A Month in Yorkshire

“Didn’t I tell ye so!” broke in my neighbour, as he winced a little under a shaft unusually keen from the singer’s quiver.

I was quite ready to praise the song, which, indeed, was remarkable. The cleverest ‘Ethiopian minstrel’ could not chant his ditty more fluently than that blind fiddler caught up all the telling points of the hour. He touched upon the one who had been turned out, and on my hydropathic prescription, and sundry circumstances which could only be understood by one on the spot. Without pause or hesitation, he produced a dozen stanzas, of which the last two may serve as a specimen:

“Rebecca sits a shellin’ peas, ye all may hear ’em pop:She knows who’s comin’ with a cart: he won’t forget to stop:And Frank, and Jem, and lazy Mat, got past the time to think,With ginger-beer and rum have gone and muddled all their drink.With a fol lol, riddle, liddle, lol, lol, lol!“Here’s a genelman fro’ Lunnon; ’tis well that he cam’ doun;If he’d no coom ye rantin’ lads would happen had no tune:Ye fumbled at the fiddle-strings; he screwed ’em tight and strong;Success to Lunnon then I say, and so here ends my song.With a fol lol, riddle, liddle, lol, lol, lol!”

Lusty acclamations and a drink from every man’s jug rewarded the fiddler, and a vigorous cry was set up for “The Donkey Races,” another of his songs, which, as lazy Mat told me, “had been printed and sold by hundreds.” The blind man, nothing loth, rattled off a lively prelude, and sang his song with telling effect. The race was supposed to be run by donkeys from all the towns and villages of the neighbourhood: from Patrington, Hedon, Hull, Driffield, Beverley, and others, each possessed of a certain local peculiarity, the mention of which threw the company into ecstacies of merriment. And when the “donkey from York” was introduced along with his “sire Gravelcart” and his “dam Work,” two of the guests flumped from their chairs to laugh more at ease on the floor. The fiddler seemed to enjoy the effect of his music; but his grim smile took no relief; the twinkle of the eye was wanting. He was now sure of his game, for the afternoon at least.

While looking round on the party, I had little difficulty in discerning among them the three principal varieties of Yorkshiremen. There was the tall, broad-shouldered rustic, whose stalwart limbs, light gray or blue eyes, yellowish hair, and open features indicate the Saxon; there was the Scandinavian, less tall and big, with eyes, hair, and complexion dark, and an intention in the expression not perceptible in the Saxon face; and last, the Celt, short, swarthy, and Irish looking. The first two appeared to me most numerous in the East and North Ridings, the last in the West.

On the question of wages they were all content. Here and there a man got eighteen shillings a week; but the general rate was fifteen shillings, or “nine shill’n’s a week and our meat” (diet), as one expressed it. Whatever folk might do in the south, Yorkshire lads didn’t mean to work for nothing, or to put up with scanty food. “We get beef and mutton to eat,” said lazy Mat, “and plenty of it.”

The road continues between fat fields and pastures, skirts a park bordered by noble trees, or tall plantations, in which the breeze lingers to play with the branches: here and there a few cottages, or a hamlet, clean in-doors, and pretty out of doors, with gay little flower-gardens. Frequent thunder-showers fell, and I was glad to shelter from the heaviest under a roof. Always the same cleanliness and signs of thrift, and manifest pleasure in a brief talk with the stranger. And always the same report about wages, and plenty of work for men and boys; but a slowness to believe that sending a boy to school would be better than keeping him at work for five shillings a week. I got but few examples of reading, and those far from promising, and could not help remembering how different my experiences had been the year before in Bohemia.

One of the cottages in which I took shelter stands lonely in a little wood. The tenant, a young labourer, who had just come home from work, “not a bit sorry,” as he said, “that ’twas Saturday afternoon,” entered willingly into conversation, and made no secret of his circumstances. His testimony was also favourable as regards wages. He earned fifteen shillings a week, and didn’t see any reason to complain of hard times, for he paid but three pounds a year for his cottage, which sum he recovered from his garden in vegetables and flowers, besides sundry little advantages which at times fall to the lot of rustics. He eat meat—beef or mutton—“pretty well every day,” and was fully persuaded that without enough of good food a man could not do a fair day’s work.

While we talked his wife was putting the finishing touch to the day’s cleaning by washing the brick floor, and without making herself unclean or untidy, as many do. Her husband had shown himself no bad judge of rustic beauty when he chose her as his helpmate, and her good looks were repeated in their little daughter, who ran playfully about the room. I suggested that the evening, when one wished to sit quiet and comfortable, was hardly the time to wet the floor. “I’d rather see it wet than mucky” (mooky, as he pronounced it), was the answer; and neither husband nor wife was ready to believe that the ill-health too plainly observable among many cottagers’ children arises from avoidable damp. To wash the floor in the morning, when no one had occasion to sit in the room, would be against all rule.

“Stay a bit longer,” said the young man, as I rose when the shower ceased; “I like to hear ye talk.”

And I liked to hear him talk, especially as he began to praise his wife. It was such a pleasure to come home when there was such a lass as that to make a man comfortable. Nobody could beat her at making a shirt or making bread, or cooking; and he opened the oven to show me how much room there was for the loaves. Scarcely a cottage but has a grate with iron oven attached, and in some places the overpowering heat reminded me of my friend’s house in Ulrichsthal. Then we had a little discourse about books. He liked reading, and had a Bible for Sundays, and a few odd volumes which he read in the evenings, but not without difficulty; it was so hard to keep awake after a day out of doors.

Meanwhile I made enticing signs to the merry little lassie, and at last she sat without fear on my knee, and listened with a happy smile and wondering eyes to my chant of the pastoral legend of Little Bopeep. Such good friends did we become, that when at length I said “good-bye,” and shook hands, there was a general expression of regret, and a hope that I would call again. I certainly will the next time I visit Holderness.

Often since has this incident recurred to my mind, and most often when the discussion was going on in the newspapers concerning the impropriety of marriage on three hundred a year. I wished that the writers, especially he who sneered at domestic life, could go down into Yorkshire, and see how much happiness may be had for less than fifty pounds a year. As if any selfish bachelor enjoyments, any of the talk of the clubs, were worth the prattle of infancy, the happy voices of childhood, the pleasures and duties that come with offspring! Sandeau deserved to be made Académicien, if only for having said that “un berceau est plus éloquent qu’une chaire, et rien n’enseigne mieux à l’homme les côtés sérieux de sa destinée.”

A mile or two farther and water gleams through the trees on the right. It is Hornsea Mere, nearly two miles in length, and soon, when the road skirts the margin, you see reedy shallows, the resort of wild-fowl, and swans floating around the wooded islands; and at the upper end the belts and masses of trees under which the visitors to Hornsea find pleasant walks while sauntering out to the sylvan scenery of Wassand and Sigglesthorne. The lake, said a passing villager, averages ten feet in depth, with perhaps as much more of mud, and swarms with fish, chiefly pike and perch. He added something about the great people of the neighbourhood, who would not let a poor fellow fish in the mere, and ordered the keeper to duck even little boys poaching with stick and string. And he recited with a gruff chuckle a rhyming epitaph which one of his neighbours had composed to the memory of a clergyman who had made himself particularly obnoxious. It did not flatter the deceased.

In Henry the Third’s reign, as may be read in the Liber Melsæ, or Chronicle of the Abbey of Meaux, the Abbot of St. Mary’s at York quarrelled with him of Meaux, about the right to fish in the mere, and not being able to decide the quarrel by argument, the pious churchmen had recourse to arms. Each party hired combatants, who met on the appointed day, and after a horse had been swum across the mere, and stakes had been planted to mark the Abbot of St. Mary’s claim, they fought from morning until nightfall, and Meaux lost the battle, and with it his ancient right of fishery.

In Elizabeth’s reign, the Countess of Warwick granted to Marmaduke Constable the right to fish and fowl for “the some of fyftye and five pounds of lawful English money.” This Marmaduke, who thus testified his love of fin and feather, was an ancestor of Sir Clifford Constable, the present “Lord Paramount,” upon whom the blind fiddler exercised his wit.

Hornsea church stands on an eminence at the eastern end between the mere and the village. Its low square tower once bore a tall spire, on which, as is said, the builder had cut an inscription:—

Hornsea steeple, when I built thee,Thou was 10 miles off Burlington,Ten miles off Beverley, and 10 miles off sea;

but it fell during a gale in 1773. The edifice is a specimen of fifteenth-century architecture, with portions of an earlier date. The crypt under the chancel was at one time a receptacle for smuggled goods, and the clerk was down there doing unlawful work when the tempest smote the spire, and frightened him well-nigh to death. The memory of the last rector is preserved by an altar tomb of alabaster, and of William Day, gentleman, who “dyed” in 1616, by a curious epitaph:

If that man’s life be likened to a day,One here interr’d in youth did lose a dayBy death, and yet no loss to him at all,For he a threefold day gain’d by his fall;One day of rest in bliss celestial,Two days on earth by gifts terrestryall—Three pounds at Christmas, three at Easter Day,Given to the poure until the world’s last day.This was no cause to heaven; but, consequent,Who thither will, must tread the steps he went.For why? Faith, Hope, and Christian Charity,Perfect the house framed for eternity.

Hornsea village is a homely-looking place, with two or three inns, a post-office, and little shops and houses furbished up till they look expectant of customers and lodgers. Many a pair of eyes took an observation of me as I passed along the street, and away up the hill, seeking for quarters with an open prospect. Half a mile farther, the ground always rising, and you come to the edge of a clay cliff, and a row of modern houses, and the Marine Hotel in full view of the sea.

Even at the first glance you note the waste of the land. As at Kilnsea, so here. A few miles to the south, between us and Owthorne, stands the village of Aldborough, far to the rear of the site once occupied by its church. The sea washed it away. That church was built by Ulf, a mighty thane, in the reign of Canute. A stone, a relic of the former edifice, bearing an inscription in Anglo-Saxon, which he caused to be cut, is preserved in the wall of the present church. This stone, and Ulf’s horn, still to be seen in York Minster, are among the most venerable antiquities of the county.

Hornsea is a favourite resort of many Yorkshire folk who love quiet; hence a casual traveller is liable to be disappointed of a lodging on the shore. There was, however, a room to spare at the hotel—a top room, from which, later in the evening, I saw miles of ripples twinkling with moonlight, and heard their murmur on the sand through the open window till I fell asleep.

CHAPTER VII

Coast Scenery—A waning Mere, and wasting Cliffs—The Rain and the Sea—Encroachment prevented—Economy of the Hotel—A Start on the Sands—Pleasure of Walking—Cure for a bad Conscience—Phenomena of the Shore—Curious Forms in the Cliffs—Fossil Remains—Strange Boulders—A Villager’s Etymology—Reminiscences of “Bonypart” and Paul Jones—The last House—Chalk and Clay—Bridlington—One of the Gipseys—Paul Jones again—The Sea-Fight—A Reminiscence of Montgomery.

I was out early the next morning for a stroll. The upper margin of the beach, covered only by the highest tides, is loose, heavy sand, strewn with hardened lumps of clay, fatiguing to walk upon; but grows firmer as you approach the water. The wheels of the bathing-machines have broad wooden tires to prevent their sinking. The cliffs are, as we saw near the Spurn, nothing but clay, very irregular in profile and elevation, resembling, for the most part, a great brown bank, varying in height from ten feet to forty. The hotel stands on a rise, which overtops the land on each side and juts out farther, commanding a view for miles, bounded on the north by that far-stretching promontory, Flamborough Head; and to the south by the pale line, where land and water meet the sky. The morning sun touching the many jutting points, while the intervals lay in thin, hazy shadow, imparted something picturesque to the scene, which vanished as the hours drew on, and the stronger light revealed the monotonous colour and unclothed surface of the cliffs. Towards evening the picturesque reappears with the lights falling in the opposite direction.

A short distance south of the hotel, a stream runs from the mere to the sea. The land is low here, so low that unusually high tides have forced their way up the channel of the stream to the lake, and flooded the grounds on both sides; and the effect will be, as Professor Phillips says, the entire drainage of the mere, and production of phenomena similar to those which may be seen on the other parts of the coast of Holderness: a depression in the cliffs exposing a section of deposits such as are only formed under a large surface of standing water. The result is a mere question of time; and if it be true that Hornsea church once stood ten miles from the sea, within the historical period, the scant half-mile, which is now all that separates it from the hungry waves, has no very lengthened term of existence before it. More than a mile in breadth along the whole coast from Bridlington to Spurn has been devoured since the Battle of the Standard was fought.

An old man of eighty who lives in the village says there are no such high tides now as when he was a boy; and if he be not a romancer, the low ground from the sea to the mere must, at least once, have presented the appearance of a great lake. But the wasting process is carried on by other means than the sea. I saw threads of water running down the cliffs, produced by yesterday’s rain, and not without astonishment at the great quantities of mud they deposit at the base, forming in places a narrow viscous stream, creeping in a raised channel across the sand, or confused pasty heaps dotted with pools of liquid ochre. Mr. Coniton, the proprietor of the hotel, told me that he believed the rain had more influence than the sea in causing the waste of land, and he showed me the means he employed to protect his territory from one and the other. To prevent the loss by rain, which he estimates, where no precautions are taken, at a foot a year, he at first sloped his cliff at such an angle that the water runs easily down and with scarcely appreciable mischief. Then, to protect the base, he has driven rows of piles through the sand into the clay beneath, and these, checking the natural drift of the sand to the southward, preserve the under stratum. Where no such barrier exists, the waves in a winter storm sweep all the sand clean off, and lay bare the clay, and tumbling upon it with mighty shocks, sometimes wear it down a foot in the course of a tide. By this lowering of the base, the saturated soil above, deprived of support, topples over, leaving a huge gap, which only facilitates further encroachments; and in the course of a few tides the fallen mass is drifted away to enlarge the shoals in the estuary of the Humber.

Mr. Coniton entered into possession fifteen years ago, and in all that time, so effectual are the safeguards, has lost none of his land. The edge, he says, has not receded, and, to show what might be, he points to his neighbour’s field, which has shrunk away some yards to the rear.

The space between the hotel and the edge of the cliff is laid out as a lawn, which, sheltered by a bank on the north, forms an agreeable outlook and lounging-place, while gravelled paths lead to an easy descent to the sands at each extremity of the premises. The house is well arranged; there is no noise, no slackness in the service; and families may live as privately as in a private residence. The charge for adults is four shillings a day; for young children, half a guinea a week, without stint as to the number of meals: to which must be added the cost of rooms and attendance. The charges to casual guests are as reasonable as could be desired, contrasting favourably in this particular with my experiences at Hull and in certain of the inland towns and villages. Ninepence a day for service and boots is charged in the bill; hence you can depart without being troubled to “remember” anybody. An omnibus arrives every day from Beverley during the season—May to November. The distance is thirteen miles.

The falling tide had left a breadth of comparatively firm sand by the time I was ready to start, and along that I took my way to Bridlington: another stage of thirteen miles. The morning was bounteous in elements of enjoyment: a bright sun, great white clouds sailing high across the blue, a south-westerly breeze, which made the sea playful and murmurous: all gratifying to the desire of a wayfarer’s heart. I could not help pitying those farmers at Beverley, who saw no pleasure in walking. No pleasure in the surest promotion of health and exercise! No pleasure in the steady progressive motion which satisfies our love of change without hindering observation! No pleasure in walking, that strengthens the limbs and invigorates the lungs! No pleasure in arming the sling against the giant! No pleasure in the occasion of cheerful thoughts and manifold suggestions which bring contentment to the heart! Walking is an exercise which in our days might replace, more commonly than it does, the rude out-door recreations of former times; and if but a few of the many hundreds who put on their Sunday clothes to lounge the hours away at the corner of a street, would but take a ten miles’ walk out to the country lanes or breezy moorlands, they would find benefit alike to their manhood and morals. If I remember rightly, it is one of the old Greeks who says that walking will almost cure a bad conscience; and, for my part, I am never so ready to obey the precept of neighbourly love as when my sentiments are harmonized by walks of seven or eight leagues a day.

The sands are of varying consistency. In some places you leave deep footprints; and nowhere is the firmness equal to that we shall find farther north, except on the wet border from which the wave has just retired. Mile after mile it stretches before you, a broad slope of sand, sparely roughened here and there by pebble drifts. At times you see numerous rounded lumps lying about of many sizes, which at a distance resemble sleeping turtles, and on a nearer view prove to be nothing but masses of hardened clay, water-worn, and as full of pebbles as a canon’s pudding is of plums. These are portions of the bottoms of lakes overrun by the sea; stubborn vestiges, which yield but slowly. At times the shortest route takes you through watery flats, or broad shallow streams, where little rivers are well-nigh swallowed by the sand as they run across to the sea. A little farther and you come to a low bank, everywhere cut up by glistening ripple-marks, or to a bare patch of clay, which feels like india-rubber under your foot.

And the cliffs taken thus furlong by furlong offer a greater variety than appears at first sight. Here, the clay is cracked in such a way as to resemble nothing so much as a pile of huge brown loaves; now it falls away into a broken hollow patched with rough grass; now it juts again so full of perpendicular cracks that you liken it to a mass of starch; now it is grooved by a deep gully; now a buttress terminates in a crumbling pyramid—umber mottled with yellow; now it is a rude stair, six great steps only to the summit; now a point, of which you would say the extremity has been shaped by turf-cutters; now a wall of pebbles, hundreds of thousands of all sizes, the largest equal in bigness to a child’s head; now a shattered ruin fallen in a confused heap. Such are some of the appearances left by the waves in their never-ending aggressions.

In one hollow the disposition of the clay was so singular, and apparently artificial, and unlike anything which I had ever seen, that I could only imagine it to be a recess in which a party of Assyrian brickmakers had been at work and left great piles of their bricks in different degrees of finish. It was easier to imagine that than to believe such effects could be produced by the dash of the sea.

The greatest elevation occurs about Atwick and Skirlington, places interesting to the palæontologist, on account of fossils—an elephant’s tusk, and the head and horns of the great Irish elk—found in the cliffs. Farther on the cliff sinks to a mere bank, six feet in height, but, whether high or low, you need not fear a surprise by the rising tide, for you can scramble up anywhere out of reach of the water. Looking inland from these points you see always the same character of scenery, and where a path zigzags up you will notice large trays used for carrying up the heaps of pebbles there accumulated, for the construction of drains, fences, and walls. Among remarkable curiosities are two large boulders—one of a slaty rock, the other of granite half embedded in the sand. From what part of the country were they drifted to their present position?

Here and there I fell in with a villager taking a quiet walk on the beach, and leading two or three little children. One of them told me that the Stricklands, a well-known family in Holderness, derived their name from Strikeland; that is, they were the first to strike the land when they came over. Collectors of folk-lore will perhaps make a note of this rustic etymology. He remembered hearing his father talk of the alarm that prevailed all along the coast when there was talk of “Bonypart’s” invasion; and how that Paul Jones never sailed past without firing a ball at Rolleston Hall, that stood on a slope in sight of the sea, where dwelt Mr. Brough, who, as Marshal to the Court of Admiralty, had to direct the proceedings on the trial of Admiral Byng.

Here and there are parties of country lads bathing; or trying which can take the longest jump on the smooth sand; or squatting in soft places idly watching the waves, and exasperating their dogs into a fight.

After passing Skipsea, and the northern end of the Barmston drain, the lone house in the distance catches your eye; the last house of Auburn, a village devoured by the sea. The distance is deceptive along the level shore; but when at length you come to the spot, you see a poor weather-beaten cottage on the top of the cliff, and so close to the edge that the eastern wall forms but one perpendicular line with the cliff itself. You can hardly help fancying that it will fall at any moment, even while you are looking; but so it has stood for many years; a fact the more remarkable, as in this place the cliff projects as if in defiance of the ruthless waters. Look at the old maps, and you will read: “Here Auburn washed away by the sea;” and the lone house remains a melancholy yet suggestive monument of geological change.

Now Bridlington comes in sight, and immediately beyond you see a change in the aspect of the cliffs. The chalk formation which stretches across England from Hampshire to Yorkshire, makes its appearance here as a thin white band under the clay, becoming thicker and thicker, till at length the whole cliff is chalk from base to summit, and the great promontory, of snowy whiteness, gleams afar in the sunlight along the shores and across the sea. The chalk opposes a barrier, which, though far less stubborn than the volcanic rocks of Cornwall, is yet more enduring than the clay: hence the land rushes proudly out on the domain of ocean. Nearness, however, while it shows you the mouths of caverns and gullies, like dark shades in the chalk, markedly shortens the headland to the eye.