Chapter IV: From Newcastle to the Sea (2)

Not far below Newton Bridge and Auckland Park is Binchester, marking the place where the Wear was crossed by the great Roman road of Watling Street, in its straight course across the county from Piercebridge on the Tees to Lanchester on the Browney, and Ebchester on the Derwent. Roman remains, in the form of sculptured stones, of votive altars, and of baths, have been discovered at Binchester, which may be the Binovium of Ptolemy; and here a cross-road from the south joined the old military way, coming past the sites of what are now Raby Castle, Staindrop, Streatham, Barnard Castle, and other scenes in Langleydale and Teesdale and on the banks of the Greta, since immortalised by history and legend. An older seat of the great family of the Nevilles than Raby Hall itself--Brancepeth Castle, beyond Willington--is near at hand. It got into their possession when the grandson of the Neville who "came over with the Conqueror" married the heiress of the Saxon family of Bulmer. From the Bulmers the Nevilles are supposed to have derived their badge of the "Dun Bull;" and one of their race may have been the hero of the legend that accounts for the local nomenclature by telling how "Sir Hodge of Ferryhill" watched the track of the savage boar--the "Brawn's path"--from Brandon Hill, and dug a pitfall for him at the spot still marked by a stone at Cleve's Cross, near Merrington. Brancepeth was the rendezvous of the "grave gentry of estate and name" in the North, who came to aid the Northern Earls, Westmorland, and Northumberland, in the unhappy rising in Queen Elizabeth's time that cost so many of them their heads as well as their lands. It now belongs to Viscount Boyne. In spite of its low situation and the too intrusive neighbourhood of the great Brancepeth Collieries, it is a noble and massive feudal pile, and in its general effect has been pronounced "superior to any other battlemented edifice in the North of England." In the Baron's Hall are memorials of the battle of Neville's Cross; but for the most interesting memorials of the noble family that ruled the Borders from Brancepeth or from Raby, and by turns formed alliances with, and plotted against, the king, one must go to the old church of St. Brandon, and look at the effigies in carved oak or stone of the Nevilles.

On the other or south side of the Wear are Whitworth Hall, the historic seat of the Shaftos, and Spennymoor, made memorable by a terrible colliery disaster; and by Sunderland Bridge, near the inflow of the Browney, you cross to the vicinity of deep and haunted Croxdale. Behind all these rises the high ridge upon which are perched Ferryhill and the lofty tower of the old Church of Merrington. This is a commanding historic site for surveying the County Palatine; and on a clear day the view ranges all up the valley of the Wear to the mountains of Westmorland and Cumberland, and south-east and east to the mouth of the Tees and to the Cleveland Hills in Yorkshire. Near by are many scenes of note in the annals of Durham. It was in Merrington Church that the usurping Comyn made his last stand in his "lewd enterprise" of seizing the Bishopric in 1144; and it was the gathering-place of the English forces that assembled to repel the Scots before Neville's Cross. Eldon, which gave its name to the eminent Lord Chancellor; Thickley, where were reared those stout Cromwellians, General Robert and Colonel John Lilburn; Mainsforth, the home of Surtees, the historian of Durham and friend of Walter Scott; and Bishop Middleham, the residence of the Bishops for two or three centuries after the Conquest, are all within easy reach. To the north and north-east, Brancepeth and Ushaw College, and the town and towers of Durham, are in sight, and between the Wear and the sea rise Penshaw, Wardenlaw, and other heights, and the smoke of collieries innumerable.

Wardenlaw receives most countenance from tradition for the claim that it is the spot where St. Cuthbert made selection of the last resting-place for his bones, weary of long wanderings by land and sea. But, on the ground of situation, the honour might be disputed by a score of other sites commanding a view of the rich valley, the winding river, and the "guarded cliff," crowned by the "Cathedral huge and vast," that is at once a monument and a symbol of the grand old Saint of the North. To visit Durham, or even to see its three great square towers rising in stern and severe majesty over the Wear and the masses of houses and foliage clustered beneath, is to feel that the Age of Miracle is not yet past. Or, if the ancient phases of faith and life be indeed dead or dying, there has nowhere in England been left a more solid and impressive memorial of their former strength than the Cathedral of Durham. The Apostle among the Angles, dead these twelve centuries, seems to haunt his ancient fane, and to cast the influence of his austere spirit over the narrow streets and lanes of the venerable town. The spell by which these stately arches and massive towers rose, and which, in other centuries, drew towards Durham great crowds of pilgrims, and wealth and secular and ecclesiastical power unequalled in the North, is not yet wholly broken. To this day the town stands somewhat aside, with an air of proud seclusion, from the rush and din of the great highways of commerce that pass so near. It gives, indeed, a part of its mind and time to the manufacture of mustard and carpets and the raising of coal, but it does not give its whole heart, like its neighbour cities, to trade. It is a centre of academic culture and learning, and has its thoughts not unfrequently cast back into a darker but splendid past. St. Cuthbert's body may follow the way of all flesh, but his will and his character are still living and acting powers in Durham.

Whether chance or heavenly inspiration directed the choice of site, the selection of Durham as the stronghold of the religious feeling and of the temporal power of the North was a happy one. For centuries it was the core, not only of the Vale of Wear and of the County Palatine, but of ancient Northumbria. To the credit of the Scots, to whose account Durham and the Wear had afterwards to set down so terrible an array of losses and grudges, it has to be said that this region of the North was originally missionised and converted to Christianity from the further side of the Tweed. When the greater part of Saxon England was in heathen darkness, a spark of light was struck at Holy Island and Lindisfarne, and a little later at Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, and never after was it extinguished. It was carried thither by apostles of the Early Scottish Church, and when Oswald, King and Saint, granted Holy Island, close by his royal residence of Bamborough, to St. Aidan as a site for a monastic house and a centre of missionary effort, the germ was planted of the future See of Durham. Cuthbert also came from the other side of the Border--a Border, however, which did not exist in those days as a barrier of ecclesiastical and political power. He was a native of the pleasant vale of Lauderdale, and came as a member of the brotherhood of Melrose to reinforce the band of holy men whose home was at Lindisfarne, and whose special field of labour was the region between Tees and Tweed. The zeal and the austerities of his companions were not enough to satisfy the ardent soul of Cuthbert; neither was Holy Island a retreat secluded enough for the practice of those penances and prayers by which he sought to mortify the flesh and to propitiate Heaven in favour of his work. His fame for piety was such that he was promoted to be Bishop of Hexham, and afterwards to be head of the Monastery of Lindisfarne; but, laying down these charges, he retired to the surf-beaten refuge of the Farne Islands, and there spent the solitary close of his days. Even in his lifetime, St. Cuthbert's fasts and prayers had, according to the belief of that time, been efficacious in working miracles; and it may be judged whether his brethren were likely to allow the tales of wondrous cures wrought at the touch or word of the holy man to suffer in repetition, or to permit so valuable a power to die with him. On his death-bed, it is said, he exhorted his companions to hold fast by the faith, and, rather than submit to the violation of a jot or tittle of the doctrine and ritual committed to them, to take up his body and flee with it to some spot where the Church might be free, and finally triumphant.

The body of the saint thus became not merely a precious property, in which resided thaumaturgical virtues, but a symbol and pledge of monastic and churchly privileges; and it travelled farther and met with more adventures after death than in life. The pagan Norsemen became soon after the curse and the terror of the Northumberland coasts. Their first descent was made exactly eleven centuries ago--in 789--and four years later they returned and ravaged Lindisfarne, as well as Jarrow and other churches; but the monks, on coming back to their ruined home, found the incorruptible body of their saint intact in its shrine. Still later, in King Alfred's time, the Danes hove down upon the shores of England, and the brethren had again to flee for their lives from the marauders. This time, however, because they were not sufficiently persuaded that another miracle would be vouchsafed for the preservation of the precious remains, or for some other good reason, they did not leave the saint to the mercies of the invaders. Church legend has repeated with many marvellous particulars the story--

"How when the rude Danes burned their pile,
The monks fled forth from Holy Isle--
O'er northern mountain, marsh, and moor,
From sea to sea, from shore to shore,
Seven years Saint Cuthbert's corpse they bore";

how, also, among other strange experiences, the corpse in its stone coffin floated "light as gossamer" down Tweed from Melrose to Tillmouth; and how, after an excursion to Ireland and to Craike Abbey, it was brought back once more to familiar ground by Wear and Tyne, but never again to Lindisfarne.

It was perhaps because the saint or his guardians thought that the risks of disturbance were too great on Holy Island that the relics sought refuge at Chester-le-Street, and there rested for more than a century. And now began the period of power of the bishopric, united to that of Hexham. Alfred the Great had, on regaining the control of his realm, largely endowed the episcopal seat rendered illustrious by the sanctity of Cuthbert and the learning of Bede. The lands between Tyne and Tees became "the patrimony of St. Cuthbert," and to these were added large possessions or authority in adjoining districts. The king decreed that "whatever additions the bishopric might acquire by benefaction or otherwise should be held free of temporal service of any kind to the Crown"--Cuthbert's dying wish put into the form of a royal grant. The bishop thus became, within his own domain, a vice-king, exercising civil as well as spiritual jurisdiction. Lands and vassals were added by a natural process of selecting the service least onerous in this world and offering the greatest rewards in the next; and the nucleus was formed of the County Palatine, which retained, down to the present century, some of the properties of an _imperium in imperio_. In the time of Ethelred the Unready, the spoilers returned, and the monks and the canonised remains were again driven forth, this time as far as Ripon. There came a time when it seemed safe to move back to Chester-le-Street, but the saint does not appear to have relished reinstatement after eviction. The returning company of monks halted on high ground overlooking the fair Vale of Wear and the likely site of Durham, then an insignificant village, and known as "Dunholm." At the top of the hill the precious burden became miraculously heavy, and the bearers had to set it down. Three days of prayer and fasting were required before inspired direction was obtained through a monk, or a dun cow--tradition is contradictory on the point--and the _cortège_ finally halted in a grove of trees on the platform of the high peninsula formed by the bend of the river. Here first rose a "tabernacle of boughs," and then a humble cell--the "White Church"--on the spot, as is supposed, now occupied by the church of St. Mary-le-Bow, in the North Bailey. In a few years' time the bishop, Aldune, set to work to erect, upon the site of the present cathedral, a "roof divine" to worthily cover the bones of holy Cuthbert; and as the monkish rhyme (translated) runs:--

"Arch follows arch; o'er turrets turrets rise,
Until the hallowed cross salutes the skies,
And the blest city, free henceforth from foes,
Beneath that sacred shadow finds repose."

All this happened nine hundred years ago. In counting upon rest, St. Cuthbert and his brethren had reckoned without the Scots and the Normans. Aldune's low and crypt-like structure did not last a century. It was rebuilt in statelier form by Bishop William de Carilepho, and Turgot the Prior; Malcolm of Scotland, then on his way to meet Rufus at Gloucester, also laying a foundation stone. Normans and Scots thus set their hands to the work of repairing the ruin they had made. It was the way of Durham and St. Cuthbert's shrine to thrive more by the assaults of enemies than by the benefits of friends. In the meantime, the fame and importance of the place had vastly increased. King Canute had made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the patron saint, having travelled the distance from Trimdon to Durham, by way of Garmondsway, with naked feet and clad in pilgrim's weeds. He added liberal gifts and fresh franchises to the see, and encouraged the monks to bring the remains of the Venerable Bede, the father of English Church and secular history, from Jarrow Monastery to be laid beside those of Cuthbert. Another great conqueror and sinner--William of Normandy--after he had wreaked terrible vengeance on the town that had become the centre of Saxon feeling in the north, and that had slaughtered his Norman garrison and his Norman Bishop, showed great respect for the shrine and patrimony of the saint; he even wished to look with his own eyes upon the incorruptible body, but a timely illness that seized him after saying mass in the cathedral baulked his purpose. Flambard, Pudsey, and the other successors of Carilepho, were not so much churchmen as great feudal lords, exercising almost regal sway on the Borders and a powerful influence at court. The privileges and revenues of the Prince-Bishops of Durham were a prize that the Sovereign himself might covet. They raised armies, coined money, levied taxes, appointed sheriffs and other judicial officers, and, in spite of their vows, exercised the right of presiding in court when sentences of life or death were adjudged upon criminals. In other respects their sacred office sat lightly upon them, and they caroused and hunted and intrigued and plotted on a grander scale than any baron of their time. Besides being Bishops of St. Cuthbert's See, they were titular Earls of Sadberge, and they found it easy to shuffle off the sacred for the secular character, or the secular for the sacred, as suited them. At the same time they never forgot the tradition of their patron saint, or failed to seize an opportunity of magnifying the office and increasing the dignity and power that centred in the "Haliwerk," or Castle, and the Cathedral. Thus Flambard divided his energies between building strong castles and completing the great church, and endowing public hospitals and his own bastard children. Hugh de Pudsey's wealth--such of it as the rapacious hands of the Anjou kings left--was spent on similar objects; to him Durham town owes its first charter, and the Cathedral its famous "Galilee Porch," or Lady's Chapel, an ingenious compromise, as we are told, between the inveterate ascetic prejudice of St. Cuthbert against the presence of women, and the necessity of allowing the sex access to the chapel dedicated to the Virgin. In Bishop Anthony Bek's days the See may be said to have reached the zenith of its splendour. He was little less than a Sovereign within his extensive domains; was right-hand man of Edward I. in planning and in seeking to carry out the subjugation of Scotland; led the van with his Northumbrian levies at Falkirk, and carried away the Stone of Destiny from Scone to Westminster; and, dying, left all he had to St. Cuthbert and the Church.

Signal revenge did the Scots work for these wrongs in the time of later bishops; England was never engaged in foreign war or domestic broil but they seized the opportunity of crossing the Border, and the See and the city of Durham caught the brunt of their attack. That was a crushing check, however, which they suffered in 1346, in the days of the learned Bishop Hatfield, when David of Scotland, taking advantage of Edward III.'s absence on his French wars, crossed the Border and with a great host of hungry horsemen was harrying the country up to the gates of Durham. England was not altogether defenceless; for the king had left behind him able guardians of the North Country, in the persons of his Queen Philippa and the Prince-Bishop. The "Haliwerk folk" assembled for the protection of their beloved fane, and the Nevilles and other great lords called together their retainers to fight under the standard of St. Cuthbert. The two armies met at the Red Hill, a broken and hilly piece of ground a short distance west of the city; and after having hung long doubtful, the fortune of war went utterly against the Scots, who left their king in the hands of the victors. A group of monks took up their position at the "Maiden's Bower," and signalled to another company upon the central tower of the Cathedral how it went with the battle; and when at length the invaders were put to rout, a solemn "Te Deum" was chanted, and this commemorative custom was continued almost to our own day. Lord Ralph Neville, who led the protecting troops, caused the monument to be raised which has given its name--"Neville's Cross"--to the battle; his body, with that of other members of the great family that once ruled at Brancepeth and Raby, is buried in the nave; and over his grave was placed, with his own standard, the banner wrested from the King of the Scots. Though Queen Philippa was so good a friend to Durham, yet the churlish patron saint could not brook her presence near his shrine, and when she took up her quarters in the Prior's house she had to flee hastily in the night in her bed-gear. Not more hospitable was the welcome given to Margaret of Anjou, when fortune went finally against the House of Lancaster and she fled for refuge to Durham. The town and the Prince-Bishops had ventured and suffered much for the Lancastrian cause in the Wars of the Roses; but they dared not risk the vengeance of the victorious side, and hurried the despairing Queen across the Border into Scotland. More troubles awaited Durham at the time of the Reformation. For six years Cardinal Wolsey held the diocese, but confined his duties to drawing its rich revenues. His successor, Tunstall, was a man of rare moderation for his time. Though a Reformer, like his friend Erasmus, he was inclined to remain attached to the "old religion," and he suffered at the hands of both parties as they successively came uppermost. In his days the monasteries--including that of Durham and the older foundations of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, which had long been annexed to it as "cells"--were suppressed; and the curious reactionary movement known as the "Pilgrimage of Grace" may be said to have had its beginning at Durham. It was renewed, with like disastrous consequences, in the time of the first Protestant Bishop, Pilkington, in the famous enterprise of the "Rising of the North," when Queen Elizabeth's partisans, the Bowes of Streatham, rose to notice over the ruin of the Nevilles and Percys, Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland. The Bishopric was temporarily suppressed during the Commonwealth; and the Cathedral interior suffered from being the place of confinement of the Scottish prisoners from Dunbar. But amends came at the Restoration, and whatever can be said against the personal or political character of Bishops Cosin and Crewe, they were princely builders, entertainers, and benefactors of the Cathedral and city. Other eminent men have since occupied the episcopal throne and palace--chief among them for learning and good works being Butler, the author of the "Analogy"; but since the year 1836 almost the whole of the old temporal distinctions and franchises have been stripped from the "Fighting Bishopric," and Her Majesty is the Countess Palatine of Durham, and keeps "the peace of St. Cuthbert" as well as that of the Sovereign.

Durham and its cathedral have an aspect worthy of their history. No such grandly imposing combination of massive Norman strength and solemn religious beauty is presented by any other architectural pile in England. Seen from Framwellgate Bridge or any other of the many favourite points of view, it looks, what it has been in the past,

"Half house of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot."

About its outward shape there is that air of "rocky solidity and indeterminate endurance" which so impressed Dr. Johnson in its interior. Half the majestic effect of Durham Cathedral is derived, however, from its situation, settled firmly and boldly upon the highest platform of the rocky promontory washed by the river, its huge central tower rising sheer above all its surroundings--the focus of the picture; its two lesser towers squarely fronting the west; the pinnacles of the eastern transept, or "Nine Altars," balancing them on the other side; and, grouped around, the Castle and its lowering Norman keep, and the high masses of other buildings that surmount the beautiful green "Banks" and walks descending steeply to the Wear. Nearer at hand, after climbing and threading the narrow streets to the "Castle Green," the exterior view of the great Cathedral is still profoundly impressive if somewhat monotonous. On the north door hangs the knocker and ring, to which the offender against the laws could cling and claim sanctuary, or "the peace of St. Cuthbert." Within, the long arched roof and lines of alternate round and cruciform pillars are almost overwhelming, not so much on account of their height as of their ponderous strength and massive dignity. Many styles are represented, as many hands have been employed, in the interior; but the pervading spirit is the masterful and dominating genius of the Norman. The original work of Carilepho and Flambard is represented by the nave and choir. Bishop Pudsey's hand is manifest in the Transition-Norman of the "Galilee" at the west end, under the light and delicate arches of which repose the bones of the Venerable Bede. The "Nine Altars," extending eastward beyond the choir, is still later work, and was not completed until about the year 1230. In the graceful elegance of its slender shafts of stone shooting up to the extreme height of the roof, and broken only by the rich carvings of the capitals, and in the light that floods it through the beautiful "rose window" and other inlets, it forms a contrast to the somewhat sombre and heavy grandeur of the main portion of the Cathedral, and is one of our finest examples of the Early English style of church architecture. Here, however, was the "most holy place" in the Durham fane; for here is the platform of "the Shrine of St. Cuthbert," and under it the remains of the hermit of Lindisfarne rest after their long wanderings; and beside them lie other relics--"treasures more precious than gold or topaz"--among them the head of St. Oswald, "the lion of the Angles," and bones of St. Aidan. It was long believed that the place of the patron saint's sepulture was a mystery, revealed alone to three brothers of the Benedictine Order, who, under oath, passed on their knowledge, upon their death-bed, to other members of the monastery.

"Deep in Durham's Gothic shade
His relics are in secret laid,
But none may know the place."

But excavations made in 1827 have left little doubt that the spot pointed out in this Eastern Transept is that which contains the veritable remains of the "Blessed Cuthbert." Above it hung his banner and "Corporax Cloth," carried before the English host to victory at Falkirk, Neville's Cross, Flodden, and other fields; and the miraculous "Black Rood of Scotland," another of the spoils of war of the Bishopric, was among the treasures of Durham Cathedral until it was lost at the Reformation.

The chapter-house, the cloisters, and the dormitory represent most of what remains of the Monastery of Durham. Its priors took rank as abbots, and vied with the bishops of the See in piety and spiritual influence if not in temporal power. In the library and treasury are preserved many valuable manuscript relics of the monastic days, and in the great kitchen of the Deanery one may form an idea of the scale on which the old Benedictines lived and feasted. Other interesting ecclesiastical and secular buildings are collected upon the rocky platform above the Wear; but next to the Cathedral, the Castle takes first rank. It has long ceased to be the seat of episcopal state, as it has ceased to fulfil any warlike purpose in the land. It has been rebuilt, restored and added to many times since the Conqueror founded it to hold in check the Scots and to overawe the burghers; and it now helps to accommodate the Durham University--an institution which Oliver Cromwell first sought to establish, but which was only brought finally into existence upon the redistribution of the revenues of the See in 1837. Norman strength and solidity, so majestically exhibited in the interior and exterior of the Cathedral, become grim and sinister in the lines of the Castle, and in what remains of the fortifications that enclosed the ancient "Ballium." Bishop Hatfield rebuilt the Great Keep and the Hall named after him, in which Bishop Anthony Bek, that "most famous clerk of the realm," feasted Edward Longshanks on his way to conquer Scotland--the Hall which, before or since, has royally entertained a score of different Sovereigns as guests of the Prince-Prelates of Durham. But these restorations were made on the earlier foundations, and Keep and Hall and Norman Chapel retain many of the old features, and something of the old spirit.

Feudalism and romance quickly disappear from the scene when Durham is left behind, and the Wear, now becoming navigable for small craft, is followed farther on its course to the sea. There is an air of mournful solitude about the fragmentary ruins of Beaurepaire, or Bear Park, the retreat of the Priors of Durham, and of seclusion at the Roman Catholic College at Ushaw, founded for the use of the French refugees from the Revolution, and even at Sherburn Hospital, Bishop Pudsey's great foundation for lepers, now converted to other charitable purposes. But the squalor of colliery rows intrudes upon the picturesque, and the clash of machinery puts to flight the old spirit of monastic calm. This eastern side of the county of Durham is a vast busy workshop--a Northern "Black Country;" and earth and air and water, and even the minds and thoughts of the inhabitants, seem to have an impregnation of coal-dust and engine-smoke. Finchale, three or four miles below Durham, is still, however, a lonely and retired spot; and a charming road through Kepyer Wood leads to the interesting ruins of the Priory erected by Bishop Pudsey's son, near the place where the good Saint Godric dwelt in hermitage. There are still some remains of the beautiful Decorative work to be seen through the screen of ivy; and the effect is deepened by the situation, on a promontory round which the river makes a bold sweep, and by the fine woods of Cocken that enclose and form a background to the buildings.

Chester-le-Street and Lumley and Lambton Castles are the next places of note by the Wear. Something already we know about Chester, and how narrowly it escaped being the civil and ecclesiastical capital of the County Palatine, and the custodian of the bones of St. Cuthbert. Its business is now mainly with coal and ironstone; but it grumbles a little still over the golden chance it missed, and the baser minerals it has to put up with:--

"Durham lads hae gowd and silver,
Chester lads hae nowt but brass."

It is supposed to have been a Roman station; but at all events its importance was considerable in Saxon times. The Church of St. Mary and St. Cuthbert is six hundred years old; and the most remarkable of its features is perhaps the "Aisle of Tombs," a row of fourteen recumbent effigies supposed to represent the ancestors of the Lumley family, who have lived or had possessions hard by since before the Norman Conquest, and whose pedigree is so long that James I., compelled to listen to its recital, conjectured that "Adam's name was Lumley." Camden has it, however, that a Lord Lumley of Queen Elizabeth's time, who brought this collection of monuments together, "either picked them out of demolished monasteries or made them anew." The family are now represented by the Earl of Scarbrough whose seat, Lumley Castle, overlooks the Wear and the deep wooded valley through which, coming from Houghton-le-Spring and Hetton-le-Hole, runs the Lumley Beck. It is a goodly and in parts an ancient pile, but since the collieries have crowded around it, Lumley sees little of its owners, and has to be content with the range of old family portraits in the Grand Hall, a companion set to the stone effigies in the church.

Lambton Castle is not only surrounded but undermined by pit workings to such an extent that the ground and the fine semi-Norman, semi-Tudor building upon it--the home for many centuries of the Lambtons, now Earls of Durham--threatened to collapse, and are partly supported by the solid brickwork with which the old mines were filled. Lambton belonged of old to the D'Arcys; but, according to the legend, it was after it came into the hands of the present family that the famous fight between the heir of the estate and the "Worm" took place. The county, as would appear from its traditions, once swarmed with loathly "worms" or dragons; and this one took up its station by coiling itself around the "Worm Hill," and also frequented the "Worm Well." The heir of Lambton encountered it in armour "set about with razor blades," and the monster cut itself to pieces, the penalty of victory, however, being that no chief of Lambton was to die in his bed for nine generations. The most eminent name in the Lambton pedigree is that of John, first Earl of Durham, the champion of Reform, and the Greek temple that crowns the summit of Penshaw Hill, on the opposite or south side of the Wear, is erected to his memory.

At Biddick the great Victoria Railway Bridge crosses the Wear by a series of large spans at a height of 156 feet above the stream. The "Biddickers," now good, bad, and indifferent, like other "keelmen" of their class, were a wild set last century, and among them the Jacobite Earl of Perth found refuge after Culloden. The banks of the stream, crowded with busy and grimy colliery rows and coal staithes, the lines of rail and tramway that run up and athwart the inclines, and the fleets of coal-barges ascending and descending, help to announce the close neighbourhood of Sunderland. Before we reach the seaport of the Wear, however, Hylton Ferry is passed. In spite of the increasing sounds and sights of shipping industry and manufacture, a little bit of superstition and romance continues to linger about dilapidated Hylton Castle, for a fabulous number of centuries the home of the fighting race of Hyltons, now extinct as county landlords: the countryside has not quite forgotten the family goblin or brownie--the "Cauld Lad"--the eccentric ghost of a stable-boy who was killed in a fit of anger by a former lord of Hylton; though it remembers and points out with more pride Ford Hall, where the Havelocks, a martial race of later date and purer fame, were born and bred.

It is not easy in these days to associate the three townships comprehended within the municipal and parliamentary bounds of Sunderland with cloistral seclusion or warlike events, or with romance or mystery in any form--more especially when the place is approached by road, rail, or river from the colliery districts that hem it in on the land side. Yet busy, smoky, and in some spots ugly and squalid as it is, Sunderland hardly deserves the censure that has been heaped upon it as a town where "earth and water are alike black and filthy," through whose murky atmosphere the blue sky seldom shows itself, and whose architectural features are utterly contemptible. Sunderland has a number of fine buildings and handsome thoroughfares, and a large part of the town is lifted clear of the dingy streets by the wharves and river-bank. The animation on water and shore, the passing stream of coasting and river craft, and the other signs of shipping, shipbuilding, and manufacturing trade, spanned by the huge arch of the Cast Iron Bridge; the larger vessels--evidences of an ocean-going commerce--in and around the docks on either hand; even the smoke and shadows, and the dirt itself in the streets and lanes, might have been reckoned fine pictorial elements of interest in a foreign seaport.

Coal, lime, and iron; timber, glass, and chemicals; ship stores, ship fittings, and fishing, are the businesses to which modern Sunderland, Bishop Wearmouth, and Monkwearmouth, chiefly give mind and time. It was very different when they first began to be mentioned in history. The little harbourage at the mouth of the Wear was a shelter for ships, but it was also a place of refuge for studious and pious men. We hear of it first in the seventh century, when, soon after Aidan became Bishop of Lindisfarne, St. Hilda, or Bega, obtained a grant of land on the north side of the river and founded the convent of St. Bee's. Biscopius, a Saxon knight in the service of King Oswyn of Northumberland, resolved to renounce war and the world, and having prepared himself by making a pilgrimage to Rome, whence he brought back many precious books and relics, he obtained from the pious King Ecgfrith a grant of land near the nunnery--the modern Monkwearmouth--and set to work in 674 to build the monastery of St. Peter's; and a few years later he founded St. Paul's, at Jarrow. It has to be noted that Biscopius, who took the name of Benedict, brought over from France masons and glaziers to instruct the natives in these arts, and that glass-making has ever since flourished on the Wear and Tyne. All this we know from the Venerable Bede, who, when quite a young boy, resided in St. Peter's, under the Abbot Ceolfrid, before he took up his abode for life in the sister monastery at Jarrow. It is thought by archæologists that part of the original building is to be seen to this day in the west porch and west wall of the old church of Monkwearmouth. Sunderland already existed at that date; and the name was probably confined to the peninsula between the natural harbour on the south side of the Wear and the sea. Of Bishop Wearmouth, or "the delightful vill of South Wearmouth," as it was called, we do not hear until Alfred's time, when large additional grants were made to Benedict's monastery, partly in exchange for a "Book of Cosmogony," which had been brought from Rome. The Danes, the pest, and the Scots troubled much the place, and reduced the number of the inmates of the house. Sometimes these were as many as six hundred; sometimes they were like to have perished altogether, and for two centuries the place lay "waste and desolate." Malcolm was here on a plundering excursion when St. Margaret and her brother, the Atheling, happened to be in the Wear, waiting for a fair wind to carry them to Scotland--a meeting that probably changed the rude monarch's life and the national history. In 1083 the brethren of both Wearmouth and Jarrow were removed to Durham, and, as we have seen, both houses were reduced to cells dependent on the monastery of St. Cuthbert.

The mouth of the Wear had compensation in the growth of other and more secular interests. Seven centuries ago Bishop Pudsey granted a charter to Sunderland; and the liberties and privileges of the borough were extended by subsequent holders of the See, in consideration of its increasing trade and consequence. In the sixteenth century, as we learn, the coal trade was already of some importance, and Sunderland was "enriched every day thereby;" grindstones also became a far-famed article of export from the Wear. Its industrial development was temporarily checked during the Civil War, when Sunderland became a centre of fighting between Cavaliers and Roundheads. The Scots army, under Leslie, Earl of Leven, encamped on what is now part of the long High Street of Bishop Wearmouth, and not far from the Building Hill, which local tradition points out as a Druidical place of worship. The King's forces from Newcastle drew out to face the "blue bonnets," first on Bolden Hill and afterwards at Hylton; and skirmishing took place, which was not attended with decisive results. The commercial development of Sunderland has since been steady and often rapid. Including Bishop Wearmouth and Monkwearmouth, it now contains some 130,000 inhabitants, and it ranks high among British ports in shipbuilding tonnage and coal output. It has other claims to distinction: Paley was rector of Bishop Wearmouth last century, and wrote his "Evidences" there; and further proofs could be given that learning and piety did not come to an end at Wearmouth in Biscopius's and Bede's time, any more than did the worldly enterprise of the "canny" inhabitants.

Outside, the North Sea beats against the long piers and lighthouses, and rocks the fleets of steamers and sailing craft lying at anchor, or plying between the Wear and the Tyne; and on either hand, at Roker and Whitburn, Ryhope and Seaham, are the bold cliffs and bathing sands, the caves and cloven "gills" and wooded "denes," to which the dwellers by the Wear resort to fill their lungs with fresh air.

JOHN GEDDIE.

THE TEES.

Among the Fells--The Weel--Caldron Snout--High Force--Gibson's
Cave--Bow Leys--Middleton-in-Teesdale--The Lune and the
Balder--Scandinavian Names--Cotherstone Cheese--History
in Teesdale--Scott's Description of the Tees--Egliston
Abbey--Greta Bridge--Dickens and Mr. Squeers--Brignal Banks and
Rokeby--The Village of Ovington--Gainford--Pierce Bridge--High
and Low Coniscliffe--Croft--Yarm--The Industries of the
Tees--Stockton--Middlesbrough--The Sea.

"You can stand in fower keaunties at yance at Caldron Snout," said the companionable whip whom I had engaged to drive me, for such distance as the roads went, towards the first joyous springing up of the Tees at Cross Fell. The statement was a palpable exaggeration; no mere biped can stand in four counties at once; the most that is practicable is to straddle from one county to another. But from Caldron Snout the nearest point of Cumberland is distant at least five miles; so that only the counties of Durham, Yorkshire, and Westmorland touch each other where this marvellous waterfall pours through its rocky and precipitous gorge. However, the information was passably accurate. From the natives of Upper Teesdale no exact knowledge is to be extracted, by hook or by crook. They are chiefly remarkable for what they don't know. From Middleton, Cross Fell was five miles away--six miles, ten miles, fifteen miles, and so on, through an ever-lengthening road. A landlord, who was really not stupid-looking, and who was certainly not indifferent to matters of business, was unable to name the beck which flows within a few yards of his own door. "You will have h'ard o' th' High Force?" queried a Middletonian. "It's a famous place, is th' High Force. Well, no; I've never seen it myself; but I've lived five miles from it all my life, an' it's a fine, famous place is th' High Force." A fair sample of what the inhabitant of Upper Teesdale knows, or cares to know. This singular incuriousness is almost general. The facts of Nature are accepted as matters of course, and without inquiry. The report of the adventurous traveller is enough. In the first fifty miles of wandering by Tees-side I encountered only one man who was proud of his information, and this related exclusively to the places of public entertainment in the village of Yarm. Mr. Samuel Weller's knowledge of London was not more extensive and peculiar. In a slow, cautious, and yet eager style of speaking, he gave a detailed and exhaustive account of every public-house in the village, with sidelong glances at the characters of the various landlords, and an evidently cultivated criticism of the quality of the refreshment supplied by each.

The long ridge of Cross Fell was grey and cloudlike, as seen in the morning sunshine, from where our pair of horses finished their journey at the Green Hurth Mines. The intervening space of undulating moor was as parched and brown as if some sudden flame had swept across it; and where the clouds moved slowly across the grey-blue of the sky, long bands of dark shadow fell, so intense as to lend the brightness of contrast to what otherwise might itself have seemed to be a mass of shade. Not a single tree was in sight, but only whin-bushes and their yellow bloom. A white gleam of water in occasional hollows of the hills indicated the sluggish beck which divides Durham from Cumberland; and to the left, in a winding course well marked by the depression of the moorlands, the Tees wandered towards Caldron Snout, flanked by the steep side of Dufton Fell. It is here but a thin and narrow stream on dry summer days, but in times of rain it broadens and swells with an amazing suddenness, rushing downwards with a great roar and tumult of waters, so unexpected, sometimes, and with a character so much resembling the opposite phenomenon of the bore on the Severn, that holiday visitors, inapprehensive of calamity, have before now been carried headlong over the terrible cataract of High Force.

_Walker & Boutall sc._

THE COURSE OF THE TEES.]

The guide-book accounts of Upper Teesdale are mainly remarkable for their singular inattention to facts, and their following of each other. "Murray" confidently places High Force at a distance of five miles below the source of the river at Cross Fell. As a plain matter of fact, it is five miles from High Force to Caldron Snout, a much more amazing waterfall, and there are more than seven miles as the crow flies between Caldron Snout and Tees Head. It is a country bare of inhabitants and abounding in game. There is no village beyond Langdon Beck, where we begin the ascent of the moors. The Tees is joined by numerous little streams before it leaves Cumberland, and flows through the four or five miles of stern valley where Westmorland and Durham face each other. Just before reaching the wild extremity of Yorkshire it thrusts out a broad arm through a deep, long recess of the hills, and "as with molten glass inlays the vale." The Weel is the odd and unaccountable name which has been given to this winding lake. It lies, white and weird and still, where scarcely even the winds can reach it; and so deserted is it that not so much as a single wild fowl breaks the surface of its ghastly calm. There is henceforth no more rest to the Tees water during the whole of its curiously devious journeying to the sea. Below the Weel it tumbles with desperate tumult over Caldron Snout, foaming down into a pool two hundred feet beneath. Had Southey beheld this waterfall when it was in flood he would scarcely have had the heart to write of the Falls of Lodore. Here there are no mossy rocks or sheltering trees to dapple the scene with their brightness and shadow. The river dashes in a succession of leaps over the bare basalt, swirling and boiling after such manner as easily explains the name given to this most lonely and most splendid of English cataracts, where the creamy waters--

"With many a shock
Given and received in mutual jeopardy,
Dance, like a Bacchanal, from rock to rock,
Tossing her frantic thyrsus wide and high!"

Here the Tees, in a succession of violent cascades, makes a descent, as we have seen, of two hundred feet. At High Force it falls by only seventy-five feet; but, whereas the lonelier cataract is a long and broken slope, the water at High Force falls with plummet-like directness, in a vast broad sheet when the river is in flood, in two straight white columns when the floods are subsiding, and in a single glittering fall when the river is at its normal height. Here the contrast between the Yorkshire and the Durham side of the Tees first makes itself decisively felt. The steep but still gradual declivity of the Durham side is veiled in woods of birch and beech and fir; on the Yorkshire side the basalt descends sheer to the river's bed, and beyond and above it there is a bare expanse of unprofitable fields, darkened here and there by patches of whin-bush and long streaks of broom. This barren character is maintained, with a gradual decrease of sternness, until the little town of Middleton-in-Teesdale comes in sight.

Middleton is a long, straggling town, starting away from a stone bridge over the Tees, and climbing far away up the sides of the hills. It is built entirely of stone, even to the roofs and the chimneys. This is a peculiarity of all the houses in Upper Teesdale. Slates, in small quantities, have penetrated thus far into the wilds; but of baked clay, otherwise than in the form of pottery, there is no suggestion until the village of Cotherstone is reached, whence emanates the famous Cotherstone cheese. Below the bridge at Middleton the Tees leaves behind it the stern Yorkshire moorlands and scaurs, the hills on either bank withdrawing themselves that it may glitter in the sunbeams over a pebbly bed. Henceforth, until it approaches the large towns, and when it encounters the sea-tides, it flows, broad and open, past richly-wooded banks. In all England there is no more pleasant valley than that which the Tees waters between Middleton and Pierce Bridge. There is an almost equal beauty in the valleys of its numerous tributaries. "All the little rills concealed among the forked hills" have their individual features of loveliness, and hide sweet secrets of their own. About a mile below Middleton the river Lune ripples sunnily down into the Tees. Rising in Westmorland, it flows across that portion of Yorkshire which interposes itself between Westmorland and Durham, wearing one of the deepest of channels for itself, and giving token of frequent floods in the large stones by which its bed is thickly strewn. The river Lune is a favourite stream for trout, but it is still more renowned as a spawning ground for salmon; for as that kingly fish cannot ascend the Tees beyond the seventy-foot precipice at High Force, and as some of the higher tributaries are polluted with water from the lead mines, the Lune and the Balder, a smaller stream which flows into the Tees at Cotherstone, are almost the only accessible breeding beds.

"Fish! I should think so!" says a man who has fishings to let. "Why, there are times in the year when you could take salmon out by the armful." To the remark that this is not the time when salmon ought to be taken, he replies that there are good trout at any time of the year; and a very cursory observation of the Tees proves this to be true. The keen observation of Sir Walter Scott led him to remark on the blackness of this river. Coming down from the moorlands, it is thickly stained by the peat; but the peaty colour does not in fact obscure the clearness of the water, and looking down from above, one may everywhere see the fish shooting athwart the stream in little shoals. The river is exceedingly well preserved; indeed, on one side it is in the hands of the Duke of Cleveland, on the other it is well tended by Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, the Earl of Strathmore, and Sir Talbot Constable. Nevertheless, fishing is to be had on easy terms--from Henry Ludgate, of Winston, for example, who was formerly gamekeeper to the Earl of Brownlow, and who now keeps a public-house and writes verses. His political ideas take that turn, he observes, and the visitor to Henry's hostelry may hear some of the verses repeated if he should be so minded as to listen to them.

There are no towns on the Tees until one of the most horrible in all England is reached--Stockton, to wit; but there are innumerable villages. Some of these are quite remarkable for their cleanliness and beauty. Romaldkirk, the second village from Middleton, on the Yorkshire side, is an incomparable village, far scattered, but bound together by a plenitude of trees. Romaldkirk--anciently "Rum auld kirk," a serious-minded old villager observed, with a trenchant faith in his etymology--is noticeable not only for its combination of all the charms that an English village can possess, but also on account of its parish church and its parish stocks. The stocks are unique, indeed. Shackles of this ancient description are usually of wood; but the stocks at Romaldkirk are bars of iron, fastened in stone posts, and ingeniously bent so that one of the bars, locked down on the other, will imprison two pairs of feet. In winter the parish stocks of Romaldkirk must have been the most uncomfortable parish stocks in all England. The villagers preserve them now with genuine and reasonable pride, and the oldest inhabitant sits upon them and relates sad stories of the last persons who were imprisoned therein. The church has been so little restored that it remains one of the finest examples of early ecclesiastical architecture. It is unusually large for so small a village, a fact which is explained by its erection by the Barons Fitzhugh, who were buried here whenever they chanced to die in their beds. The building dates from the twelfth century, and is in the Early English style. One of the Lords Fitzhugh is kept in remembrance by a statue in chain-armour, still contemplated by the villagers with a mixture of awe and delight.

The Fitzhughs are again in evidence at the village of Cotherstone, two miles further down the Tees. They had a castle there, of which a small portion still remains, bearing the same proportion to a complete feudal castle that an odd brick will bear to a modern house. Cotherstone is a smart, businesslike village, for these parts. Some of its stone roofs have a coping of red tiles, the first to be seen in Upper Teesdale. It has recently built itself a very pretty little church. Above all, it is renowned for its cheese. This cheese of Cotherstone is in shape similar to Stilton; but, however long Stilton cheese may be kept, it can never approach that of Cotherstone in aroma. A Cotherstone cheese, truly, requires a large room all to itself; it is not the kind of cheese that one can live with, even for the short space of lunch; it is a militant sort of cheese--fit to defeat armies. Those who produce it were formerly thought to be rather pronounced rustics by the inhabitants of Teesdale. They were called "Cotherstone calves," and uncomplimentary references were made to the strength of their heads; but the School Boards have changed all that, and a young Cotherstone calf now speaks with a certain air of refinement, and is not above feeling pleasure in giving information to the intruding stranger.