Chapter XXII

STAMFORD compels enthusiasm, from the first glimpse of it on entering, to the last regretful backward glance on leaving. It is historic, picturesque, stately, aristocratic, and cleanly, all at once. Its stone-built mansions and houses are chiefly of the Renaissance period, from Elizabeth onwards to the time of George the First, and it is in this sort the most beautiful town in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, and even in some aspects surpassing them.

Apart from its lovely churches, one seeks not Gothic architecture at Stamford but the stateliness of classic methods as understood in the sixteenth and seventeenth century revival. It is this especial architectural character which gives the town such an air of academic distinction and leads the stranger to compare it with the great university towns, even before the fact comes to his knowledge that Stamford itself was once the seat of a University.

The entrance is of a peculiar stateliness, the broad quiet street descending, lined with dignified private houses, to where the river Welland flows beneath the bridge, dividing the counties of Northampton and Lincoln, and Stamford Baron from Stamford town. On the right hand rises the fine tower of St. Martin’s, its perforated battlements showing, lace-like, against the sky, just as when Turner painted his view. Lower down across the street straddles the sign of the great “George” inn, and a few steps forward serve to disclose the exquisite picture of St. Mary’s tower and spire soaring from the rising ground on the other side of the river. The “distracting bustle of the ‘George,’ which exceeded anything I ever saw or heard,” as the Reverend Thomas Twining wrote, in 1776, has long since become a thing of the past, and a certain quiet dignity now belongs to it, as to Stamford in general.

The “George” is an inn with a history. Charles the First slept there, August 23, 1645, and a whole train of dignitaries at one time or another. “Billy the Butcher,” too, returning from Culloden, stayed in the house, and with his officers celebrated that victory. “Billy the Butcher,” one regrets to say, was the vulgar nickname by which the people called William, Duke of Cumberland.

Distinguished foreigners without number have rested here and wondered at the habits of Englishmen. The foreigner, it is to be feared, never, with every advantage, really understands us; sometimes, too, he is so perverse that we find a difficulty in understanding him. Thus, Master Estienne Perlin, who travelled the roads and sampled the inns of England so far back as 1558, says we were great drunkards then. He wrote an account of his travels, and of England, as it appeared to him; and the way in which he wrestles with the pronunciation of the language is amusing enough. Thus, according to this traveller, if an Englishman would treat you, he would say in his language: “Vis dring a’ quarta uin oim gasquim oim hespaignol oim malvoysi.” This is merely maddening, and it is a positive relief to know that the meaning of it is, “Will you drink a quart of Gascony wine, another of Spanish, and another of Malmsey?” According to this, the Englishman of three hundred years ago mixed his drinks alarmingly. “In drinking,” continues this amusing foreigner, “they will say to you, a hundred times, ‘Drind iou,’ which is, ‘I drink to you’; and you should answer them in their language, ‘Iplaigiou,’ which means ‘I pledge you.’ If you would thank them in their language, you say, ‘God tanque artelay.’ When they are drunk,” he concludes, “they will swear by blood and death that you shall drink all that is in your cup, and will say to you thus: ‘Bigod sol drind iou agoud uin.’”

[Picture: Entrance to Stamford. (After J. M. W. Turner R.A.)]

Such customs as these must have been excellent business for the “George” and its contemporaries.

To this inn belongs an incident not paralleled elsewhere. The daughter of one of its landlords, Margaret, daughter of Bryan Hodgson, married a bishop! Or, more exactly, one who became a bishop: the Reverend Beilby Porteous, who at the time of his marriage, in 1765, was vicar of Ruckinge and Wittersham, in Kent. In 1776 he became Bishop of Chester, and eleven years later Bishop of London. This was long years before Whincup kept the house. He reigned here in the full tide of the coaching age, and was one of the proprietors of the “Stamford Regent.”

Much history has been made at Stamford, from the time when it was the “stone ford” of the Romans across the Welland, through the long ages of blood and destruction, stretching, with little intermission, from the days of Saxon and Danish conflicts to that final clash of arms in 1643, when Cromwell held the town and besieged Burghley House; and to that Monday in the first week of May, 1646, when Charles the First, having slept the night before at the residence of Alderman Wolph (descended from Wulph, son of King Harold) slipped through a postern-gate in the town wall, and so escaped for a final few hours as a free man. The gate is there yet, in the grounds of Barn Hill House, a mansion which, in 1729, was purchased by Stukeley, the antiquary, vicar of All Saints.

Here is no place to tell of the Councils and Parliaments held at Stamford; but, as justifying the academic air the town still holds, it must be said that it was indeed the home of a University, long centuries ago. It was following the early quarrels of Oxford University and Oxford town that a body of students left that seat of learning, in 1260, and set up a temporary home at Northampton. Political troubles drove them, six years later, to Stamford, where they founded several Colleges and Halls, which were already flourishing when, in 1333, the northern students at Oxford, disgusted with the alleged favouritism shown to the southerners, left in a body and found a welcome at Stamford. Liberty in those days was construed as permission given the strong to oppress the weak, and so when Oxford University and Oxford town jointly petitioned the king to forbid the seceders learning where they listed, those unhappy students were promptly arrested and sent back to suck wisdom from _alma mater_ on the Isis. Oxford and Cambridge both agreed not to recognise degrees conferred by Stamford, and at length, by 1463, this University was strangled.

The actual relics of those times are few. Chief in point of interest is the old Brasenose Gate, the only fragment of the College of that name, said to have been founded by students from Brasenose College, Oxford. Here remained until recent years the ancient bronze knocker, in the form of a lion’s head with a massive ring in its mouth, brought, according to the legend, from the Oxford college. This knocker certainly belongs to a period not later than the thirteenth century, and may have been conveyed away. Whether it was the original “brazen nose,” said to have originated the odd name of the College, or whether that name arose from the _brassen-huis_, or brew-house, whose site the original College was built upon, is one of those mysteries of derivation never likely to be solved. During the last years of its stay at Stamford, the knocker was kept in a house adjoining, until it and the house were purchased by Brasenose College, Oxford, in whose Common Room the ancient relic now occupies a place of honour.

[Picture: Stamford]

Stamford was attached to the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses, and had occasion to regret the fact; for it offered an especial mark to the victorious Lancastrians in 1461, after the battle of St. Albans, when Sir Andrew Trollope, with the triple ferocity of the _trois loups_ from which the name derives, fell upon the town and pillaged and burnt it. Eight churches, two castles, and the town walls, together with many hundreds of houses, were destroyed, and Stamford has never recovered its ancient importance since then. It is enough for us that it is among the stateliest of towns, stone-built and dignified; with its beautiful churches of St. Mary, All Saints, and St. Martin; its old almshouses and mansions, not exactly matched in all England.

The histories tell of a long list of famous men, natives of Stamford; but the mere mental capacity or personal bravery shown by these great ones is sardonically overshadowed by the physical greatness of quite another kind of person, who, although not even a native of Stamford, has, by his dying here, shed an especial lustre upon the town.

[Picture: Daniel Lambert] Far transcending the fame of all other personages is that of Daniel Lambert, the Fat Man. In the computation of avoirdupois and of the tape-measure, this was the greatest figure that ever travelled the Great North Road. No king or noble can vie with him, nor are saintly shrines more zealously visited than his grave in the old churchyard of St. Martin’s. While the tomb of that great Cecil, the Lord Treasurer Burghley, within the church, remains often unvisited, photographs of Daniel Lambert and of his epitaph meet the traveller at every turn.

Although destined to this undying fame, and to pothouse canonisation, Daniel’s career was short, as that epitaph tells us:—

“In Remembrance of
That Prodigy in Nature
DANIEL LAMBERT
who was possessed of
An exalted and convivial mind
And in personal greatness
Had no Competitor
He measured three feet, one inch, round the leg
Nine feet, four inches, round the body
And Weighed
Fifty-two stone Eleven pounds
He departed this life
On the 21st of June
1809
Aged 39 years.”

His diet is said to have been plain, and the quantity moderate, and he never drank anything stronger than water. His countenance was manly and intelligent, and he had a melodious tenor voice. For some years before his death he had toured the country, exhibiting himself, and visited London on two occasions. The weights and measurements quoted on his tombstone were taken at Huntingdon only the day before his death. In the evening he arrived at the “Waggon and Horses,” Stamford, in good health, in preparation for “receiving company” during Stamford Races, but before nine o’clock the next morning was dead in the room on the ground floor which he had taken because of his inability to go upstairs. For many years two of his suits were shown at the inn, seven men often succeeding in squeezing themselves within the mighty embrace of his waistcoat, without bursting a button. The “Waggon and Horses” has long since given place to a school, and so here is a place of pilgrimage the less; but Daniel’s fame is immortal, for he lives as the sign of many an inn and refreshment-house, whose proprietors use him as an advertisement of the plenteous fare to be obtained within, regardless of the fact that his immense bulk was due rather to a dropsical habit than to much eating or drinking.