willie, a high-handed cattle-thief of the Border. For between the recognised English and Scottish boundaries lay a strip of so-called Debatable Land, whose settlers, known as the Batables, owed allegiance to neither country, but

This Border was a natural shelter for outlaws, refugees, and "broken men" in general, – reckless fellows who loved the wildness and peril of the life, men of the type depicted in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."

Although these picturesque plunderers cost the neighbourhood dear, they never failed of sympathy in the hour of doom. The Graemes, for instance, were a large clan who lived by rapine. In 1600, when Elizabeth's government compelled them to give a bond of surety for one another's good behaviour, they numbered more than four hundred fighting men. There was Muckle Willie, and Mickle Willie, and Nimble Willie, and many a Willie more. But the execution of Hughie the Graeme was none the less grievous.

They tried him by a jury of men, and although his guilt was open, "gude Lord Hume" offered the judge "twenty white owsen" to let him off, and "gude lady Hume" "a peck of white pennies," but it was of no avail, and Hughie went gallantly to his death.

For these Batables had their own code of right and wrong, and were, in their peculiar way, men of honour. There was Hobbie Noble, an English outlaw, who was betrayed by a comrade for English gold, and who, hanged at Carlisle, expressed on the gallows his execration of such conduct.

The seizure of Kinmont Willie was hotly resented, even though his clan, the Armstrongs, who had built themselves strong towers on the Debatable Land, "robbed, spoiled, burned and murdered," as the Warden of the West Marches complained, all along upper Cumberland. The Armstrongs could, at one time, muster out over three thousand horsemen, and Dacres and Howards strove in vain to bring them under control. Yet there was "Border law," too, one of its provisions being that on the appointed days of truce, when the "Lord Wardens of England and Scotland, and Scotland and England" met, each attended by a numerous retinue, at a midway cairn, to hear complaints from either side and administer a rude sort of justice in accordance with "the laws of the Marches," no man present, not even the most notorious freebooter, could be arrested. But William Armstrong of Kinmont was too great a temptation; he had harried Cumberland too long; and a troop of some two hundred English stole after him, as he rode off carelessly along the Liddel bank, when the assemblage broke up, overpowered him, and brought him in bonds to Carlisle.

But this was more than the Scottish warden, Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, could bear.

So Buccleuch rode out, one dark night, with a small party of Borderers, and succeeded, aided by one of the gusty storms of the region, in making his way to Carlisle undetected.

The sudden uproar raised by the little band bewildered the garrison, and to Kinmont Willie, heavily ironed in the inner dungeon and expecting death in the morning, came the voices of friends.

But his spirits rose to the occasion, and when Red Rowan,

hoisted Kinmont Willie, whose fetters there was no time to knock off, on his back and carried him up to the breach they had made in the wall, from which they went down by a ladder they had brought with them, the man so narrowly delivered from the noose had his jest ready:

It is high time that we, too, escaped from Carlisle Castle into the open-air delights of the surrounding country. Five miles to the east lies the pleasant village of Wetheral on the Eden. Corby Castle, seat of a branch of the great Howard family, crowns the wooded hill across the river, but we lingered in Wetheral Church for the sake of one who may have been an ancestor of "the fause Sakelde." This stately sleeper is described as Sir Richard Salkeld, "Captain and Keeper of Carlisle," who, at about the time of Henry VII, "in this land was mickle of might." His effigy is sadly battered; both arms are gone, a part of a leg, and the whole body is marred and dinted, with latter-day initials profanely scrawled upon it. But he, lying on the outside, has taken the brunt of abuse and, like a chivalrous lord, protected Dame Jane, his lady, whose alabaster gown still falls in even folds.

We drove eastward ten miles farther, under sun and shower, now by broad meadows where sleek kine, secure at last from cattle-lifters, were tranquilly grazing, now by solemn ranks of Scotch firs and far-reaching parks of smooth-barked, muscular beeches, now through stone-paved hamlets above whose shop-doors we would read the familiar ballad names, Scott, Graham (Graeme), Armstrong, Musgrave, Johnston, Kerr, and wonder how the wild blood of the Border had been tamed to the selling of picture postal cards.

Our goal was Naworth, one of the most romantic of English castles. Its two great towers, as we approached, called imagination back to the days

Naworth is the heart of a luxuriant valley. The position owes its defensive strength to the gorges cut by the Irthing and two tributaries. These three streams, when supplemented by the old moat, made Naworth an island fortress. The seat of the Earls of Carlisle, it was built by Ranulph Dacre in the fourteenth century. Even the present Lady Carlisle, a pronounced Liberal and a vigorous worker in the causes of Temperance and Woman Suffrage, though claiming to be a more thoroughgoing Republican than any of us in the United States, points out with something akin to pride "the stone man" on the Dacre Tower who has upheld the family escutcheon there for a little matter of five hundred years. In the sixteenth century the Dacre lands passed by marriage to the Howards, and "Belted Will," as Sir Walter Scott dubbed Lord William Howard, proved, under Elizabeth and James, an efficient agent of law and order. Two suits of his plate armour still bear witness to the warrior, whom the people called "Bauld Willie," with the same homely directness that named his wife, in recognition of the ample dower she brought him, "Bessie with the braid apron," but his tastes were scholarly and his disposition devout. Lord William's Tower, with its rugged stone walls, its loopholes and battlements, its steep and narrow winding-stair guarded by a massive iron door, its secret passage to the dungeons, is feudal enough in suggestion, yet here may be seen his library with the oak-panelled roof and the great case of tempting old folios, and here his oratory, with its fine wood-carvings, its Flemish altar-piece, and its deep-windowed recess outlooking on a fair expanse of green earth and silver sky.

This castle, with its magnificent baronial hall, its treasures of art and spirit of frank hospitality, was harder to escape from than Carlisle. There was no time to follow the Irthing eastward to the point where, as the Popping Stones tell, Walter Scott offered his warm heart and honest hand to the dark-eyed daughter of a French emigre. But we could not miss Lanercost, the beautiful ruined abbey lying about a mile to the north of Naworth. An Augustine foundation of the twelfth century, it has its memories of Edward I, who visited it with Queen Eleanor in 1180 and came again in broken health, six years later, to spend quietly in King Edward's Tower the last winter of his life. The nave now makes a noble parish church in which windows by William Morris and Burne-Jones glow like jewels. The choir is roofless, but gracious in its ruin, its pavement greened by moss, feathery grasses waving from its lofty arcades, and its walls weathered to all pensive, tender tints. The ancient tombs, most of them bearing the scallop-shells of the Dacres, are rich in sculpture. Into the transept walls are built some square grey stones of the Roman Wall, and a Roman altar forms a part of the clerestory roof. The crypt, too, contains several Roman altars, dedicated to different gods whose figures, after the lapse of two thousand years, are startling in their spirited grace, their energy of life.

But Lanercost reminds us that we have all but ignored Carlisle Cathedral, and back we drive, by way of the village of Brampton with its curious old market-hall, to the Border City. After all, we have only followed the custom of the place in slighting the cathedral. Carlisle was ever too busy fighting to pay much heed to formal worship.

The cathedral dates from the time of William Rufus, and still retains two bays of its Norman nave, which suffered from fire in the early part of the thirteenth century. A still more disastrous fire, toward the close of that century, all but destroyed the new choir, which it took the preoccupied citizens one hundred years to rebuild, so that we see to-day Early English arches in combination with Decorated pillars and Late Decorated capitals. These capitals of fresh and piquant designs are an especial feature of the choir, whose prime glory, however, is the great east window with its perfect tracery, although only the upper glass is old. The cathedral has suffered not alone from a series of fires, but from military desecration. Part of its nave was pulled down by the irreverent Roundheads to repair the fortifications, and it was used after Carlisle was retaken from Prince Charlie as a prison for the garrison. Even to-day canny Cumberland shows a grain too much of frugality in pasturing sheep in the cathedral graveyard. Carlisle Cathedral has numbered among its archdeacons Paley of the "Evidences," and among its archdeans Percy of the "Reliques." Among its bridegrooms was Walter Scott, who wedded here his raven-haired lady of the Popping Stones.

One drive more before we seek the Lake Country, – ten miles to the north, this time, across the adventurous Esk, where a fierce wind seemed to carry in it the shout of old slogans and the clash and clang of arms, and across the boundary stream, the Sark, to Gretna Green, where breathless couples used to be married by blacksmith or innkeeper or the first man they met, the furious parents posting after all in vain. Then around by Longtown we drove and back to Carlisle, across the Solway Moss, – reaches of blowing grass in the foreground; dark, broken bogs, where men and women were gathering in the peat, in the middle distance; and beyond, the blue folds of hills on hills. It was already evening, but such was the witchery of the scene, still with something eerie and lawless about it despite an occasional farmhouse with stuffed barns and plump ricks and meadows of unmolested kine, that we would gladly, like the old Borderers whose armorial bearings so frequently included stars and crescents, have spent the night in that Debatable Land, with the moon for our accomplice in moss-trooping.