From Gretna Green to Land's End Part 1

From Gretna Green to Land's End.

by Katharine Lee Bates.

THE BORDER

The dominant interest of the northwestern counties is, of course, the Lake District, with its far-famed poetic a.s.sociations; yet for the student of English history and the lover of Border minstrelsy the upper strip of c.u.mberland 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-cla.s.s 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 h.e.l.lifield, tore us and our belongings forth and thrust us into an empty first-cla.s.s, lingering in the doorway until we had produced the inevitable s.h.i.+lling. But the freedom of an empty carriage would have been well worth the honest price of first-cla.s.s 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 Yorks.h.i.+re moors on our right, and on our left the cloud-caressed summits of Lakeland, we needed all the s.p.a.ce there was for our exultant _ohs_ and _ahs_, not to mention our continual rus.h.i.+ng from window to window for the swiftly vanis.h.i.+ng 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 c.u.mberland 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 ma.s.s 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sed into Arthurian tradition as Cardueil. Even the ballads vaguely sing of a time when

"King Arthur lived in Merry Carlisle And seemly was to see."

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 heads.h.i.+p of their northern confederacy was wrested from Carlisle and transferred to Dumbarton on the Clyde. The kingdom of the c.u.mbrian Britons, thenceforth known as Strathclyde, fell before the a.s.sault 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 G.o.ds, 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 c.u.mberland and Westmoreland, and the Carlisle museum preserves, in Runic letters, a Christian epitaph of "Cimokom, Alh's queen."

"Holy into ruin she went,"

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

"My body the all-loving Christ Young again shall renew after death, But indeed sorrowing tear-flow Never shall afflict me more."

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 workmans.h.i.+p. 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 c.u.mberland 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

"The sun s.h.i.+nes fair on Carlisle wall,"

but there is still the castle, which even the most precipitate tourist does not fail to visit. We went in one of those wild bl.u.s.ters 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 a.s.sailants 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 t.i.tles 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 fis.h.i.+ng-boat at Workington, on the c.u.mberland coast,--a decisive moment which Wordsworth has crystallised in a sonnet:

"Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed, The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore; And to the throng, that on the c.u.mbrian sh.o.r.e Her landing hailed, how touchingly she bowed!

And like a star (that, from a heavy cloud Of pine-tree foliage poised in air, forth darts, When a soft summer gale at evening parts The gloom that did its loveliness enshroud) She smiled; but Time, the old Saturnian seer, Sighed on the wing as her foot pressed the strand With step prelusive to a long array Of woes and degradations hand in hand-- Weeping captivity, and shuddering fear Stilled by the ensanguined block of Fotheringay!"

Mary was escorted with all courtesy to c.o.c.kermouth 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 s.h.i.+fts, 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.

"Full fifteen stane o' Spanish iron They hae laid a'right sair on me; Wi' locks and keys I am fast bound Into this dungeon dark and dreerie."

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 pa.s.sed 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.

"White was the rose in his gay bonnet, As he folded me in his broached plaidie; His hand, which clasped mine i' the truth o' luve, O it was aye in battle ready.

His lang, lang hair in yellow hanks Waved o'er his cheeks sae sweet and ruddy, But now they wave o'er Carlisle yetts In dripping ringlets clotting bloodie.

My father's blood's in that flower tap, My brother's in that hare-bell's blossom; This white rose was steeped in my luve's blude, And I'll aye wear it in my bosom.

"When I cam' first by merrie Carlisle, Was ne'er a town sae sweetly seeming; The white rose flaunted o'er the wall, The thistled banners far were streaming!

When I cam' next by merrie Carlisle, O sad, sad seemed the town, and eerie!

The auld, auld men came out and wept-- _O, maiden, come ye to seek ye'r dearie?_"

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.

"Then aye he harped, and aye he carped, Till a' the lordlings footed the floor; But an the music was sae sweet, The groom had nae mind o' the stable door.

"And aye he harped, and aye he carped, Till a' the n.o.bles were fast asleep; Then quickly he took off his shoon, And softly down the stair did creep."

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,

"But kept him a-galloping home to her foal."

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

"Sought the beeves, that made their broth, In Scotland and in England both."

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."

"A stark moss-trooping Scot was he, As e'er couched Border lance by knee: Through Solway sands, through Tarras moss, Blindfold, he knew the paths to cross; By wily turns, by desperate bounds, Had baffled Percy's best bloodhounds; In Eske, or Liddel, fords were none, But he would ride them, one by one; Alike to him was time, or tide, December's snow or July's pride: Alike to him was tide, or time, Moonless midnight, or matin prime: Steady of heart, and stout of hand, As ever drove prey from c.u.mberland; Five times outlawed had he been, By England's king and Scotland's queen."

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.

"Gude Lord Scroope's to the hunting gane, He has ridden o'er moss and muir; And he has grippit Hughie the Graeme, For stealing o' the Bishop's mare.

"Then they have grippit Hughie the Graeme, And brought him up through Carlisle toun; The la.s.ses and lads stood on the walls, Crying, 'Hughie the Graeme, thou 'se ne'er gae doun.'"

They tried him by a jury of men,