THE STORY OF 
 E ENGLISH TOWNS! 
 
 1ARR0GAH 
 
 
 J.S.Fletcher
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE STORY OF THE ENGLISH TOWNS 
 
 HARROGATE 
 
 AND 
 
 KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 J. S. FLETCHER 
 
 MEMBER OF THE YORKSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING 
 CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 NEW YORK :THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1920
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED 
 LONDON AND BECCLES
 
 PREFACE 
 
 LJ ARROGATE, as it presents itself to-day, is 
 one of the newest of English towns ; Knares- 
 borough is one of the oldest. Knaresborough has 
 been very much what it is now for several cen- 
 turies ; Harrogate, within the memory of man, 
 has so increased as to dwarf its ancient neighbour. 
 But while one represents antiquity, and the other 
 the modern spirits of improvement and progress, 
 there is a close link between the two, and in writing 
 local history it is impossible to separate them. In 
 the following chapters an attempt is made to deal 
 with episodes in which they have a common 
 interest ; for example, the discovery of the medi- 
 cinal waters which attract so many thousands to 
 Harrogate every year, was originally a matter 
 affecting Knaresborough only, for Harrogate, as 
 we know it, had then no existence. Again, the 
 career of John Metcalf is almost as closely con- 
 cerned with the new town as with the old. And 
 
 1051412
 
 4 PREFACE 
 
 as no one goes to Harrogate without visiting 
 
 Knaresborough, there seems to be good reason 
 
 for dealing with one place in union with the 
 other. 
 
 j. s. FLETCHER. 
 
 THE CROSSWAYS, 
 
 HAMBROOK, CHICHESTER.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PACK 
 
 I. THE FOREST OF KNARESBOROUGH ,., ... 9 
 
 II. THE MURDERERS OF THOMAS BEKET ... ... 20 
 
 III. THE CULT OF ROBERT FLOWER ... ... ... 28 
 
 IV. MEDIEVAL KNARESBOROUGH ... .. ... 38 
 
 V. MOTHER SHIPTON ... ... ... ... 48 
 
 VI. WATERS OF HEALING ... ... ... ... 57 
 
 VII. CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD ... ... ... 67 
 
 VIII. HARROGATE IN 1750 ... ... ... ... 77 
 
 IX. EUGENE ARAM ... ... ... ... ... 86 
 
 X. BLIND JACK OF KNARESBOROUGH ... ... ... 96 
 
 XI. HARROGATE IN 1830 ... ... ... ... 105 
 
 XII. NEW TOWN AND OLD BOROUGH ... ... ... 114
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACING PAGB 
 
 Low HARROGATE ... ... ... Frontispiece 
 
 From a Drawing by F. Nic/iolion, 1796 
 
 ST. ROBERT'S CHAPEL ... ... ... ... ... 32 
 
 KNARESBOROUGH ... ... ... ... ... 40 
 
 MOTHER SHIPTON ... ... , ... ... ... 48 
 
 THE OLD SULPHUR WELL, HARROGATE ... ... ... 80 
 
 EUGENE ARAM ... ... ... ... ... 88 
 
 JOHN METCALF... ... ... ... ... ... 96 
 
 STATION SQUARE, HARROGATE ... ... ... ... 116 
 
 END-PAPERS 
 
 STREET PLAN OF HARROGATE ... ... ... j 
 
 \ Front 
 MAP OF HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 MAP OF SURROUNDING COUNTRY ... Back
 
 AUTHORITIES 
 
 ANONYMOUS, A Week at Harrogate, 1913.! 
 ANONYMOUS, Mother Shipton, N.D. 
 CALVERT, M., History of Knaresborough, 1844. 
 DEANE, E., Spadacrene Anglica, 1626. 
 FRENCH, J. } The Yorkshire Spaw, 1652. 
 FLOYER, SIR J., History of Cold Bathing, 1706. 
 GRAINGE, W., Nidderdale, 1863. 
 
 GRAINGE, W., Historical and Descriptive Account of Knares- 
 borough, 1865. 
 
 GENT, T., Life of St. Robert, N.D. : 
 
 HARGROVE, E., History of Knaresborough, 1832. 
 
 HARGROVE, E., Ancient Customs of the Forest of Knaresborough, 
 1808. 
 
 HUTTON, W. H., Life of Bishop Stubbs, 1906. 
 
 LEWIS, D., Beauties of Harrogate and Knaresborough, 1798. 
 
 METCALF, J., Autobiography, 1795. 
 
 SLINGSBY, SIR H., Memoirs: Ed. Sir Walter Scott, 1806. 
 
 SPEIGHT, H., Nidderdale, 1894. 
 
 STUBBS, BP., Genealogical History of his Family, 1915. 
 
 STANHOPE, M., Newes out of Yorkshire, 1626. 
 
 STANHOPE, M., Cures without Care, 1632. 
 
 WATSON, E. R., Eugene Aram, 1913. 
 WHEATER, W., Knaresburgh and its Rulers, 1907.
 
 HARROGATE AND 
 KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 I. THE FOREST OF KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 ON the third day of September, in the year 
 1767, a gathering took place in the neighbour- 
 hood of Harrogate and Knaresborough which was 
 of a much more fateful character than was probably 
 thought of by those who had a part in it or witnessed 
 its proceedings. On that day six men, Joseph 
 Tullie, Receiver General of the Revenues of the 
 Duchy of Lancaster, Robert Roper, Auditor for the 
 North Parts of the Duchy, William Ashurst, Auditor 
 for the South Parts, William Masterman, Clerk of 
 the Council, William Marsden, Surveyor of the 
 Lands, and Francis Russell, Surveyor of the Woods, 
 met " at a certain place where the Water of Crimple 
 runs into the River Nidd," and in the presence of 
 the Deputy Constable, Deputy Steward, and Bailiff 
 of His Majesty's Castle, Honour, and Forest of 
 Knaresborough, made public proclamation that they 
 were empowered by Royal Commission to perambu- 
 late and ascertain the Metes and Boundaries of the 
 Forest, calling to their aid and assistance all officers 
 and tenants and such " ancient persons " as were 
 
 9
 
 io HARROGATB AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 conversant with the countryside and neighbourhood. 
 This proclamation, which had been prefaced by four- 
 teen days' public notice in all the surrounding 
 towns and villages, duly made, they set out on their 
 travels, in company with " a great Concourse of 
 His Majesty's Copyhold Tenants of the said Honour 
 and Forest," and continued them, from day to day, 
 until the 27th of the same month, by which date, 
 having personally walked over every yard of the 
 boundaries, following streams, paths, woods, 
 meadows, moors, they made their return, written out 
 on Five Skins of Parchment, at the foot of each 
 signing their names, and to the last affixing their 
 seals. The perambulation, then, occupied the time 
 of these six Commissioners during twenty-one work- 
 ing days, and its real significance lies in the fact that 
 it was a preliminary to the enclosure, by an Act of 
 Parliament of 1770, of a vast tract of twenty 
 thousand acres, set down in the Act as open, com- 
 monable, or waste lands. The award in respect to 
 this tract was made in 1775, and it is interesting to 
 know how it was made and how it affected the folk 
 of the district. 2751 acres were sold to defray the ex- 
 penses. 2344 acres were awarded to the Crown. 4694 
 acres were apportioned to the tithe owners. The 
 remaining portion was distributed amongst 700 
 different persons. Finally, 32 acres were given to 
 trustees for the use of the poor, many of whom, we 
 may be sure, had, until this enclosure was made, 
 enjoyed common rights over land which was now 
 lost to them and their like for ever. 
 
 before this proceeding of 1767 there had
 
 THE FOREST OF KNARESBOROUGH n 
 
 been another Commission held in the Forest of 
 Knaresborough to make enquiry into its Ancient 
 Customs. In June, 1563, being " the fifth year of 
 the Reign of our Sovereign I,ady Elizabeth," a 
 commission was directed to the Earl of Cumberland, 
 Sir William Ingilby, and other worthy gentlemen, 
 " to enquire, by the Oaths of Twelve Honest and 
 Indifferent Men, dwelling in the Forest of Knares- 
 borough, of the Ancient Customs and Things which 
 of old Time had been used within the same." The 
 particulars of those customs are deeply interesting ; 
 they show what had been done in this wild and 
 lonely part of England for many centuries of the 
 Middle Ages ; they also show what, in view of the 
 ancient usages, the Elizabethan Commissioners 
 ordained should continue "for a final Order, and 
 for the Ease and Quietness of the Tenants." On 
 the death of a Customary Tenant, the Officer is to 
 seize " to the use of the Queen's Majesty, her Heirs 
 and Successors," his Best Beast, whether it be Horse, 
 Ox, or Cow, for his Heriot. No Customary Tenant 
 must cut down " any great Trees of the Age of 24 
 years." The heirs of any tenant whose life has 
 been forfeited by conviction for Felony must pay 
 a fine of six years' rent of his lands within a year 
 and a day after their ancestor's death. Widows of 
 tenants may have their land on paying the proper 
 fine and remaining unmarried ; if they marry again 
 they must pay for every messuage twopence, and 
 for every acre threepence. All Customary Tenants 
 must carry their grain, for milling, to one of the 
 royal mills within the Forest : all are to have
 
 12 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Common or Pasture for all kinds of cattle, except 
 swine, without number. Particularly interesting 
 is the provision that every three years the Constable 
 of the Castle of Knaresborough shall ride or go about 
 the Metes and Bounds of the Forest, taking with 
 him Ancient Persons, each one of whom shall be 
 accompanied by a Child or Boy of the Age of Ten 
 Years, or thereabouts. Interesting, too, is the Cus- 
 tom of Heirlooms. After the death of a Customary 
 Tenant, his rightful Heir is to have the deceased's 
 best lyoom, best Wain, best Rope, best Plough, best 
 Caldron, best Cupboard, best Table, best Pot, 
 best Pewter, best Team he is, in short, to have the 
 best of all that has been left. Significant is the 
 provision that no Customary Tenant shall let any 
 part or parcel of his land to any Stranger or Foreigner 
 one learns from it, and from certain other clauses, 
 that the rights and privileges of the Forest were 
 jealously guarded. 
 
 This Forest of Knaresborough was one of six 
 Royal forests or of eight, if the Barnsdale district 
 between Pontefract and Doncaster, and the extensive 
 tract about the meeting of Ouse and Derwent are 
 reckoned in which in ancient days occupied no 
 inconsiderable part of the area of Yorkshire, the 
 others being those of Hatfield, Galtres, Pickering, 
 Skipton, and Wensleydale. Nowadays the word is 
 much misunderstood, and most folk think of a forest 
 as of a tract of land thickly covered by trees. But 
 " the English word forest," says Dr. Cox, " signified 
 in Norman, Plantagenet, and early Tudor times, a 
 portion of territory consisting of extensive waste
 
 THE FOREST OF KNARESBOROUGH 13 
 
 lands, but including a certain amount of both wood- 
 land and pasture, circumscribed by certain metes or 
 bounds, within which the right of hunting was 
 reserved exclusively to the King and his nominees, 
 and which was subject to a special code of laws 
 administered by local as well as central ministers." 
 Very little of the space included in the Yorkshire 
 forests was tree-covered, and the legend that the 
 Cistercians of Fountains Abbey cut down the whole 
 of the trees in Knaresborough Forest for their forges 
 may be dismissed as mere tradition having no basis : 
 the greater part of the extensive area (twenty miles 
 from east to west, and eight miles from north to 
 south) was precisely what it was described as being 
 at the time of the Enclosure Act of 1770 open, 
 commonable, or waste land. Within this area there 
 were in 1085 only four townships : Birstwith, 
 Fewston, Beckwith, and Rosset. In 1368 there 
 were three : Thruscross, Clint, and Killinghall, 
 sub-divided into sixteen hamlets, and at that period 
 the entire population, including Knaresborough, as 
 centre of the district, must have been very incon- 
 siderable. Such it was, apart from the military 
 garrison at Kuaresborough Castle, it lived the life of 
 moorland folk, cut off from the world, existing in 
 wide spaces, dark valleys, and by the banks of 
 numerous streams, tributaries of the Nidd on its 
 northern confines and of the Wharfe on the south, 
 and into its innermost recesses probably none 
 but the Greave or the Constable ever cared to 
 penetrate. 
 
 There were reasons why Knaresborough should
 
 14 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 become the centre of this wild and solitary region* 
 The river Nidd, after rising in the high grounds to 
 the west, flows at Knaresborough into a deep and 
 romantic channel, overhung at one part by a high 
 rocky plateau which commands the country on all 
 sides but one, and in that respect much resembles 
 the promontory on which the town of Richmond is 
 built, overlooking the river Swale. On this plateau 
 there was doubtless a Saxon stockade or fortifica- 
 tion, of the type commonly erected on similar points 
 of vantage, and hence, later, it was replaced by the 
 castle. But the castle was certainly not built as 
 early as some of the historians of Knaresborough 
 have supposed, nor by Serlo de Burgh, to whom most 
 of them have attributed it, and who appears to have 
 been not grantee of the Manor and Honour, but 
 merely custos of the place for a time. In the Domes- 
 day Survey there is no mention of any castle or 
 church or mill in Knaresborough, and the probability 
 is that the whole district had been wasted at the 
 time of the Harrying of the North. But there are 
 documents which show that the building of the 
 Castle was in process during the reigns of Henry I. 
 and of John : 
 
 i. " Pipe Roll, 3ist Henry I. York and Northum- 
 berland. Eustace Fitz-John renders account 
 of 22 of the farm of Burg (Aldborough, 
 near Boroughbridge) and of Chenaresburgh 
 (Knaresborough). In the Exchequer 11, 
 and in the King's works of Chenaresburgh 
 11, by the King's Writ. And he is 
 quit."
 
 THE FOREST OF KNARESBOROUGH 15 
 
 ii. "Close Roll, 8th John. The King to the 
 Barons, etc. Account to Brian de Insula, 
 for that which he has reasonably laid out, 
 by the view and testimony of lawful men, 
 in the works of the Castle, and our houses 
 in the Castle of Knaresborough by our 
 command. Witness ourself at York, on the 
 28th of May." 
 
 iii. "Close Roll, gib John. The King to the 
 Barons, etc. Account to Brian de Insula, 
 for that which he has laid out, by the 
 view and testimony of lawful men, in 
 making the ditches of the Castle of Knares- 
 borough. Witness ourself at Marlborough, 
 on the 1 7th March." ' 
 
 And the following extract seems to show that 
 by the beginning or soon after the beginning of 
 the reign of Henry III., the Castle was finished : 
 
 iv. " Close Roll, 7th Henry III. Of the Castle of 
 Knaresborough. The King to the Barons of 
 the Exchequer greeting. Know ye that 
 we, some time since, granted to our trusty 
 and beloved Brian de Insula our Castle of 
 Knaresborough with the town of Knares- 
 borough, and all its appurtenances, to be 
 kept during our pleasure, rendering there- 
 fore yearly the old farm of 50 at our 
 Exchequer. And therefore we command 
 you that you allow that grant to the same 
 Brian, so that you exact nothing further 
 from him in respect of the abovesaid 
 custody than the aforesaid 50 yearly, as
 
 16 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 aforesaid, until we shall therein otherwise 
 command. Witness, the King, at West- 
 minster, 3oth May." 
 
 Here reference is made to " the town," but there 
 is little in the oldest records to show of what size 
 the town had become at this time. It was probably 
 no more than a few houses closely clustered about 
 the newly built castle : town and castle must have 
 been singularly isolated in the midst of the sparsely 
 populated Forest. But during that century mention 
 begins to be made of various places in the Forest 
 which still retain the names by which they were 
 then known. Several of them are found in the 
 Chartulary of Fountains Abbey. Edmund, son of 
 Richard, King of Germany and Earl of Cornwall, 
 gives to the Abbot and monks of Fountains house- 
 bote (wood for household purposes) and haybote 
 (wood for fencing) in the Forest of Knaresborough, 
 of which, under Edward I., he was guardian during 
 the King's absence in the Holy lyand ; he also 
 grants them the honey and bees found in the woods, 
 and he allows them to enclose one wood, but in such 
 a manner " with fosse and fence " that the wild 
 beasts may not gain access to it. 
 
 The origin of the name Knaresborough, from 
 whence the entire district came to be similarly 
 called, is given by Hargrove as from Knares a 
 hard knot (as Hard Knot, near Sea Fell) and burgh, 
 a fortified place. Speight, however, derives it from 
 the Celtic Cnare A.S. Neer = lower, and says it 
 was the lower fort, in contradiction to Aldburgh, 
 the old camp, seven miles to the North. But the
 
 THE FOREST OF KNARESBOROUGH 17 
 
 much more probable derivation is that given by 
 the late Canon Greenwell, and shared in by Mr. 
 G. T. Clark : that it comes from the O.E. Cneores, 
 a family race or tribe, and was originally the tribes' 
 town or fort. In the ancient documents, and in the 
 Fountains Chartulary, the name is given under 
 various forms and in many different spellings but 
 it has existed, in one form or another, as applied to 
 town or Forest, for nearly a thousand years. So 
 have the names of many of the places in its vicinity. 
 But of the name Harrogate it is difficult to find any 
 early mention. It does not occur in any old charter. 
 Hargrove, writing of it a hundred years ago, calls it 
 then a hamlet, and says it originated from a few 
 cottages standing on the " gate " (= road) leading 
 from Knaresborough to Heywra-Park, and was so 
 called Heywragate. As regards this, Professor 
 Moorman made some comments a few years ago in 
 the Yorkshire Post : " The most primitive of the 
 forms of Harrogate," he says, " is Heyragat, but 
 Heywra is not an English word, nor is Havra (or 
 Haverah) its Norman-French form. The word 
 Heywragat is pure Scandinavian, being made up of 
 the three words hey = hay, wra = a corner, and gat = 
 a road. So that the meaning of Heywragat is the 
 road to the corner of enclosed land where grass was 
 grown for hay ; or, more simply, the road to the 
 hayfield. The name Haverah, in Haverah Park, 
 is quite different, though also Scandinavian. The 
 termination is again the word wra, a corner, but the 
 first element is the Scandinavian word hafri = oats, 
 which is also found in such place and personal 
 
 B
 
 names as Havercroft, Haverfield, Haverthwaite. 
 The underlying history of the two names would 
 seem to be somewhat as follows : At a time when 
 Scandinavian was still spoken in the Knaresborough 
 district, i.e. between the end of the ninth and the 
 twelfth centuries, two pieces of moorland on the 
 outskirts of Knaresborough Forest were enclosed 
 and cultivated. On the one enclosure oats were 
 grown, while the other became a hayfield. The 
 peasant or peasants who farmed this hayfield 
 needed a cart-track across the moors in order to 
 bring their hay home, and this cart-track to the hay- 
 field, this ' heywragat,' as they would have called 
 it, is the original road along which cottages were 
 subsequently built, and where the town of Harrogate 
 is now situated." 
 
 Now this proves a highly interesting fact that 
 instead of Harrogate being the entirely modern 
 place which most people believe it to be, it is really 
 of considerable antiquity, since (whether it was then 
 one cottage, or two cottages, or twelve cottages) it 
 was actually in existence not later than the twelfth, 
 and possibly as far back as the ninth century. It 
 was, of course, a mere speck, an insignificant point, 
 in the vast stretch of the Forest of Knaresborough, 
 so insignificant, indeed, that it does not come into 
 the documentary evidence for a very long time. 
 But it was there, just as a great many small places 
 in the Forest were there. As time goes on, one 
 hears of them in charters, rolls, returns, lists. Many 
 of them figure in the Nomina Villarum, made in the 
 ninth year of Edward II. : some of them are there
 
 THE FOREST OF KNARESBOROUGH 19 
 
 stated to belong to the King ; some to the Prior 
 of Bolton ; some to the Archbishop of York ; some 
 to families of great repute in their day, every one 
 of which is extinct save the Middletons of Middleton. 
 In the chartularies of the religious houses of these 
 parts the references to these obscure places in the 
 Forest are many : a toft is given in one ; a messuage 
 in another ; the Abbot has certain privileges in this 
 place ; the Prior has others in that : there is always 
 evidence that, small as these Forest villages and 
 hamlets were, and however little their population 
 increased, they were always there, changing in such 
 infinitesimal fashion that at the end of the eighteenth 
 century they were very much what they had been 
 five hundred years before. But in the midst of 
 the Forest the town from which it took its name 
 changed much, and became the scene of some of the 
 most romantic passages in Yorkshire history, and 
 the birthplace of some exceedingly remarkable and 
 even justly famous people.
 
 II. THE MURDERERS OF THOMAS 
 BEKET 
 
 ONE of the first of the many romantic episodes 
 in the history of Knaresborough is connected 
 with one of the most famous events in English 
 history : the murder of Thomas Beket, Archbishop 
 of Canterbury, in his own cathedral, by four knights, 
 Hugh de Moreville, Reginald Fitzurse, William de 
 Tracy, and Richard le Bret. Around these four has 
 been woven a Knaresborough tradition. According 
 to the commonly accepted version of it, the four 
 murderers, their deed accomplished, fled north to 
 Knaresborough, secured themselves in the Castle, 
 and there abode for a year, subject not only to 
 bitter remorse, but to strange manifestations of 
 Divine wrath. Animals shrank away from them ; 
 the dogs refused the crumbs which fell from their 
 table. Tortured at last beyond endurance, they 
 set out for Rome, confessed their terrible crime to 
 the Pope, and were sent to the Holy I^and. There 
 three of them died and were buried ; the fourth, 
 Tracy, suffered a horrible death on the coast of 
 Calabria. All this, and much more, is found in 
 monkish chroniclers like Roger of Hoveden and 
 John of Brompton, and in the Middle Ages every 
 
 20
 
 THE MURDERERS OF THOMAS BEKET 21 
 
 word of it was believed, and nowhere more firmly 
 than at Knaresborough. The idea of the four 
 knights in their self-imposed imprisonment, scorned 
 by men, avoided by beasts, frowned upon by the 
 Deity, appealed to the medieval mind and con- 
 science, and folk looked on the Castle of Knares- 
 borough as having been under an awful cloud of 
 Divine justice during the year of their stay in its 
 dark vaults. But the legend is legend and no more, 
 though it is easy enough to see how it arose, and 
 how it developed in days when legend was eagerly 
 accepted. 
 
 During the reign of Henry II. mention begins 
 to be made in the Pipe Rolls of one Hugh de More- 
 ville in connection with Knaresborough, where the 
 Castle was evidently in course of construction. In 
 1161 there are several entries : " In lands given 
 to Hugh de Moreville 40 blanch in Cnardesburg. 
 In operationes castelli de Cnardesburc 90 and 
 there the Castle is named. The same sheriff renders 
 account of 64 of the farm of Burc and Cnardesburc, 
 numero. In the Treasury, 20. In lands given to 
 Hugh de Moreville 19, numero." There are more 
 entries relating to him in 1164 and in 1169, both 
 giving particulars of additional grants. Who was 
 Moreville ? According to Stanley's " Memorials of 
 Canterbury," he was a man of high rank and office, 
 Justice Itinerant of the Counties of Northumberland 
 and Cumberland, holder of the Barony of Burgh-on- 
 the-Sandes, Forestes of Cumberland, and " owner " of 
 Knaresborough Castle he was, as regards Knares- 
 borough, Custodian for the Crown. He married
 
 22 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Helwise de Stuteville, daughter of a family which 
 had a close connection with Knaresborough ; alto- 
 gether, he was intimately associated with the district, 
 and with the ruling families of the North of England 
 a fact which must be remembered when we come 
 to the flight of his associates and himself to Knares- 
 borough from Canterbury after the murder of 
 Beket. The associates, too, were closely connected 
 with the North, le Bret with the Stutevilles, Tracy 
 with the Romillies. Here, then, we see at once that 
 when the murderers fled from Canterbury northward 
 they were not fleeing, as the legend suggests, into 
 terrible and unknown wilds, instigated by awful 
 remorse and by desire to hide their guilty faces from 
 the sight of men, but to a place and to people whereat 
 and amongst whom they were very well known. 
 
 In order to get at a clear idea of why the four 
 knights came to Knaresborough at all, it is necessary 
 to go back to the day on which Henry II., irritated 
 by the accounts of Beket's doings furnished to 
 him by the emissaries of the Archbishop's enemies, 
 asked impetuously if there was none amongst those 
 that ate his bread who would rid him of " this 
 turbulent priest ? " This was on some day towards 
 the end of December, 1170 some chroniclers fix 
 the day as the 24th, some as the 27th and the 
 place was Bure, near Bayeux, in Normandy, where 
 Henry was then keeping his court. Amongst those 
 present were de Moreville, Fitzurse, Tracy, and le 
 Bret, who either there and then resolved to take the 
 King at his word, or had already made some secret 
 resolution of their own in concert with Beket's
 
 enemies. If the King's famous exclamation was 
 uttered on the 27th December, the four knights 
 must have left Bure at once, for on the 28th they 
 arrived at Saltwood Castle, in Kent, which, though 
 it belonged to the See of Canterbury, was at that 
 time occupied by Beket's chief enemy, Ranulf de 
 Broc, whom the Archbishop had once called " the 
 son of perdition." There, welcomed by him, the 
 four spent that night, and, in collusion with him, 
 agreed upon their next proceedings. It is said that 
 they carried on their conference in total darkness, 
 not daring to see each other's faces while they 
 plotted the Archbishop's murder this, in view of 
 the determination which they showed all along may 
 be set down as mere legend. From first to last the 
 conduct of all four was that of men who had set out 
 to do a certain deed, and meant to do it thoroughly. 
 Next morning, Tuesday, the 2gth December, they 
 rode into Canterbury, resolved that by nightfall the 
 " turbulent priest " should no longer trouble their 
 royal master. 
 
 The late Dean Stanley, in the article on the 
 murder of Beket, which he contributed to the 
 Quarterly Review in 1853, pointed out that 
 Tuesday had always been a significant day in 
 Beket's life. " On a Tuesday he was born and 
 baptised ; on a Tuesday he had fled from Northamp- 
 ton ; on a Tuesday he had left the King's Court in 
 Normandy ; on a Tuesday he had left England on 
 his exile ; on a Tuesday he had received warning of 
 his martyrdom in a vision at Pontigny ; on a Tues- 
 day he had returned from that exile ; it was now on
 
 24 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 a Tuesday that the fatal hour came, and (as the 
 next generation observed) it was on a Tuesday 
 that his enemy King Henry was buried ; on a 
 Tuesday that the martyr's relics were translated ; 
 and Tuesday was long afterwards regarded as the 
 week-day especially consecrated to the saint, with 
 whose fortunes it had thus been so strangely inter- 
 woven." On this last Tuesday of all, Beket himself 
 seems to have had some premonition that evil was 
 at hand nevertheless, when the four knights were 
 admitted to his presence after dinner, where he sat 
 in the midst of his attendant clergy, they found his 
 countenance as fresh, majestic, and striking as ever 
 they had known it in the days when he was Chancellor 
 of England and the favourite of the King who now 
 desired, or had seemed to desire, his death. 
 
 Of the actual doings of that December day in 
 Canterbury there is no need to write here they are 
 told in every English history. There was the bitter 
 and acrimonious discussion between the Archbishop 
 and the four knights ; the withdrawal of the four 
 to the sycamore tree in the garden, where they threw 
 off their cloaks and gowns, revealed the armour 
 beneath, and girt on their swords ; the procession 
 of the Archbishop to vespers ; the breaking into the 
 church by the knights ; the flight of many of the 
 monks and clergy ; the awful scene in the transept 
 still known as the Martyrdom ; the first murderous 
 blow from Tracy ; the last from le Bret of such 
 violence that the murderer's sword snapped on the 
 marble pavement and then the flight. But it was 
 not a flight of men already stricken by remorse.
 
 THE MURDERERS OF THOMAS BEKET 25 
 
 They and their followers plundered and pillaged 
 right and left gold, silver, vestments, books, 
 furniture, horses : Fitzstepheu reckoned the value 
 of the plunder at two thousand marks. And at 
 last that was done, and the murderers passed out 
 of the precincts amidst a terrible storm of thunder 
 and rain into a black winter's night. Of the four, 
 one man only was actually innocent of a blow : 
 de Moreville had stood by, keeping off the crowd, 
 while his companions did the work. 
 
 Now began the flight which was to end at 
 Knaresborough ; now began, too, if the monkish 
 legends are to be credited, the extraordinary mani- 
 festations which signified the Divine wrath. The 
 four knights rode back to Saltwood, glorying in the 
 crime they had committed ; at Saltwood they 
 passed the night. Next day they rode forty miles 
 south, to I/ewes, in Sussex, where, in the suburb 
 called Mailing, there was an archiepiscopal manor. 
 Popular tradition affirms that when Moreville and 
 his three companions entered the house they took 
 off their armour and weapons and placed them on a 
 table in the dining-hall ; and that soon afterwards, 
 as they stood around the hearth, the various trappings 
 were violently flung to the floor by some unseen 
 hand. They were replaced, only to be thrown off 
 a second time, and to a greater distance. Tradition 
 says, too, that one of the four was so conscience- 
 stricken that he at once suggested that the table 
 (which was preserved at Mailing for some centuries) 
 refused to support its sacrilegious burden. I^egend 
 of this sort, freely narrated by Grandison and
 
 26 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Giraldus, Brompton and Hoveden, surrounds the 
 murderers at Knaresborough the houses to which 
 they turned were hung with black ; birds refused 
 to fly through the air which they polluted ; dogs 
 turned from the morsels cast from their murderous 
 hands. According to the chronicles, each was 
 dogged by misfortune and misery ; three died far 
 off ; one, vainly endeavouring to regain his native 
 land, perished miserably on a foreign shore. 
 
 But it is, after all, legend and tradition. The 
 real reason why the four knights fled to Knares- 
 borough, and took up their residence for a time in 
 the Castle which was then in course of construction, 
 is found in the fact that the anti-Beket influence 
 was strong in the North of England, that all four 
 had powerful friends and interests in Yorkshire, 
 and that Moreville knew they would be safe in the 
 fortress of which he was guardian for the King. 
 According to Wheater, the Castle, though not then 
 finished, was already a place of considerable strength ; 
 it had a garrison, and, if need had arisen, Moreville 
 and his three guests could have offered a stout 
 resistance to any force coming there to apprehend 
 them. But we do not hear of any interference. 
 The Archbishop of York,that Roger of Pont L/Eveque 
 who was Beket's enemy, and whom the Papal 
 Legate had called the " Arch-devil " of York, was 
 on their side ; so, too, were all the great families 
 of the county. And in spite of the King's grief, 
 and of his humiliation, and of his penance at Canter- 
 bury, we hear nothing of any desire on his part to 
 punish the murderers ; it may have been that he
 
 THE MURDERERS OF THOMAS BEKET 27 
 
 felt himself morally bound to take all their guilt on 
 his own shoulders. None of Beket's enemies 
 suffered punishment. On the contrary so far as 
 regards the four knights advancement and a peace- 
 ful old age appears to have been their lot. Some 
 legends speak of a curse following them and their 
 families until extinction followed. But Fitzurse 
 moved over to Ireland eventually, and became the 
 ancestor of the Mac Mahons. I,e Bret founded a 
 family which existed for many generations in 
 Somersetshire. Tracy, four years after the murder, 
 was in high office as Justiciary of Normandy ; his 
 family has existed in Devonshire and Gloucestershire 
 to the present time. Indeed, within two years of 
 Beket's death, his murderers were all in favour at 
 Court, and as to Hugh de Moreville's stay at Knares- 
 borough in the meantime, what is of absolute fact 
 is that for two and a half years after he and his 
 three guests fled there, he exercised his custodianship 
 in the ordinary way, and drew his full rents, undis- 
 turbed. He was alive in the first year of the reign 
 of King John, and about that time secured a charter 
 for a fair and market at Kirk Oswald. Never, when 
 plain truth is told, did murderers escape human 
 justice more easily than he and his companions.
 
 III. THE CULT OF ROBERT FLOWER 
 
 QOMEWHERE about the time that Beket 
 O was becoming widely known as the martyred 
 St. Thomas of Canterbury, there was a man living 
 in a cave on the banks of the Nidd who was also 
 destined to canonisation, and who, as St. Robert 
 of Knaresborough, became one of the most popular 
 of Yorkshire saints. With him the history of 
 Knaresborough has a good deal to do ; certain 
 legends which arose after his death have also much 
 to do with the earliest history of Harrogate. And 
 in his case, just as in that of the connection of Hugh 
 de Moreville with Knaresborough, so much tradition 
 is mingled with history, so much superstitious 
 legend with real fact, that it is difficult to distinguish 
 the real man from the supposititious figure which 
 the credulity of the fourteenth century set up. 
 
 Hugh de Moreville's guardianship of Knares- 
 borough came to an end in 1174, four years after his 
 complicity in the murder of Beket, and he was 
 succeeded by William de Stuteville, whose name in 
 this connection appears in a return made for that 
 year : " In lands given to William de Stuteville 
 22, in the town of Cnarres Burch held in custody 
 for the King. The same William 22 in Burch 
 
 28
 
 THE CULT OF ROBERT FLOWER 29 
 
 (Aldborough)." . He remained custos for some time ; 
 in 1195 we hear of him as making a gift of fuel from 
 the Forest of Knaresborough to the Abbot of 
 Fountains ; in the Fountains Chartulary his name 
 constantly occurs in documents relating to this 
 period. He died in 1203, and was buried at Foun- 
 tains Abbey with all the honours due to a pious 
 benefactor. And it was during his lordship of 
 Knaresborough and its Forest that St. Robert made 
 his appearance there, and began the life and works 
 which were to ensure great fame. Like many other 
 celebrities of his sort he was by no means well 
 received on his first appearance, for de Stuteville 
 showed a great dislike to his presence, and it was 
 doubtless the fact that the saint conquered the 
 great man's aversion which first brought him into 
 prominence and made him an object of respect 
 amongst the lesser folk. 
 
 As to who St. Robert of Knaresborough really was 
 accounts differ. But, when they are all compared 
 and summed up, we may reasonably believe that 
 the commonly accepted story about his parentage 
 and early life has a considerable basis of fact. That 
 story was first set forth in a curious chronicle of 
 the later Middle Ages, probably written by one of 
 the Trinitarians of Knaresborough, and full of legend. 
 It was substantially included in a curious Chap-book 
 printed by Thomas Gent, the eccentric antiquary- 
 printer, in York, early in the eighteenth century, 
 under the title, " Piety Display 'd : in the Holy Life 
 and Death of the Ancient and Celebrated St. Robert, 
 Hermit, at Knaresborough." According to this, the
 
 30 HARROGATE AND KNARESBQROUGH 
 
 saint was the son of one Took Floure, or Tockless 
 Flower, who was chief magistrate or Mayor of York 
 in the year 1195, and who had married a lady of 
 reputable descent, whose name was Smimera, or 
 Semenia. Robert Flower, their son, is said to have 
 been born in York in 1159, and from his earliest 
 infancy to have shown signs of sanctity " he would 
 often secretly retire to Prayer, with a sweet juvenile 
 Ardency which made him to be honoured by the 
 Elders, while he was still but young ; and as he 
 grew in years, their Wonder increas'd at his Exten- 
 sive Knowledge and Divine Penetration." In those 
 days such a child naturally found his way speedily 
 to some religious house, and there seems little doubt 
 that Robert Flower entered upon a novitiate some- 
 where at a very early age. According to the 
 chronicle, his parents placed him with the Bene- 
 dictines at Whitby, with whom he abode for five 
 years, after which period, happening to meet his 
 younger brother, " who was at the New Monastery 
 of Cistercians," he fell in love with the rule of St. 
 Bernard and embraced it, remaining a Cistercian 
 for four years more, after which he became a Hermit. 
 But the probability is that though Robert Flower 
 may have been at Whitby, and possibly at New- 
 minster, in Northumberland, for certain periods, he 
 was a monk of Fountains, who, desiring to lire the 
 life of an anchorite obtained permission from his 
 superiors, and betook himself to the solitudes of 
 Nidderdale. 
 
 Anyway, at some period during the lordship of 
 William de Stuteville, Robert Flower was a hermit
 
 THE CULT OF ROBERT FLOWER 31 
 
 in the neighbourhood of Knaresborough, living in 
 " a dreary cavity in the I/ow Part of a prominent 
 Rock/' and cultivating some ground which had been 
 given to him by " a rich Matron," who was probably 
 one of the Percies of Spofforth. One day William 
 de Stuteville passing by his retreat enquired of his 
 servants who lived in it ? they answered, " Robert, 
 a Holy Hermit." " No," said he, " rather a receiver 
 of thieves," and bade them destroy it. Thereupon 
 Robert removed himself closer to Knaresborough, 
 and in the cliffs overhanging the Nidd made another 
 hermitage, which, de Stuteville espying, also resolved 
 to destroy. But that night he had a vision of such 
 a terrible character that it melted his hard heart, 
 and next day he visited the Hermit, gave him a 
 piece of land, and supplemented his gift with two 
 Oxen, two Horses, and two Cows. 
 
 Here we see the monkish version of an endow- 
 ment : de Stuteville doubtless gave Robert Flower 
 certain lands and goods. And forthwith the hermit 
 is safely established, and becomes a permanent 
 feature of society in the neighbourhood. Very soon 
 he is credited with the possession of miraculous 
 powers ; he cures a broken limb by laying his hand 
 upon it ; certain deer, from the Forest, which spoil 
 his corn, are so tamed by his touch that he is able 
 to put them under yoke, and plough his ground 
 with them ; birds and beasts respond to his call. 
 There is now no question of turning him away from 
 the quarters he has chosen, and he begins to work 
 at his new chapel, or oratory, which he excavates 
 (wonderful to relate, by ordinary means, instead of
 
 32 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 by miracle) out of a solid and high rock. His reputa- 
 tion increases ; so much so that King John, coming 
 to Knaresborough on one of his many visits, must 
 needs go to see him, and is so charmed by his con- 
 versation, his courteous manner, and extraordinary 
 piety, that he gives him forty acres of waste ground. 
 About this time he began to utter prophecies ; one 
 was that when his death should occur, the monks 
 of Fountains would attempt to carry off his corpse, 
 " but," said he to those about him, " I beseech you 
 to resist them ; and if there be occasion, do not 
 fail to call secular power to your assistance, for 
 in some part of the place belonging to that where 
 I shall give up my latest breath there indeed I 
 would have my body remain in peace, I hope, till 
 a Blessed Resurrection shall recall it from the dust." 
 According to the legends, this prophecy was fulfilled ; 
 the Cistercians of Fountains endeavoured to carry 
 off the Saint's body on his demise (24th September, 
 1218, according to the Lanercost Chronicle), which 
 they certainly would have accomplished, had not 
 a company of armed men, that belonged to the 
 Castle, resisted them ; and so " they were obliged to 
 return home exceeding sorrowful for so great a 
 loss." Then the folk of the neighbourhood, " High 
 and IvOw, Rich and Poor," coming in great crowds, 
 laid the saint in his own chapel, and covered his 
 remains with a slab of stone which, in later times, 
 was transferred to the Parish Church to cover the 
 grave of Sir Henry Slingsby, and may be seen in 
 the Slingsby Chapel to this day. 
 
 Here comes in a connection between St, Rober t
 
 ST. ROBERTS CHAPEL
 
 THE CULT OF ROBERT FLOWER 33 
 
 of Knaresborough and the medicinal waters of the 
 neighbourhood, now and for long chiefly associated 
 with Harrogate. Matthew Paris says that the fame 
 of St. Robert, Hermit of Knaresborough, soon shone 
 conspicuously all over the countryside, because from 
 his sepulchre a medicinal oil plentifully issued forth. 
 Now upon this Wheater makes some remarks which 
 are well worth consideration : he takes the observa- 
 tions of Matthew Paris as showing that what we now 
 call " Harrogate Water " was well known and in 
 high repute early in the thirteenth century. " That 
 the fame of the Forest as a watering-place had spread 
 so far [as St. Albans, where Matthew Paris was a 
 monk] is," he says, " conclusive that it was of no 
 mere passing repute. Our much earlier ancestors 
 were not ignorant of the water-cure. The Romans 
 in Britain understood the virtues of bathing ; and 
 enjoyed it at Harrogate, without a doubt. It is 
 hardly credible that the springs of Knaresborough 
 would escape notice. All the old British track-ways 
 across the Forest converge to the old Sulphur- Well 
 at Harrogate." We may take it, therefore, that 
 the medicinal oils written of by the old chroniclers 
 in connection with St. Robert were really the 
 mineral waters of the district, already resorted to 
 by crowds, and that those who desired to accord 
 miraculous powers to the saint calmly attributed 
 their virtues to him. 
 
 But that there was vast belief in St. Robert as 
 a local saint is shown by the next proceeding. 
 Sometime during the reign of Henry III., probably 
 about thirty years after the saint's death, Richard, 
 
 c
 
 34 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans, who was 
 then lord of the Honour of Knaresborough, founded 
 in the town the religious house known as the Trini- 
 tarian, or Order of St. Robert, Friary. Tanner, in his 
 " Notitia," says the house was instituted by St. 
 Robert himself : Burton, in his " Monasticon," makes 
 no mention whatever of it. But founded it was 
 about this time, and there is a charter of Edward II., 
 dated 1311, which confirms a previous one ; in it 
 the religious are referred to as the Brethren of the 
 Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives. 
 Various charters, grants, and gifts were made to this 
 foundation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries : 
 in one of 1473 its full title is set forth : " The House 
 of St. Robert near Knaresborough, of the Order of 
 the Holy Trinity, and the Redemption of Captives 
 who are imprisoned amongst Pagans for the faith 
 of Jesus Christ." From some of these early charters 
 and grants it would appear that the possessions of 
 the Trinitarians of Knaresborough were at one 
 time fairly considerable. Certainly they suffered 
 terribly during the reign of Edward II. from the 
 Scots, who came marauding in these parts, and in 
 1318 they are returned in the Nova Taxatio as being 
 worth no more than 5 a year. But during the 
 fourteenth century much property was given to them, 
 and several advowsons, and if the few fragments 
 of their architecture are to be taken as specimens 
 of their house and church their establishment was 
 one of some pretensions. Those fragments, how- 
 ever, are chiefly to be found in the walls of farm- 
 steads and cottages ; cloister and church were
 
 THE CULT OF ROBERT FLOWER 35 
 
 completely destroyed at the time of the Dissolution, 
 and no trace of them was seen for three centuries. 
 
 When the house was surrendered, in December, 
 1538, it was one of the poorest in Yorkshire. Accord- 
 ing to the Valor Ecclesiasticus, it was then worth 
 35 los. n^. There were eight inmates Thomas 
 Kent, Minister, and seven priests, one of whom could 
 not write his name. Kent received 13 6s. 8^., as 
 pension ; John Trumballe had 5 ; the others 
 received lesser amounts, in degree. Blitheman, the 
 Commissioner, accounted for 3 cart horses, 8 working 
 oxen, 4 draught horses, 6 cows, 20 pigs ; the utensils 
 of the forge sold for 6s. Sd., the vestments for 
 3 i8s. lod. ; in the granary at Wixley there was 
 store of grain worth 17 2s. Sd. He reckons 18 
 fothers of lead, and says the five bells found in 
 the belfry weighed 7000 Ibs. ; these he reserved 
 until the King's pleasure was known concerning 
 them. The jewels he estimated at 80 ounces ; they 
 consisted of a crown weighing 56 ounces and two 
 chalices weighing together 26 ounces : these he sent 
 to the King's treasure-house. Numerous servants 
 of the community claimed wages in arrear from him ; 
 to these he paid out six guineas ; he also paid 
 4 los. 6d. in the same way to the Vicars of Wixley 
 and Fewston, who claimed money on account of 
 their pensions. Altogether the Crown profited little 
 by disturbing these sons of Robert Flower. As 
 for their lands, they passed into the hands of the 
 Slingsby family during the reign of Edward VI., 
 and remained in them for several centuries. In 
 1862 some trenchmg operations (not undertaken in
 
 36 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 the interests of archaeology) brought to light the 
 foundations of the church. " The building," says 
 an account in the Gentleman's Magazine of that 
 year, " was probably cruciform, and what would 
 appear to be the north transept is already bared ; 
 the towers or turrets are placed at the angles. The 
 ornamental work in the mouldings scattered about 
 show the building to have been of fine and elegant 
 workmanship, and the tooth ornament so peculiar 
 to the style is most conspicuous. A stone coffin 
 containing three skeletons has already been found, 
 and it is not improbable that some very curious and 
 interesting relics may be brought to light. ' ' Previous 
 to this, many carved stones had been turned up 
 on the site of the Friary, and Pennant, in his " Tour 
 from Alston Moor to Harrogate," speaks of one in 
 particular, which, unearthed in 1776, bore on one side 
 the arms of the house, and on the other a representa- 
 tion of ships and of men and women in the habit of 
 slaves. But of Robert Flower himself there have 
 always been strangely interesting and romantic 
 memorials in Knaresborough, in the reputed St. 
 Robert's Chapel and St. Robert's Cave, which for 
 many a generation have attracted the sight-seeing 
 visitor as well as the historian and the antiquary. 
 These, in 1916, were put up to auction with some 
 other property of the Slingsby family, and, being 
 bought by the Rt. Rev. Prior Cummins, O.S.B., 
 were thus rescued from secular, and restored to 
 religious, uses. But here, if one is to be candid, 
 it had better be stated that much of what has been 
 written, at times, of St. Robert's Chapel, is more or
 
 THE CULT OF ROBERT FLOWER 37 
 
 less erroneous. It is almost impossible that the 
 cavity can ever have been his habitation ; it was, 
 no doubt, in real truth, a shrine-chapel made by his 
 successors long after his death. And in the ancient 
 Court Rolls it is never referred to in connection with 
 St. Robert at all, but is described as the Chapel of 
 Our Lady of the Crag.
 
 IV. MEDIEVAL KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Castle of Knaresborough, from the time of 
 L its completion, about the beginning of the 
 thirteenth century, was a favourite resort of the 
 English sovereigns. Between 1206 and 1216 King 
 John visited it on at least seven occasions ; at these 
 times castle and town alike were filled with his 
 followers. There are many records of the royal 
 visits in the local documents ; they cast curious side- 
 lights on the manners and customs of those days. 
 On one occasion, when John appears to have 
 journeyed from Rothwell, near Leeds, to Knares- 
 borough, the King's luggage filled five carts, each 
 drawn by two horses, and each under the care of a 
 sumpter-man : the cost was set down at twenty 
 pence per man, there and back. In 1206 there is 
 mention in the royal accounts of three bacons, six 
 " porcos," eighteen quarters of oats, two and a half 
 skeps of corn, and three tuns of wine " our expendi- 
 ture at Cnareburg " on the Monday before Ash 
 Wednesday ; about the same date there is a bill for 
 Queen Isabella's baths and washing, and for ham 
 and eggs supplied to her. In 1213, when Isabella 
 stayed at Knaresborough while John visited his 
 Castle of Pontefract, there are more entries on the 
 
 38
 
 MEDIEVAL KNARESBOROUGH 39 
 
 Queen's behalf 6s. n^d. for her baths, washing 
 her linen, and for a pack-saddle. During one of 
 the royal visits, in 1210, there are certain entries 
 which seem to refer to some old custom of alms- 
 giving : 35. id. is paid by the King for the robes of 
 the poor, " as accustomed," while 2s. zd. is paid for 
 13 " zones " and as many jack-knives for the same 
 purpose : there is also an entry of two marks paid 
 to Nichol the Carpenter. Wheater mentions a 
 curious entry made during one of John's visits, a 
 gift of five palfreys made to the King by Robert 
 de Vaux, one of his familiar associates, " for the 
 King to hold his tongue about the wife of Henry 
 Panel." But what it was that John might have 
 told about this lady, who was probably one of the 
 famous family of Paganel, does not appear. 
 
 In the Close Rolls of Henry III. there are many 
 references to Knaresborough as a royal possession. 
 In 1224 the King issues a mandate to the exchequer 
 to pay to Sir J. Parvus, " going as our messenger 
 to Cnarreburgh," twenty shillings for his expenses : 
 in the following year he orders that the goods of 
 Master Roger the Balister, left at Knaresborough, 
 be forwarded without delay to the Tower of 
 London : the Exchequer will pay the cost of carriage. 
 In 1226 there are numerous orders issued to Walter, 
 Archbishop of York, the holder of the Castle, to 
 pay sums of money for repairs ; there is another 
 ordering that Robert de Plumton shall hold his 
 wood within the Forest as of aforetime, without let 
 or disturbance. In 1228 Henry III. granted Knares- 
 borough, with Aldborough, Boroughbridge, and the
 
 40 HARROGATE AND KNARBSBOROUGH 
 
 surrounding demesnes to Hubert de Burgh and his 
 wife Margaret ; five years later, on the fall of de 
 Burgh, who had meanwhile been created Earl of 
 Kent and appointed Chief Justiciary of England, 
 these towns and lands reverted to the Crown, and 
 were given to Richard, Earl of Cornwall, commonly 
 known (at a somewhat later period) as King of the 
 Romans, and second son of the late King John. 
 During his tenure of the Town, Castle, and Honour of 
 Knaresborough things seem to have gone towards 
 wrack and ruin ; he is said to have sold vast quant- 
 ities of timber out of the Forest, and to have so 
 neglected the up-keep of the Castle that its re- 
 construction was necessary early in the following 
 century. 
 
 Between 1290 and the end of his reign, Edward I. 
 seems to have visited Knaresborough on several 
 occasions, and not always for the mere pleasure of 
 hunting in the Forest. There are various entries 
 in the accounts in which Knaresborough is mentioned. 
 In 1290 a sum of eighty pounds is set down for the 
 carriage of wine for the King's use from Hull to 
 Knaresborough and some other places in the North. 
 In 1298 William the Archer, a Lincolnshire man, is 
 granted the royal pardon, in view of his previous 
 military service in Flanders, for taking venison in 
 the Forest of Knaresborough. In 1300 William de 
 Harpenden and Robert de Furneaux, knights, are 
 commissioned by the King to raise four hundred 
 footmen in the liberty of Knaresborough and 
 Boroughbridge ; Harpenden is to conduct this levy 
 to Carlisle, and John de Selby will pay the wages.
 
 MEDIEVAL KNARESBOROUGH 41 
 
 In 1305 William de Rythre is granted royal per- 
 mission to hunt foxes, hares, badgers, and cats, 
 within the Forest, with his own dogs it will be 
 observed that though the wild cat is obviously 
 referred to here, there is no mention of wolves. 
 Edward I. was probably at Knaresborough not long 
 before his death ; it is significant that within a 
 very few weeks of it the Castle, Town, and Honour 
 were in possession of the man against whom he had 
 warned his son on his death-bed Gaveston. Under 
 him Knaresborough received new life, and with his 
 curious and eventful history the medieval town is 
 closely concerned : in fact, it is from Gaveston's 
 time as holder that the place becomes a free borough, 
 and begins to assume its character as a principal 
 centre in the county. Wheater gives an abstract 
 of the charter granted to Gaveston by Edward II. 
 in 1311 ; it is substantially that of the extract 
 printed in Hargrove's Knaresborough Customs : 
 
 " Charter granted by Edward II., i6th August, 
 1311 . . . to Peter de Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall 
 . . . reciting that the Earl and his heirs shall freely 
 enjoy the honour and manor with the parks of La 
 Haye, Bilton, and Heywra. That Knaresborough 
 be a Free Burgh, and the men Free Burghers. They 
 shall have one market and one fair, with the assize 
 of bread and ale. The Earl and his heirs shall have 
 free share in all the land belonging to that honour ; 
 the privilege of judging malefactors taken either 
 within or without the manor : one gibbet and one 
 gallows for the execution of such offenders, and be 
 entitled to all their cattle and goods ; together
 
 42 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 with all animals called waifs. They shall have 
 users of all writs ; also two Coroners, whose jurisdic- 
 tion shall extend over all the County of York. 
 The inhabitants shall be free of all fines and amerce- 
 ments for toll, pontage, murage, pannage, et cetera, 
 throughout the whole kingdom." 
 
 After Gaveston's fall, in 1312, Edward II. 
 handed his Knaresborough possessions over to 
 William de Vaux, with instructions for further 
 improvement and enlargement of the Castle. He 
 ordered him to make a pent-house between the 
 King's chamber and the kitchen, and to repair the 
 royal mills, mend the fences in the Forest, and to 
 maintain the iron mine. It was clearly the royal 
 intention to develop the place, but before long 
 terrible misfortunes fell upon it. In 1314, by a 
 commission issued at York, the King ordered William 
 of Boroughbridge and Robert de Weston to raise at 
 once within the Liberty of Knaresborough all the 
 available men between the ages of sixteen and 
 sixty, horsemen as well as foot, each arrayed and 
 equipped according to his estate, and to lead them 
 to the King, who, in his turn, led them, as part of 
 his forces, to Bannockburn, with what results we all 
 know. Four years later, the Scots, under Sir James 
 Douglas, poured over the border, and down into 
 Yorkshire. Bribed to leave Northallerton by pay- 
 ment of a thousand marks ; got away from Rip on, 
 after three days of terror, by gift of a similar sum, 
 they swept over the middle of the county and 
 burned Skipton and Knaresborough to ashes. In 
 each case the Castles were left comparatively
 
 MEDIEVAL KNARESBOROUGH 43 
 
 uninjured, but the small, growing towns were entirely 
 destroyed : in the case of Knaresborough the traces 
 of the burning have been often discovered in recent 
 years in making excavations for building. John de 
 Wysham was then in charge of the Castle, and he 
 made a successful resistance, but when the Scots 
 withdrew, the parish church, in company with most 
 other churches of the district, was a mass of ruinous 
 stone and charred wood, and so remained for twenty 
 years. As for the folk, recently made free burghers, 
 we may conclude that most of them had perished or 
 had fled into the wild places of the Forest. 
 
 Under Edward III. the town began to revive. 
 Married at York in 1328 to Philippa of Hainault, he 
 gave Knaresborough to his consort as part of her 
 dower " the Castle, Town, Forest, and Honour of 
 Knaresborough, of the value of 533 6s. Sd." and 
 at Knaresborough the young Queen spent a good 
 deal of her time. In 1333 she was there with a 
 large household, and for some period of that year 
 Edward was there, too on April loth he orders 
 the Sheriff of York to send immediately to Knares- 
 borough Castle 120 quarters of wheat, 20 quarters 
 of beans and peas, and 80 bacon-hogs, or other salt 
 meat. He was at Knaresborough again after the 
 battle of Halidon Hill ; during the next few years 
 he was frequently at the Castle. Here, according 
 to various entries in the State Papers and Court 
 Rolls, he kept a valuable stud of horses, mares, and 
 foals, under the charge of " valets " Roger de 
 Normanville at one time, John de Barton at another. 
 During his reign the church and town were rebuilt
 
 44 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 and began to flourish, and the improvement con- 
 tinued when, after the death of Queen Philippa, 
 the possessions were granted by Edward III. to his 
 son John of Gaunt, whose name is still associated 
 with the district in the ruinous pile in Haverah Park 
 locally known as John o' Gaunt's Castle, and in 
 the hill outside L,eeds whereon he is said to have 
 killed the last English wolf. 
 
 During John of Gaunt's lordship the Poll Tax 
 of 1379 was collected, and from it we can gain some 
 idea of the population of Knaresborough at that 
 time, and of the occupations of its inhabitants. One 
 man, Robert de Nesfield, franklin, paid 35. 4^. Two 
 men paid 2s. each. Six men paid is. each. Nineteen 
 men and women paid 6d. each ; about forty-five 
 persons paid 4^. each. The particulars of trades 
 are few. Only one carpenter is mentioned ; there 
 is also only one draper. There are several cobblers 
 (souters) and two or three weavers. There are no 
 brewers, and no ale-house keepers. The total amount 
 of the tax levied was only a little over two pounds, 
 and the place was obviously still very insignificant. 
 Nevertheless, it must have been steadily growing 
 and improving during this century, if we are to 
 take the rebuilding of the parish church as evidence. 
 Its restoration was completed about 1345, and it 
 was evidently carried out on much more extensive 
 lines than those of the church destroyed by the 
 Scottish marauders : Wheater, indeed, takes the 
 rebuilding to imply " an enormous increase of 
 population." But in view of the Poll Tax returns 
 it is difficult to believe that Knaresborough was more
 
 MEDIEVAL KNARESBOROUGH 45 
 
 than a very small town when John of Gaunt died 
 in 1399. 
 
 During the fifteenth century, various entries in 
 local and state documents tell us something of 
 people and events. One notable fact is an epidemic 
 of poaching ; in the first half of the century the 
 killing of game and even of deer in the erstwhile 
 jealously preserved Forest evidently went on to a 
 considerable extent. Many of the poachers came 
 from the growing towns of the neighbourhood, but 
 there were others of more than ordinary social 
 standing even the local clergy and gentry were 
 caught red-handed ; the Vicar of Knaresborough 
 offended times without number. Evidently the 
 supervision of the Forest grew lax. There was 
 trouble, too, about the royal mills ; more than 
 once the ruling powers had to seek the protection 
 of the law as regards their rights : there are com- 
 plaints that the tenants do not repair and sustain 
 the mills, of which there were many, and are " in 
 misericordia," by which one suspects that they 
 were in arrears of rent and dues. About this time, 
 too, a great deal of wood was cut down in the Forest ; 
 one finds entries of " twenty-six oaks cut down " ; 
 " eighteen oaks cut down " ; there are entries 
 which show that great trees were felled in Knares- 
 borough itself a sure proof that houses were being 
 built and streets laid out. The names of streets 
 begin to occur the Mill Bank, Finkle Street, Worm- 
 wood Hill, Parson's Garden, High Street ; all these 
 begin to be met with in the documents. Once, the 
 town foss, commonly called the Dyke, had been
 
 4 6 
 
 surrounded by wood ; by the middle of the fifteenth 
 century all the wood had been felled, and Briggate 
 is heard of as evidently being a thoroughfare of 
 importance instead of a mere track. We hear, too, 
 of the extension of trade in the little town tanning 
 which was being carried on a hundred years before, 
 appears to have become an important industry by 
 1450, and the name Tentergate, occurring in docu- 
 ments of 1430-40 shows that the home manufacture 
 of woollen goods was already a well-established 
 industry. 
 
 When Iceland came into this neighbourhood in 
 the reign of Henry VIII., he saw Knaresborough as 
 it presented itself in the last stage of its medieval 
 existence. He approached it from Aldborough, and 
 writes of the land between as being of pasture, corn, 
 and wood. He says that the two parks which he 
 saw, Bilton, and Haverah, were " metely well " 
 wooded. Knaresborough he sets down as "no 
 great thing," " meanly builded " : its market, how- 
 ever, he describes as " quick." The situation of the 
 Castle evidently impressed him much ; it stands, he 
 says, " magnificently and strongly on a rock," having 
 a very deep ditch hewn out of the rock " where it 
 is not defended with the river of Nidd, that there 
 runneth in a dead stony bottom." He counted 
 eleven or twelve towers in the walls of the Castle, 
 and one " very fair " within the area. The river was 
 then crossed by two bridges of stone : a little above 
 one of them he saw the Dropping Well, " of a 
 wonderful nature " ; he is at some pains to explain 
 its so-called " petrifying " properties. Also he saw
 
 MEDIEVAL KNARESBOROUGH 47 
 
 " a chapel in a rock," but he does not connect it 
 with St. Robert, whose Priory he also visited. As 
 for the great Forest, he says it was then " full of 
 ling-moors and mosses, with stony hills," and 
 was already, for the most part, denuded of its 
 wood.
 
 V. MOTHER SHIPTON 
 
 LEI/AND'S account of Knaresborough, com- 
 pared with those which he gives of some 
 other Yorkshire towns of equal fame, is somewhat 
 lengthy, and it is therefore all the more remarkable 
 that he makes no mention whatever of the notorious 
 Mother Shipton, who, if the accepted tradition is 
 true, ought at the time of his visit to have been at 
 the very height of her local celebrity. But though 
 he says a good deal about the Dropping Well, with 
 which natural curiosity her name is chiefly asso- 
 ciated, he says nothing about her, and the inference 
 is that though he apparently stayed long enough 
 in the town and neighbourhood to make himself 
 well acquainted with their chief features and a 
 good deal of their history, he never even heard 
 of the sybil who ranks high amongst English 
 prophets. According to local tradition, Mother 
 Shipton was one Ursula Southill, born at Knares- 
 borough, in a cottage near the Dropping Well, 
 in 1488. She married Tobias Shipton, said to be 
 a native of Shipton, near York, and lived with him 
 at that place as well as at Knaresborough. At 
 Shipton she is said to have died, in 1561, and a 
 tombstone in the churchyard, bearing a doggerel 
 inscription, was at one time reputed to be hers. 
 
 4 8
 
 THE 
 
 PROPHESIE 
 
 MOTHER SHIPTON 
 In the Raigne of King 
 
 Henry the Eighth. 
 
 Fortellingthe death of Cardinal! Wolsey, the LordPercy 
 
 and others, as also what should happen in 
 
 insuing times. 
 
 LONDON, 
 
 Printed for Richard Lownds, at his Shop 
 adjoyning to Ludgate. 1641.
 
 49 
 
 She is said to have uttered many remarkable 
 prophecies in her day ; to have foretold the down- 
 fall of Wolsey, the dissolution of the Religious 
 Houses and the coming of James I., and many 
 other minor matters which eventually came 
 to pass. Now, when Iceland visited Knaresborough, 
 at least two of these prophecies had come to 
 pass, and it is a curious fact that if their maker 
 lived in the town, and had the fame in the district 
 which she afterwards certainly enjoyed, his atten- 
 tion was not drawn to her presence and her story. 
 
 But the history of Mother Ship ton, whose asso- 
 ciation with Knaresborough is now so firmly fixed 
 that one may well believe it likely to continue for 
 ever, affords but one more example of the fact that 
 a vast mass of literature may easily spring up 
 around an originally obscure personage. Supposing 
 her to have had a real existence as Ursula Shipton 
 of Knaresborough (which is highly problematical), 
 to have been born, as legend says she was, in 1488, 
 and to have died in 1561, it is still a fact that 
 nothing is known of her in print until she had been 
 dead nearly a hundred years. In the Sloane MSS., 
 647-4, fl- 89, there is a piece headed " A Prophecy 
 found in ye manuscript in ye year 1620," which 
 may bear some reference to her : Allen, one of 
 Yorkshire's many historians, and Hargrove, the 
 historian of Knaresborough, mention following 
 local tradition that her prophecies had been 
 preserved in manuscript in the family of a Lord 
 
 P , which may mean Lord Powis, or, much 
 
 more likely, Lord Percy. But it was not until 
 
 D
 
 50 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 1641 that the known literature of Mother Shipton 
 really began. In that year Richard Lownds, " at 
 his shop adjoining to Ludgate," published a quarto 
 tract of four pages, the first having a rough cut 
 as title, which he called " The Prophesie of Mother 
 Shipton in the Raign of King Henry the Eighth. 
 Foretelling the death of Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord 
 Percy and others, as also what should happen in 
 coming times." In the same year, also in lyondon, 
 T.V., published another four-page tract entitled, 
 " A True Coppy of Mother Ship ton's Last Pro- 
 phesies as they were taken from one Joane Waller 
 in the year of our Lord 1625 who died in March 
 last 1641, being ninety-four yeares of age." A 
 third four-page tract followed in the same year ; 
 in it Mother Shipton's prophecies are given as 
 supplementary to those of Master Brightman, 
 Otwell Binns, Scottish Merlin, and Ignatius. 
 
 This was the beginning of a whole body of 
 Mother Shipton literature. During the next sixty 
 years numerous Mother Shipton books, pamphlets, 
 and tracts issued from the press. In 1642 G. Smith 
 of London printed " Two Strange Prophesies " ; 
 one found in the reign of Edward the Fourth ; 
 the other " named Mother Shipton " : two more 
 pamphlets followed in the same year. Each of 
 these three bore cuts of Mother Shipton on the front 
 page. In 1645 William Lilly included Mother 
 Shipton in his " Collection of Ancient and Modern 
 Prophesies." More pamphlets and tracts followed 
 in 1648 and again in 1663. In 1667 Mother 
 Shipton's fame had spread to Holland, and a Dutch
 
 MOTHER SHIPTON 51 
 
 translation of one of the foregoing books or tracts 
 was published by Crispijn Hoekwater. In the same 
 year W. Harris, of London, printed " The Life and 
 Death of Mother Ship ton " ; in 1682, 1684, J 686, 
 and 1687 there were new editions of this and 
 similar productions. And about the time of the 
 Revolution, Mother Shipton had been presented 
 on the stage, for in 1688 T. T. [Thompson] of 
 London, printed, in quarto, " The Life of Mother 
 Shipton : a New Comedy, as it was acted nineteen 
 days together with great applause." Before this, 
 indeed, Mother Shipton was quite famous in high 
 society and places ; Pepys, in his Diary, says, 
 under date October 20 th, 1666, that Sir Jeremy 
 Smith told him he was with Prince Rupert when 
 the news came of the burning of London, " and all 
 the Prince said was, that now Shipton's prophecy 
 was out." 
 
 During the eighteenth century, only four books, 
 or new editions of the various previous publications 
 appeared : one of them is noteworthy as purporting 
 to be " collected from the Ancient Caledonian 
 Chronicle in the Scottish dialect " ; it was issued 
 by J. Davenport, in London, in 1797, and in it 
 Mother Shipton is credited with the possession of 
 a daughter, Peggy, though, according to Knares- 
 borough tradition, she and Toby Shipton, her 
 carpenter-husband, never had any children. But 
 in the nineteenth century the literature increased 
 amazingly. Nearly forty separate publications, 
 ranging from volumes to chap-books, appeared 
 between the years 1800-1881, to say nothing of
 
 52 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 numerous magazine and newspaper articles, or 
 of questions and answers in such publications as 
 Notes and Queries. They came from the pro- 
 vincial as well as from the London press from 
 Newcastle, Stirling, Coventry, Derby, Otley, Liver- 
 pool, Bristol, Taunton, Grimsby, Leeds, and, of 
 course, Knaresborough. Some of these productions 
 were of a more or less learned nature ; most were 
 of the chap-book or fortune-telling order. One, 
 " Mother Ship ton Investigated," was " the result 
 of critical examination in the British Museum 
 Library, of the literature pertaining to the York- 
 shire sybil," by W. H. Harrison, one of whose chief 
 contributions to the subject is that on comparing 
 the first two versions of the prophecies, those of 
 1641, and Lilly's of 1645, he finds them to agree, 
 in substance. 
 
 Of one of these modern versions, the I2mo 
 of 32 pp., reprinted in 1862 from the Harris edition 
 of 1687 " and to be had of the booksellers and ,all 
 Railway Stations," it is necessary to write with 
 some detail, because it is from it that folk of to-day 
 gather their knowledge of the old Knaresborough 
 prophetess. It contains a lot of doggerel rhyme 
 in which Mother Shipton is supposed to prophesy 
 a good deal that has come to pass during the last 
 sixty or seventy years. Reference, for instance, is 
 made to the Crystal Palace and the Crimean War : 
 
 " A house of glass shall come to pass 
 In England but alas 1 
 War will follow with the work 
 In the land of Pagan and Turk."
 
 MOTHER SHIPTON 53 
 
 And to railways 
 
 " Carriages without horses shall go, 
 And accidents fill the world with woe." 
 
 And to the electric telegraph 
 
 " Around the world thought shall fly 
 In the twinkling of an eye." 
 
 And to ironclad ships 
 
 " Iron in the water shall float 
 As easy as a wooden boat." 
 
 And to popular education 
 
 " All England's sons that plough the land 
 Shall be seen book in hand." 
 
 Now, if Mother Shipton, living in the days of 
 Henry VIII., had really prophesied these things, 
 she would have been a very remarkable woman 
 indeed. But as a matter of fact, these lines and 
 all the rest are pure fabrication. The 1862 reprint 
 of .the Harris pamphlet of 1687 was " got up " for 
 the bookshops and railway bookstalls by Charles 
 Hindley, who, in a communication to Notes and 
 Queries, at a later date, admitted that he wrote 
 all this doggerel in order to make the edition sell. 
 Nor is this by any means the only instance in which 
 the old Knaresborough woman has been credited 
 with prophesyings which she never made. 
 
 How much, then, may we credit her with ? 
 Out of all the mass of literature which has grown 
 up around her, there are three principal pamphlets 
 which are worth some consideration the lyowndes 
 tract of 1641 ; the Conyers of 1686 ; and the
 
 54 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Harris of 1684. I 11 tne fi rst ^ which filled but three 
 pages of type, we probably have the gist of what 
 popular tradition had been attributing to Mother 
 Shipton for some eighty years before any printer 
 put her name and sayings in type. It is there 
 said that Cardinal Wolsey, having heard that the 
 wise woman of Knaresborough had declared that 
 he should never " come at York," sent the Duke 
 of Suffolk, the lyord Percy, and the lyord Darcy 
 to interview her at Knaresborough. " She bade 
 them welcome, calling them all by their names, 
 and sent for some cakes and ale, and they drunk 
 and were very merry." During the interview she 
 prophesied the Cardinal's fall ; told Percy that his 
 body should be buried in York and his head carried 
 into France ; , made some cryptic reference to 
 Darcy 's fate, and informed the Duke that in time 
 he should be as " low " as she herself was. She 
 added some general remarks which, ingeniously 
 twisted, might have been taken, subsequently, to 
 foretell much of what came to pass, but which, 
 looked at from another standpoint, were little 
 more than the guesses of a shrewd person who had 
 the wit to see how certain things were tending. 
 
 In the Harris pamphlet of 1684 we are at once 
 confronted with palpable invention. Whoever wrote 
 it was sure of his market, and laid himself out to 
 give his customers all that they wanted. Here is 
 all the old machinery of superstition, witchcraft, 
 magic, and the like. Mother Shipton is the daughter 
 of one Agatha Shipton, a maid of Knaresborough, 
 and of the Devil, who came to visit her " in the
 
 MOTHER SHIPTON 55 
 
 form of a very handsome young man." The 
 offspring, of course, is of a sort rarely seen j it had 
 teeth " like the tushes of a wild Bore," and its 
 nose and chin nearly met, after the proper fashion 
 of witches. From the time it was at nurse it was 
 visited by Familiar Spirits ; its infantile doings 
 evinced terrible commotion amongst the neighbours. 
 As a girl, it began to prophesy, and folk came from 
 far and near to listen to its sayings. These pre- 
 liminaries over, the Harris pamphlet falls into line 
 with the Lowndes tract of 1641, and practically 
 repeats what is there told. But it then goes on 
 with many and marvellous additions : it introduces 
 the Abbot of Beverley, an absolutely mythical 
 personage, and gives an enormous list of prophecies 
 which are not referred to at all in the first account. 
 Altogether, we may take the 1684 pamphlet as 
 having been the work of a bookseller's hack of that 
 period, who wished to give his readers plenty of 
 sensation and horror for their money. 
 
 The Conyers pamphlet of 1686 professes to give 
 the Strange and Wonderful History of Mother 
 Shipton, plainly setting forth her Prodigious Birth, 
 Life, Death, and Burial, with an exact collection 
 of all her famous prophecies, showing how they 
 have all been fulfilled " to this very year." It 
 agrees with the 1684 pamphlet in that the sibyl 
 was the child of Agatha (or, as some called her, 
 Emmatha) Shipton and the Devil, and follows the 
 main line of tradition in that respect. But there 
 are not so many generous details as to the super- 
 natural parentage, nor is Mother Shipton herself
 
 56 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 presented as quite such a loathsome object as the 
 1684 writer makes her : she marries Toby Shipton 
 in ordinary fashion and "very comfortably they 
 lived together." The prophecies are given in 
 detail, and explained, and the Abbot of Beverley 
 again appears, and is credited with having taken 
 down aU the sibylline utterances in writing. Here 
 Mother Shipton is said to have prophesied the 
 exact day and hour of her own death, at the age 
 of threescore and thirteen, and the pamphlet con- 
 cludes with her epitaph, composed by " a Poet of 
 that Age." We may well doubt if any poet of 
 that age ever heard of her. In sober truth, Mother 
 Shipton was probably some astute Knaresborough 
 woman who had sufficient sense to see ahead a 
 little way, at a time when changes of many sorts 
 were imminent, and was not backward in voicing her 
 opinions, and who accordingly gained a reputation 
 for foresight which she herself would have been 
 the first to laugh at.
 
 VI. WATERS OF HEALING 
 
 certain of *he local topographers 
 W and historians are correct or not in their 
 belief that the mineral waters of Harrogate and 
 Knaresborough were known to the Romans, who, 
 to be sure, were much in this neighbourhood, 
 delving in the lead mines of Nidderdale, there 
 seems to be little doubt that they were in some 
 repute in the Middle Ages. There is evidence that 
 the various royal personages and folk of high degree 
 who spent a good deal of time at Knaresborough 
 Castle made use of them, and the " medicinals " 
 which were said to flow from the tomb of St. 
 Robert were probably sulphur or chalybeate waters. 
 Hereabouts, water has many curious properties. 
 The Dropping Well on the Long Walk at Knares- 
 borough a delightful promenade under venerable 
 trees, planted by Sir Henry Slingsby nearly two 
 hundred years ago has been credited for many 
 centuries with the power of petrifaction. In the 
 Mother Shipton Inn, near the Low Bridge, the 
 curious visitor may see (and purchase) examples 
 of the work its dripping water can do in turning 
 everyday objects into stone. It has long been a 
 popular superstition that it really does petrify 
 
 57
 
 58 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 these things, and numerous Yorkshire households 
 possess a stone bird's nest, or a stone shoe, or a 
 stone hat which, after hanging under the streams 
 for more years than one knows of, was at last 
 thoroughly " petrified " and sold to the next 
 willing customer. What the water of the Dropping 
 Well really does, of course, is to coat these objects 
 with a surface of tufaceous deposit of an extra- 
 ordinary hardness. 
 
 But however early the mineral waters now so 
 famous were known, we hear nothing of them 
 between the time wherein Isabella and Philippa 
 took their baths therein, and the reign of Queen 
 Elizabeth, when they were re-discovered. As to 
 that re-discovery there is information in two works 
 published in 1626. In that year, one Edmund 
 Deane, " Dr. in physicke, Oxon, dwelling in the 
 City of Yorke " published a book which he entitled 
 " Spadacrene Anglica or The English Spaw Foun- 
 taine," which he dedicated to the physicians of 
 York, and was sold by Richard Foster, near the 
 Minster Gate. In this he describes four springs 
 of mineral water, at or near Knaresborough ; then 
 he goes on to tell of a fifth, in his opinion the most 
 important one, which, situate " in the said Forest," 
 is, he says, " commonly named by the vulgar sort 
 Tuewhit Well," but by those "of better ranke " 
 the English Spa, because its water resembles that 
 of the famous acid fountains at Spa in Germany. 
 He then proceeds to give an account of the dis- 
 covery of this well, which, called Tewit Well to 
 this day, still yields a supply at Harrogate. He
 
 WATERS OF HEALING 59 
 
 says that " about 55 yeares ago " (which would 
 make the date 1571) one Mr. William Slingsby, a 
 gentleman of many good parts, and of an ancient 
 and worthy family of Knaresborough, who had 
 travelled much abroad and knew Spa, accidentally 
 discovered that the water of this spring agreed in 
 all its constituents and properties with the water 
 which he had drunk at the German watering- 
 place. Having tried it for some time, he caused 
 the spring to be paved and walled round, so as to 
 protect it from the cattle. He adds that in addition 
 to William Slingsby, Dr. Timothy Bright, who was 
 a clergyman as well as a physician, and was some- 
 time Rector of Methley, near Leeds, made trial 
 of the spring ; he, too, knew Spa and its waters, 
 and was convinced that the water of the Tewit 
 Well was quite as good as those he had used at 
 that resort. A certain Dr. Anthony Hunter, some- 
 time of Newark, had also heard of the water of 
 Knaresborough and had expostulated with Dr. 
 Deane for not noising its virtues abroad ; hence 
 Deane's book. 
 
 Another physician, Dr. Michael Stanhope, then 
 appeared with another book " Newes out of 
 Yorkshire, or an account of a journey, in the True 
 Discovery of a sovaraign Minerall, Medicinall 
 Water, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, neere an 
 ancient Towne called Knaresborough, not inferior 
 to the Spa in Germany." He says of the Tewit 
 Well that he had heard that two gentlemen of 
 ancient descent, one named Slingsby, the other 
 Ingilby, did for many years ordinarily drink of
 
 60 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 this water, and that in the summer of 1625 he 
 himself visited it, in the company of Dr. Deane, 
 and of three other physicians, and of " a worthy 
 knight," whose name does not appear, but who, 
 he says, was " a curious speculator of rarities." 
 Stanhope, having sampled the water, was over- 
 joyed : " finding it to have a perfect Spa relish." 
 He then tells of some other springs ; one in Bilton 
 Park, and another called the Pigeon Spring ; to 
 the last-named, one Dr. Short, writing of it some 
 time later, says pigeons resorted in great numbers, 
 " to pick up the candied sea-salts " which were 
 much stronger than those at the shore, because of 
 the great admixture of sulphur. Stanhope also 
 says in this book that in the summer of 1626, Dr. 
 lyeake, a York physician, discovered another well, 
 a mile nearer to Knaresborough, the water of 
 which was of equal virtue with the others. 
 
 It will be observed that all these springs are 
 described as being at Knaresborough ; the only 
 mention of Harrogate, as we now know it, is in 
 Deane's book, in one passage of which he says 
 that one of the wells was at " a place called Haregate 
 Head." Six years after his first essay, Dr. Stanhope 
 sent out a second treatise " Cures without Care, 
 or a Summons to all such who finde little or no 
 helpe by the use of ordinary physick to repaire to 
 the Northerne Spa . . . near Knaresborow in the 
 West Riding of Yorkshire." This was printed in 
 London by William Jones, of Red Cross Street, 
 in 1632, and was dedicated to the famous Thomas 
 Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. There are certain
 
 WATERS OF HEALING 61 
 
 new and interesting facts in it. Stanhope says 
 that Knaresborough is " a place very apt to ac- 
 commodate strangers plentifully both for diet and 
 lodging," which seems to indicate that visitors 
 to the " Nor theme Spa " made the old town their 
 headquarters. He also announces that in the 
 summer of 1631 he himself made discovery of a 
 new spring (St. John's Well) of which he has very 
 great opinions, it possessing " an admixture of 
 Brimstone, besides the iron and vitriall, which 
 I take to be an aditament of worth and noblenesse." 
 He adds that his discovery has been " set with 
 stone, where it now stands upon its triall," and 
 mentions three other sulphur springs, presumably 
 discovered since 1626, by drinking of which, he 
 says, various folk, from the Countess [Duchess] of 
 Buckingham downwards, have been greatly 
 benefited. 
 
 The literature continued to increase : m 1652 
 John French, doctor of physic in London, published 
 " The Yorkshire Spaw, or a Treatise of four famous 
 medicinal Wells, viz. the Spaw, or Vitrioline Well ; 
 the stinking, or Sulphur Well ; the Dropping, or 
 Petrifying Well ; and St. Mugnus Well, near 
 Knaresborow in Yorkshire " the name Harrogate, 
 one sees, does not yet occur in these descriptions. 
 It is still " near Knaresborough " in the new 
 edition of "Spadacrene Anglica," printed by 
 Thomas Broad at York in 1654, an ^ in " Spada- 
 crene Eboracensis," written (and left unfinished) 
 by the Leeds physician, Dr. George Neale, some 
 forty years later. But Neale gives some indication
 
 62 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 that things were moving in his time at " Haregate 
 Head " : " It's now thirty years ago," he observes, 
 " since I set up first warm Bathing in this water, 
 and procured one such Vessel for a Pattern, as are 
 used beyond the sea for that purpose ; and now 
 there are above twenty Bathing Houses kept here, 
 with all necessary Conveniences, and all full em- 
 ployed in the Season." Certain remarks of his 
 show that about the time his book was written the 
 vicinity of the springs was being improved ; a 
 terrace, sixty yards square, was being laid out, 
 by Dr. Stanhope's well, as a promenade for visitors 
 who had come to drink the waters ; he complains 
 of " the Capriciousness of the Person who carried 
 on the whole Design to aggrandise himself." Dr. 
 Neale (whose book was not published for several 
 years after his death, when it was edited by Dr. 
 Short, of Sheffield) died in 1691, and it was said 
 of him that he had attended the Spaw for sixty- 
 seven years." If that statement is correct he 
 must have known it before either Deane or Stan- 
 hope first drew attention to its virtues. 
 
 Although Knaresborough appears on the titles 
 of the books published in the seventeenth century, 
 the name Harrogate begins to occur in contemporary 
 accounts of visits to the springs. In August, 1680, 
 Ralph Thoresby, the famous topographer, took 
 horse from his house at I^eeds " and rid with 
 cousin Ruth to Pannel, whither, though late 
 enough and in the dark, we got very well." He 
 stayed some days drinking the Harrogate waters, 
 but he appears to have spent all his spare time in
 
 WATERS OF HEAUNG 63 
 
 Knaresborough, copying the inscriptions on the 
 Slingsby monuments in the parish church. In 
 June of the following year he " went with cousins 
 and much company to the Spaws," and for three 
 days " drank the sulphur water plentifully ; walked 
 much for health and recreation with the company " ; 
 his whole visit extended over a month on this 
 occasion, and he remarks that Harrogate was 
 " better furnished than ordinary " with interesting 
 visitors, who appear, from his list of their names 
 and addresses, to have come from far-off places. 
 In August, 1682, he was once more at Harrogate, 
 " in the good, serious company of Cousin Ibbetson," 
 and there is a curious entry in his diary which 
 shows that there must have been some sort of a 
 Nonconformist meeting-house in the place in those 
 days. For he records that on the Sunday after 
 his arrival, " after water time in the morning," 
 he had the opportunity to hear " good Mr. Gunter " 
 preach, but suffered from his water dose, " which 
 made me excessively drowsy." He heard Mr. 
 Gunter hold forth again in the afternoon, and 
 " was somewhat disturbed at the sight of an 
 informer, who got cunningly into the meeting." 
 However, he thanks God next day that the in- 
 former has done no harm as yet, either to him or 
 to " good Mr. Gunter," who had once been chaplain 
 to Oliver Cromwell, and had been preferred by the 
 Lord Protector to the living of Bedale, whence 
 he was ejected under the Uniformity Act. Upon 
 this occasion Thoresby says of Harrogate that 
 good company was scarce.
 
 64 HARROGATE AND KNARBSBOROUGH 
 
 Up to the end of the seventeenth century the 
 folk who resorted to Harrogate either lodged them- 
 selves in the few farm-houses and cottages, or lived 
 at the inns in Knaresborough. If Hargrove is 
 correct, the first Harrogate inn, the Queen's Head, 
 was built in 1687 : that much building was done 
 between 1680 and 1700 is very evident from a 
 passage in Thoresby's Diary under date June 25th, 
 1702 : " Rode," he writes, " to the Spas at Har- 
 rowgate . . . the place itself is so altered with 
 new buildings, from what it was when I knew it 
 formerly, that it helped to deceive me." Before 
 the building of the first inn the accommodation 
 must have been primitive enough. When the 
 Duchess of Buckingham, Lord Fairfax's daughter, 
 came to the Spaws to seek relief from " a severe 
 asthma " she caused a tent to be pitched near the 
 old well, and lived in it while she took the cure. 
 However, there were three inns by 1700, and the 
 folk of the farmhouses had begun to find it a 
 profitable thing to take in the fashionables who 
 came not only from York but from London. 
 
 But before Thoresby had begun visiting Harro- 
 gate, a lively controversy had arisen between certain 
 physicians as to the merits of its medicinal springs 
 and that discovered at Scarborough by good 
 Mistress Farrow. In 1667 one Robert Wittie, a 
 doctor of medicine and a Fellow of the Royal 
 Society, published at York a " Description of Spaw 
 Waters at Scarborough in Yorkshire," wherein he 
 made some slighting remarks upon the waters of 
 Knaresborough. This in 1669 called forth a reply
 
 WATERS OF HEALING 65 
 
 from "W. Simpson, Philo-Chimico-Medicus," who 
 in that year published in London through Richard 
 Chiswel, at the Two Angels and Crown in Little 
 Britain, a treatise called " Hydrologia Chimica," 
 wherein he discussed the waters of Scarborough, 
 Knaresborough, and Malton. In the same year 
 Wittie published a rejoinder, " Pyrologia Mimica," 
 in which he contends that three pints of Scarborough 
 water are equal in quality and efficiency to ten 
 gallons of that of Knaresborough. The controversy 
 was continued by Simpson, and joined in by other 
 physicians, and in the publications issued during 
 its course one learns some strange facts as to the 
 extraordinary quantities of water drunk by the 
 patrons of the wells at Harrogate. The doses 
 range from three pints to twenty glasses. In 
 Simpson's first book we also get an account of how 
 the frequenters of the springs passed their time 
 in those primitive days : " The time of Drinking 
 the largest Dose of the waters, actuated with the 
 Salt of Steel," he says, " is the morning, walking, 
 as the usual course is, and no more all day, except 
 two glasses in the Afternoon about four of the 
 Clock ; and that but to some bodies neither, viz. 
 to such as by experiment find it go well with them ; 
 exercising themselves by Walking, Riding, Reading, 
 Bowling, or any other innocent Divertisement ; 
 keeping an ordinary diet of a few dishes, and those 
 of wholesome meat, and well cook'd, without too 
 much variety of sauces, which confounds the 
 stomach, but to keep a hanke over it." It is 
 evident from this that in essentials the water-cure
 
 66 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 practice at Harrogate has not greatly changed 
 during the last two hundred and seventy years, 
 for people still take their nauseous cups of a morning, 
 still exercise themselves, and are still bidden to 
 live plainly ; the only difference is that they do 
 not now take " a Draught of Warm Ale or Sack to 
 comfort them " on quitting the springs.
 
 VII. CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD 
 
 LONG before the worthy Mr. William Slingsby 
 discovered the virtues of the Tewit Well at 
 Harrogate, his ancestors had been men of note in 
 the Forest of Knaresborough. Somewhat to the 
 north of the old town lies Scriven, a desirable place, 
 which has been in possession of either Scrivens or 
 Slingsbys from some date closely approximating to 
 that of the Norman Conquest. When Domesday 
 Book was compiled Scravinghe was a berewic of 
 the manor of Knaresborough, and contained six 
 carucates of land, the property of the King, and it 
 was, like most of the country round about, in a 
 waste condition. Very soon it passed into the hands 
 of the Scrivens, hereditary Foresters of the Royal 
 Forest of Knaresborough, several of whom, Gamel 
 the Fowler, Baldwin, and Henry, we hear of during 
 the next two centuries. During the fourteenth 
 century the Scriven male line died out, and the whole 
 estate passed by marriage to William de Slingsby, 
 who is said to have hailed from Slingsby near 
 Hovingham. Henceforward the Slingsbys of 
 Scriven were perhaps the most important people in 
 the neighbourhood. They became connected with 
 
 67
 
 68 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 great families, with the Percies, Earls of Northumber- 
 land, with the Mallories and the Calverleys ; they 
 were knights and sheriffs ; from the time when 
 Knaresborough began to be represented in Parlia- 
 ment, which was during the reign of Queen Mary, 
 their names occur frequently and regularly in the 
 rolls of elected members. They were perhaps at 
 the full tide of their influence and prosperity when 
 the Civil War broke out in 1642, and it is in one of 
 them, Sir Henry Slingsby, that much of Knares- 
 borough's connection with the events of that period 
 centres. 
 
 Three years after the accession of Queen Eliza- 
 beth, Peter Slingsby, Gentleman, being then porter 
 and keeper of the Castle of Knaresborough, a survey 
 was made of the ancient fortress, with a view to 
 ascertaining its condition. In the vSlingsby Corre- 
 spondence, there is a long inventory of what was 
 found during this survey and it is evident from what 
 is there set down that the castle was then in a very 
 poor state, and very sparsely fitted and furnished : 
 only three windows had glass in them ; the rest 
 were closed in by wooden laths. Nothing in the way 
 of repair, however, was done until 1590. At that 
 time the castle was held by Henry Slingsby, Esquire, 
 under lease from the Crown. It was then thoroughly 
 renovated by order of the Earl of Cumberland, 
 Steward of the Honour of Knaresborough, and the 
 cost of the restoration was borne, according to 
 ancient custom, by the foresters alone, the free- 
 holders of the soke and liberty escaping altogether. 
 In 1616, the castle, honour and lordship of
 
 CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD 69 
 
 Knaresborough were given by James I. to his son, 
 afterwards Charles I., and he, on his marriage, 
 assigned them to his Queen, Henrietta Maria, in 
 whose possession they rested when the Civil War 
 broke out in 1642. 
 
 Here we first come into touch with Sir Henry 
 Slingsby, the most notable man of his ancient race. 
 When the dissensions arose between King and 
 Commons, he, a convinced loyalist, was for Charles, 
 and in his Memoirs, edited and published by Sir 
 Walter Scott in 1806, he tells, how he prepared to 
 seize Knaresborough Castle on behalf of his royal 
 master. " Being at Knaresborough," he says, 
 " some of my tenants acquaint me that my Lord 
 Fairfax intended that night to put some soldiers 
 into the castle : Herewith I acquainted General 
 Ruthen : he adviseth me to hold it myself, and draw 
 some soldiers into it : Whereupon I got the keys of 
 the castle : caused a bed to be carried in ; and that 
 very night comes Sir Richard Hutton, and part of 
 the train-bands, with commission from my Lord of 
 Cumberland to hold it for the King. So I resigned, 
 and only laid in the castle that night, and in that 
 room and lodging built by my father, and where 
 I had lain when I was very young, being sent for 
 by my father." Hutton appointed Colonel Crofts 
 to be Governor, and he continued to hold the castle, 
 having a number of train-band troops under him, 
 without much adventure, until the November of 
 1644, when a Parliamentary force appeared and 
 laid siege to it. This force was under the leadership 
 of the notorious John Lilburn, who, originally a
 
 70 HARROGATE AND KNARBSBOROUGH 
 
 bookbinder in London, had been convicted before 
 the Star Chamber of publishing seditious libels, 
 fined 5000, pilloried, whipped from the Fleet 
 Prison to Westminster Hall, and imprisoned for 
 three years, at the end of which he entered the 
 Parliamentary army and became one of its principal 
 colonels during the Northern operations : subse- 
 quently he changed sides, and fought for the King. 
 Lalburn invested Knaresborough Castle immediately 
 on his arrival, but having brought no artillery with 
 him he could at first only blockade it, which he 
 did with such effect that the garrison was reduced 
 almost to the verge of starvation. At the end of a 
 month, however, he got four pieces of ordnance 
 from Helmsley, where the castle had just been 
 heavily bombarded, and on December 2oth the 
 royalist garrison, lessened by that time to little 
 more than a hundred men, surrendered, and were 
 allowed to go free. Within the castle Lilburn found 
 considerable stores of arms and ammunition, four 
 pieces of cannon, a good deal of money, and plate 
 of the value of 1500. The demolition of the outer 
 works of the castle began at once, and the timber 
 was sold to local purchasers : in 1646 Knaresborough 
 was included with many other Yorkshire strongholds, 
 notably Tickhill, Sandal, Middleham, and Bolton, 
 in a Parliamentary order for destruction, and its 
 walls were thrown down, the stone sold for 
 building purposes, and the whole reduced to the 
 condition in which it has practically remained ever 
 since. 
 
 It must have been during this work of destruction
 
 CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD 71 
 
 that Cromwell visited Knaresborough. Sir John 
 Goodricke, of Ribston, who died, a very old man, 
 in 1789, used to relate a story which had been told 
 to him in his childhood by a Knaresborough woman, 
 in whose father's house the great man had lodged. 
 She was one Eleanor Ellis, and was born, according 
 to the parish register, in 1632 ; she was therefore 
 a girl of twelve at the time of the siege, and must 
 have been fourteen or fifteen when Cromwell stayed 
 in the town : she married one Fishwick, bore him 
 several children, and lived until 1714. Altogether 
 there seems every proof that she actually saw 
 Cromwell when he stayed in her father's house, 
 which, according to Grainge, stood near the present 
 Crown Inn, in the High Street, and was rebuilt in 
 1764. Her story, as told to Sir John Goodricke, 
 throws an interesting sidelight on the I,ord Pro- 
 tector : " When Cromwell came to lodge at our 
 house in Knaresborough," she said, " I was but a 
 young girl. Having heard much talk about the 
 man, I looked at him with wonder : being ordered 
 to take a pan of coals and air his bed, I could not 
 during the operation, forbear peeping over my 
 shoulder several times to observe this extraordinary 
 person, who was seated at the fireside of the room, 
 untying his garters. Having aired the bed, I went 
 out, and shutting the door after me, stopped and 
 peeped through the key-hole, when I saw him rise 
 from his seat, advance to the bed, and fall on his 
 knees, in which attitude I left him for some time ; 
 when returning again I found him still at prayer ; 
 and this was his custom every night so long as he
 
 72 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 stayed at our house ; from which I concluded he 
 must be a good man ; and this opinion I always 
 maintained afterwards, though I heard him very 
 much blamed and exceedingly abused." 
 
 However good a man Cromwell may have been, 
 there was nothing particularly good about the 
 conduct of the Parliamentary soldiers, who, either 
 at the time of the siege, or when they held the town 
 between 1647 an( i I 648, wantonly damaged the parish 
 register. This, which began in 1561, reveals some 
 curious things relating to the Puritan regime in 
 Knaresborough, chiefly by omission. As in a great 
 many other parishes, baptisms seem to have been 
 severely discountenanced ; the entry " borne " 
 instead of " baptized " appears frequently ; the 
 clergy are no longer " vicars " but " ministers," 
 elected " by the free choice and consent of the 
 people." According to Hargrove, there was no 
 religious ceremony of marriage in the town for four 
 years ; during that time sixty-six couples were 
 united by the civil magistrates, who were usually 
 Sir Thomas Maulerever, Baronet, of Allerton Park, 
 or Thomas Stockdale, Esquire, of Bilton Park. 
 Grainge gives a specimen of the certificate which 
 these worthies issued to the folk they united : 
 " December 7th, 1653. William Grafton of Knares- 
 bro' yeom. aged 23 years or thereabouts, and Ann 
 Letham, of ye same, aged 39 years, or thereabouts, 
 were this day married together, having first been 
 published in ye Market-place at Knaresborough, 
 3 market-days according to \e Acte of Parliament, 
 vizt. upon ye 23rd day of November, and two
 
 CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD 73 
 
 market-days thereafter, in ye presence of Hen. 
 Bullock, Thomas Field, William Busbie, and others, 
 and of me. Tho. Stockdale." 
 
 In the operations consequent on the siege of 
 Knaresborough Castle, Sir Henry Slingsby took no 
 part ; after handing the castle over to Sir Richard 
 Hutton he repaired to York, and in December, 1643, 
 received a commission as Colonel in the royal army. 
 He raised a regiment, very largely recruited from 
 amongst his own tenants and neighbours, and one 
 of his first duties was to escort Queen Henrietta 
 Maria from Bridlington Bay after her landing from 
 Holland, whither she had journeyed in the hope of 
 raising funds for the Royalist cause. He was in 
 York during the whole of the blockade and siege, 
 and was present at the battle of Marston Moor in 
 1644 the turning point in the Civil War, so far as 
 Yorkshire was concerned. After the Royalist forces 
 marched out of York, on its surrender to the Parlia- 
 mentary army, he retreated with Sir Thomas 
 Glemham into Cumberland, and after remaining in 
 the wilds for a time, joined Sir Marmaduke Langdale, 
 and with him made his way to the King at Oxford, 
 where they arrived in December. In 1645 he was 
 present at the disaster of Naseby, and subsequently 
 fled with Charles into Wales. In his Memoirs he 
 gives a quaint account of something that happened 
 there : " The King thinks to secure himself once 
 again amongst the mountains in Wales, some of 
 which we found almost inaccessible, many of the 
 troopers' horses tiring, and little accommodation 
 to be met with, which makes me remember this
 
 74 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 passage. When the King was at supper, eating a 
 pullet, and a piece of cheese, the room without was 
 full, but the men's stomachs were empty for want 
 of meat ; the good-wife, troubled with the continual 
 calling upon her for victuals, and having, it seems, 
 but that one cheese, comes into the room where 
 the King was, and very soberly asks if the King 
 had done with the cheese, for that the gentlemen 
 without desired it." 
 
 There was no rest for Charles in Wales, and Sir 
 Henry accompanied him across country, by various 
 ways, to Newark. When Newark was yielded in 
 May, 1646, he followed Charles to Topcliffe, and 
 there, on May nth, " where the king dined, I was 
 commanded by the king to return home." The 
 staunch old Royalist never saw his royal master 
 again. He repaired to Red House, one of the 
 Slingsby possessions, and there remained close 
 " since they have from York laid wait for me to 
 take me, and I have escaped them, I take myself 
 to one room in my house, scarce known of by my 
 servants, where I spend my days in great silence, 
 scarce daring to speak, or walk, but with great heed, 
 lest I be discovered." Nevertheless, during these 
 days he does something. " I did pare off the 
 swarth, and did gravel that walk which is on the 
 side of the West Orchard, which Will. Hinckes 
 planted, and set the walk with trees on either side/' 
 In this retreat he hears news of the king from time 
 to time, " Of his going to Holmby, to Hampton- 
 Court, the Isle of Wight, to White-hall, and at last, 
 which was his last day, upon the 30th of January,
 
 CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD 75 
 
 1648, I hear Heu me ! Quid heu me ! Humana 
 perpessi sumus." With these melancholy words he 
 concludes his Memoirs, perhaps foreseeing that he 
 was to end his days even as his king had ended his. 
 And that eventually came about. After the insur- 
 rection in the West of England against the Common- 
 wealth, which came to nothing, many of the old 
 Royalists became suspect, and were imprisoned ; 
 amongst others, Sir Henry Slingsby, who until then 
 had been permitted to live in seclusion, was com- 
 mitted to the care of the garrison at Hull. During 
 his imprisonment there he was said to have en- 
 deavoured to corrupt certain of the officers, and he 
 was removed to York Castle, whence later on he was 
 carried to London, where, in May, 1658, he was 
 charged with high treason before a specially con- 
 stituted, so-called High Court of Justice. All the 
 known facts as to what occurred go to show that 
 Cromwell and Thurloe, his secretary, not content 
 with having visited the old knight with heavy fine 
 and long imprisonment, were now determined to 
 have his life. It was in vain for him to protest that 
 the charges brought against him in respect of his 
 doings at Hull were largely invented, or to challenge 
 the legality of the proceedings and the status of the 
 Court. He was found guilty, and the usual barbarous 
 sentence for high treason was passed upon him. 
 Cromwell was induced by his son-in-law, Lord 
 Fauconberg, who was Sir Henry's nephew, to change 
 the method of execution to decapitation. On 
 June 5th, 1658, the staunch old Royalist suffered 
 the fate which had befallen his king ten years before,
 
 76 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 saying no more on the scaffold on Tower Hill than 
 that he was glad to die for being an honest man. 
 His body was brought to Knaresborough for intei- 
 ment, and there lies at rest in the Slingsby Chapel of 
 the parish church.
 
 VIII. HARROGATE IN 1750 
 
 were reasons why Ralph Thoresby when 
 1 he went to Harrogate early in the eighteenth 
 century after an absence of some years failed to 
 recognise the growing place. During the time of 
 William and Mary, English folk began to frequent 
 the watering-places as fashionable resorts, and the 
 habit steadily grew. Long before that, one town 
 at least had been a gathering-place of the society 
 people Bath, famous since the days of the Roman 
 occupation for its medicinal waters, had always 
 attracted those who could afford the long and 
 perilous journey across the sparsely populated 
 country which lay between it and London. We 
 know how Pepys went there in Charles the Second's 
 time, and how he lost his way on the journey, and 
 what were his impressions of the place. By the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century folk were going 
 to Bath in vast crowds ; " thousands," observes 
 Misson, " go thither to pass a few weeks, without 
 heeding either the baths or the waters, but only to 
 divert themselves with good company. They have 
 music, gaming, public walks, balls, and a little fair 
 every day." There were other places besides Bath. 
 Buxton had long enjoyed a high reputation ; Mary, 
 
 77
 
 78 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Queen of Scots, had been permitted to go there 
 regularly during her imprisonment at Sheffield. 
 Tunbridge Wells, being conveniently placed to 
 I^ondon, was much in favour ; thus, according to a 
 contemporary play, you met a very mixed assem- 
 blage, " a medley of all sorts, fops, majestic and 
 diminutive, from the long flaxen wig with a splendid 
 equipage to the merchant's spruce 'prentice, that's 
 always mighty neat about the legs." Nearer still 
 to I/ondon was Epsom, where the season began on 
 Easter Monday ; it was a great place for the citizens, 
 and the company was somewhat questionable. But 
 there were at this time Spas in Condon itself, or in 
 what we should now call I^ondon at Hampstead, 
 of which there is a memory in Well Walk, and at 
 Acton, and at Northall, and at Sadler's Wells, which 
 in those days used to be called Sadler's New Tun- 
 bridge Wells. By Queen Anne's time, the drinking 
 of waters had become fashionable, and bathing in 
 them was growing in favour ; still more fashionable 
 was it to attend these places in the proper season, 
 whether one drank or bathed, or only made a 
 pretence of doing either. 
 
 Harrogate at this period was not without certain 
 rivals in Yorkshire. Scarborough first came into 
 fame as a Spa where medicinal water could be 
 drunk, rather than as a sea-bathing resort. To this 
 day its chief centre of fashionable amusement is 
 called the Spa, and in an obscure corner of it still 
 exists the spring which Mistress Farrow discovered 
 a very long time ago. On the banks of the Tees, 
 near Darlington, was Croft, at one time in great
 
 HARROGATE IN 1750 79 
 
 repute ; in the low-lying country between Ponte- 
 fract and Doncaster was Askern, a sulphur spring 
 in a village which still retains a genuinely eighteenth- 
 century aspect ; mineral waters were to be drunk 
 at Ilkley and at Boston Spa ; there were several 
 places, indeed where there were springs which had 
 much local celebrity. Sir John Floyer mentions 
 Scarborough and Croft in his book on cold bathing ; 
 in Dr. Browne's " Account of the Wonderful Cures 
 perform'd by the Cold Baths," he gives advice " to 
 the Water Drinkers at Tunbridge, Hampstead, 
 Astrope, and Nasborough." This was published in 
 1707, and Nasborough, of course, means Harrogate. 
 Bathing in the medicinal waters at these various 
 places evidently did not come into general use until 
 a much later period than that at which the drinking 
 of them became popular. At Knaresborough, or 
 rather, at Copgrove, close by, bathing seems to have 
 begun at St. Mungo's Well, the water of which was 
 held to be particularly efficacious in cases of rheu- 
 matism. Floyer, in his book, says that it was also 
 much resorted to in cases of rickets in children. 
 " Rickets," he says, " appeared first about the year 
 1620, and travelled into all parts of the kingdom, 
 and it was more rare in the Northern counties, where 
 they commonly cured it by bathing in St. Mungo's 
 Well. . . . Children are twice or thrice dipped in, 
 and presently taken out again, and while they are 
 in, the officious Women at the Well are active in 
 rubbing their backs, or the maimed Parts, but this 
 seems only for form." There are records of women 
 having been brought to St. Mungo's Well " in a
 
 So HARROGATE AND KNARBSBOROUGH 
 
 cripple cart " from as far off as Newcastle and 
 Cockermouth ; some of the cures effected there, if the 
 accounts of them are true, verge on the miraculous. 
 This well, however, fell into disuse as those of 
 Harrogate were developed. 
 
 The " officious Women " mentioned by Sir John 
 Floyer were evidently prominent figures in Harro- 
 gate life from an early date. Baskerville, the 
 antiquary, who made a long journey " to see the 
 Spaw Water at Harricate " has left a record of what 
 befell him on his arrival. " At your first coming- 
 hither," he says, " you shall meet with a troublesome 
 delight, and importunity among the women here 
 almost as eager as that of the watermen of London, 
 who shall be your servant to fill water to you when 
 you go to the wells, or bring it to your lodging when 
 you do not. . . . They got into our chambers before 
 we got out of our beds, with pots of water, one 
 crying out, ' Oh, sir, I am pretty Betty, let me serve 
 you ! ' another ' Kate and Doll, sir, do let we tend 
 you, we be so fair ! ' but to tell you the truth, they 
 fell short of that, for their faces did shine like bacon 
 rind, and for beauty may vie with an old Bath 
 guide's ass, the sulphur waters had so fouled their 
 pristine complexions." 
 
 During the first half of the eighteenth century 
 the improvement which Thoresby noted in 1702 
 continued. More inns were built ; more lodging- 
 houses opened ; diversions multiplied ; the whole 
 affair became a business. And in 1731 the author 
 of the " Memoirs of John Buncle, Esq.," is able to 
 give a very flattering account of the new resort.
 
 HARROGATE IN 1750 81 
 
 " Of all the watering-places I know," he remarks, 
 " Harrogate is, in my opinion, the most charming. 
 The waters are incomparable ; no air can be better : 
 and, with the greatest civility, cheerfulness, and 
 good-humour, there is a certain rural plainness and 
 freedom mixed, which are vastly pleasing. The lady 
 of pleasure, the well-drest tailor, and the gamester, 
 are not to be found there. Gentlemen of the 
 country, and women of birth and fortune, their 
 wives, sisters, and daughters, are, for the most 
 part, the company. There were, at least, four- 
 score ladies in the country dances every night, while 
 I was there, and, among them, many fine women." 
 The creator of John Buncle, Esquire, it will be 
 observed, does not say anything about provision for 
 the spiritual needs of the new watering-place. 
 Obviously, when Ralph Thoresby (at that time a 
 very Puritanical Nonconformist) was there in 
 1 680-8 1, there was some sort of a meeting-house, for 
 he heard the ejected Mr. Gunter preach, and spied 
 an informer. But up to 1743 nothing seems to have 
 been done in the way of providing a church. In that 
 year, however, folk began to bestir themselves, and 
 a public subscription was instituted with the idea 
 of building a chapel-of-ease. The principal sub- 
 scriber was I,ady Elizabeth Hastings, of Ledstone, 
 well-known in Yorkshire as a most generous patron 
 in the cause of religion and education. She was 
 the virtual foundress of Holy Trinity in lyeeds, and 
 she endowed the Hastings Exhibition at Queen's 
 College, Oxford, for the benefit of Yorkshire boys : 
 we may conclude, as she gave such a handsome 
 
 F
 
 82 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 subscription towards a church at Harrogate, that 
 she was a frequenter of its wells. Other of the 
 visitors also subscribed ; the neighbouring gentry 
 subscribed ; the inhabitants subscribed. Neverthe- 
 less, six years elapsed before a sufficient sum was 
 raised to warrant the building of the church of 
 St. John, which was consecrated in 1749, the 
 patronage being vested in the Vicar of Knares- 
 borough. By general agreement of the inhabitants 
 a certain quantity of land was enclosed within the 
 Forest of Knaresborough, and the rents resulting 
 from it applied to the maintenance of the clergyman 
 in charge ; when this enclosure was resumed by the 
 Crown in 1770 special provision was made in lieu 
 of it ; special protection was made at the same 
 time for the wells, around which two hundred acres 
 of free ground were left. Slack as the eighteenth 
 century is said to have been in most matters of 
 religious observance, the new church at Harrogate 
 appears to have not lacked for services " at this 
 chapel," says an old guide-book, " are prayers, every 
 Wednesday and Friday, and a sermon every Sunday, 
 throughout the year." 
 
 When the Young Pretender threatened an in- 
 vasion of England in 1745 the folk of Harrogate and 
 Knaresborough were treated to certain diversions 
 of a military nature. It was greatly feared in 
 Yorkshire that the last hope of the Stuarts would 
 march on London by the eastern route, and that the 
 county would once again suffer the horrors of war- 
 fare. At that time Dr. Thomas Herring was Arch- 
 bishop of York, and he, being a zealous and convinced
 
 HARROGATE IN 1750 83 
 
 Hanoverian, set himself to work to raise men and 
 money in defence of George II. Money came in in 
 quantity : so did men. 31,000 was subscribed at 
 a meeting of nobility, clergy, and gentry in York : 
 York itself enrolled four companies of volunteers. 
 There was then living near Harrogate and Knares- 
 borough a patriotic gentleman named William 
 Thornton, of Thornville, who, minded to take a 
 prominent part in the affairs which seemed likely to 
 ensue, emulated the Archbishop's example in raising 
 men, and exceeded it by promising to pay all the 
 expenses out of his own pocket. He was very busy 
 in the old town and the new watering-place, and in 
 all the villages round about, during that autumn of 
 1745, in getting recruits ; eventually he raised a 
 whole company (one member of which was the 
 famous Blind Jack of Knaresborough, who went 
 a-fighting, blind though he was) and led them to 
 Scotland, where these men of Nidderdale and the 
 Forest took active parts in the battles of Falkirk 
 and Culloden. When Thornton returned from this 
 gay adventure, the inhabitants of Knaresborough 
 presented him with " a table of silver," suitably 
 engraved with two high-flown I,atin inscriptions. 
 But he was destined to receive an even greater 
 compliment. Being shortly afterwards at Court in 
 Ivondon, in company with his wife, he was accosted 
 by his sovereign. " Mr. Thornton," said the king, 
 " I have been told of the services you have rendered 
 to your country, and of your attachment to me and 
 my family, and I have held myself obliged to^you 
 for both, but I was never able to estimate the degree
 
 84 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 of the obligation until now, when I see the lady 
 whom you left behind you." 
 
 No better account of Harrogate as it was, about 
 this time, can be found than is given by Tobias 
 Smollett in his best novel, " Humphrey Clinker." 
 It was written from first-hand knowledge, for the 
 travels of Humphrey with the Melford family were 
 the actual travels of Smollett himself. After 
 remarking upon the peculiar badness and roughness 
 of the roads, and observing that Harrogate lies 
 eight miles from the post-road, between Wetherby 
 and Boroughbridge, and stating that the famous 
 water is supplied from a copious spring in the hollow 
 of a wild common, round which houses have been 
 built for the accommodation of the drinkers, he 
 proceeds to tell what sort of folk he found there : 
 " Most of the company lodge at some distance, in 
 five separate inns, situated in different parts of the 
 common, from whence they go every morning to 
 the well in their own carriages. The lodgers of each 
 inn form a distinct society, that eat together ; and 
 there is a commodious public room, where they 
 breakfast in deshabille, at separate tables, from 
 eight o'clock till eleven, as they chance or choose 
 to come in. Here also they drink tea in the after- 
 noon, and play at cards or dance in the evening. 
 One custom, however, prevails, which I look upon 
 as a solecism in politeness. The ladies treat with 
 tea in their turns ; and even girls of sixteen are not 
 exempted from this shameful imposition. There is 
 a public ball by subscription every night at one of 
 the houses, to which all the company from the others
 
 HARROGATE IN 1750 85 
 
 are admitted by tickets ; and, indeed, Harrogate 
 treads upon the heels of Bath in the articles of gaiety 
 and dissipation ; with this difference, however, that 
 here we are more sociable and familiar. One of the 
 inns is already full up to the very garrets, having 
 no less than fifty lodgers, and as many servants. 
 Our family does not exceed thirty-six ; and I should 
 be sorry to see the number augmented, as our 
 accommodations won't admit of much increase. At 
 present the company is more agreeable than one 
 could expect from an accidental assemblage, . . . 
 there seems to be a general disposition among us 
 to maintain good fellowship and promote the pur- 
 poses of humanity in favour of those who come 
 hither on the score of health. I see several faces 
 which we left at Bath, although the majority are of 
 the Northern counties, and many come from Scot- 
 land." Smollett particularises as to none of the 
 faces he saw at Harrogate, but about this time he 
 might have seen there, at the " Marquis of Granby," 
 the great Clive, and an equally famous American 
 General, Charles Lee, and the eccentric John Hall 
 Stevenson, and his friend Laurence Sterne " the 
 first people in the land were here," says one of 
 Sterne's biographers, " and at one table alone the 
 united rental of the guests reached to 60,000."
 
 IX. EUGENE ARAM 
 
 /^ONSIDERABIyE as is the literature which has 
 V-> grown up around Mother Shipton since 
 lyownds published his four-page tract in 1641, it 
 fades into insignificance when compared with the 
 body of printed matter which during the last hundred 
 and fifty years has gathered around Eugene Aram, 
 the Knaresborough schoolmaster who figured in 
 one of the most- talked of murders of modern times. 
 Mr. E. R. Watson, in his book on Aram's life and 
 trial, in which he sums up the evidence from a purely 
 legal standpoint, gives a bibliography of the subject, 
 which proves that Aram has surely been more 
 written about than any other famous English 
 criminal. He enumerates 14 legal records ; 9 
 accounts in the I/ondon and 6 in the provincial 
 press ; 9 articles in the magazines of 1759 ; 27 
 reports of the trial at York ; 3 " Araminia " (the 
 pamphlets of Norrison Scatcherd, who endeavoured 
 to whitewash Aram) ; 5 extracts from leading 
 biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias ; 18 
 accounts in criminal calendars and collected trials ; 
 20 articles or references in Yorkshire books ; 18 
 accounts in miscellaneous works ; 9 references in 
 legal and medical books ; 20 press articles since 
 
 86
 
 EUGENE ARAM 87 
 
 J 759 3 papers in phrenological works ; 5 references 
 in books about King's Lynn ; 7 novels or plays ; 
 14 particulars of portraits ; and innumerable ques- 
 tions and answers in Notes and Queries. This 
 list, amazingty full as it is, is by no means exhaustive. 
 Not a year one might almost say, not a month 
 passes without something being written about 
 Eugene Aram in the Yorkshire journals, and, in spite 
 of Mr. Watson's exhaustive treatment of the Clark 
 murder, and his emphatic assertion of Aram's guilt, 
 there has since the publication of his book a few 
 years ago, been more than one attempt in local 
 journals to reassert Aram's innocence, and to re- 
 present him as a deeply wronged man. 
 
 It has usually been held that Eugene Aram would 
 never have been much heard of if it had not been for 
 Lord Lytton's novel, and for Tom Hood's poem. But 
 the fact is that from the very first Aram was a much 
 discussed person, and that an unusual amount of 
 interest was taken in his trial and fate, not only in 
 the neighbourhood of Knaresborough, but in places 
 far off. In August and September, 1759, the London 
 journals were full of him ; at the same time he was 
 being written about in several of the big provincial 
 towns, and in Scotland and in Ireland ; a curious 
 publication called the Magazine of Magazines, 
 printed at Limerick, devoted five pages to him in 
 its August issue of the year just mentioned. The 
 accounts of his trial, in book or pamphlet form, 
 were numerous : within thirty years of his death 
 some of them had reached ten and eleven editions, 
 and one at least had been reprinted in the United
 
 88 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 States. All this, of course, was long before Lytton 
 evoked the sighs of schoolgirls over his sentimental 
 hero, and before Tom Hood provided actors with 
 a fine poem for recitation. Around Aram, and 
 around the circumstances of Daniel Clark's murder, 
 and around Richard Houseman, indeed, around all 
 the doings at Knaresborough in 1745, there was 
 mystery and romance, and the interest was con- 
 siderably added to by Aram's speech from the dock. 
 It was a new thing that a murderer should prove 
 himself a man of learning, even of genius, and until 
 that day probably no judge had ever heard so much 
 erudition from the lips of a prisoner at the bar. 
 Aram, from the moment of his condemnation 
 became a figure of note, and as is usually the case 
 in such circumstances people took a mighty concern 
 in him who were not particularly affected by his 
 innocence or his guilt ; what did interest them was 
 his undoubtedly strange personality. To this day, 
 most folk who visit Knaresborough have the 
 romantic figure of the Nidderdale scholar in their 
 minds' eyes. 
 
 Aram was born at Ramsgill, in Nidderdale, in 
 1704, the son of one Peter Aram, a Nottinghamshire 
 man who had settled near Knaresborough as a 
 gardener, and, in addition to more than ordinary 
 ability in that calling, had some literary gifts, and 
 wrote a poem on the natural beauties of Studley. 
 He was in the employ of the Blackett family at 
 Newby ; at Ripon, near by, Eugene was sent to 
 school at a very early age. Between his thirteenth 
 and sixteenth years he appears to have been
 
 was bung in Chains pur- 
 orefi.He 
 
 was Executed fourteen Tears atfzr tbeMiirder.His 
 s very artful and w0 r enwus. but 
 yet before be fufferti be cofife/stf- rbc fact . 
 
 p. 88
 
 EUGENE ARAM 89 
 
 employed under his father, in the Newby gardens ; 
 his sixteenth and seventeenth years he seems to 
 have spent chiefly in London, as a clerk in the 
 counting-house of one of the Blacketts, who was 
 engaged in mercantile pursuits. An attack of small- 
 pox cut short his London experiences, and he 
 returned to Nidderdale, where for some time he kept 
 a small school in a room at Gowthwaite Hall, near 
 his own birthplace. Some of his pupils subsequently 
 achieved distinction, and one of them speaks of him 
 as having been, even at that early age, " a rigid 
 disciplinarian " and " a famous scholar." Apart, 
 however, from his Ripon schooldays, and a month 
 which he once spent with Adcock, the eccentric 
 vicar of Burnsall, in Wharfedale, Aram was self- 
 taught, and it was during his residence at Gow- 
 thwaite, while teaching others, that he acquired 
 his very respectable knowledge of Latin and 
 Greek. 
 
 In 1731 Aram, described in the register as 
 " Ujenius," was married at Lofthouse, near Middles- 
 moor, high up in Nidderdale, to Anna Spence, and 
 a few years later he settled with his wife and one or 
 two young children at Knaresborough, where, in 
 White Horse Yard, he opened a school ; a mean 
 establishment of " two thatched rooms with no 
 fireplace," his dwelling-house, a cottage in Church 
 Lane, was little more pretentious. He began to learn 
 Hebrew at this time, and according to one of the 
 pamphlets published at York after his trial, the 
 general trend of which is by no means in his favour, 
 he was then regarded in Knaresborough with a good
 
 90 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 deal of respect. " His way of living and outward 
 deportment," says the author, " were most remark- 
 ably unblameable for many years. He was most 
 upright and fair in all dealings and transactions he 
 had with other people, of great outward tenderness 
 and humanity." However, he eventually formed 
 friendships with two men of low position, one Daniel 
 Clark, a shoemaker ; the other, Richard Houseman, 
 a flax-dresser, and through them, or because of them, 
 he certainly came to his downfall and ruin. One 
 can do no more here than glance at the chronological 
 events. On the 7th February, 1745, Aram, who 
 was known to be in desperate need of money, left 
 his house in the company of Clark, Houseman, and 
 a third man at u o'clock at night : later that night 
 they were seen in the neighbourhood of St. Robert's 
 cave. Clark was never seen again in the town, and 
 plausible explanations were offered in respect to his 
 disappearance. About three months after this, 
 Aram left Knaresborough for L,ondon, but his exact 
 whereabouts during the next few years is uncertain. 
 In 1757 he was at King's I/ynn, and in 1758 was 
 formally appointed to a mastership at the Grammar 
 School there. In August, 1758, the skeleton of a 
 man was found at Thistle Hill, Knaresborough, and 
 as the result of two inquests and of a chance remark 
 by Houseman, which led to his examination and 
 arrest, the body of Daniel Clark was unearthed in 
 St. Robert's Cave, and Aram and Houseman pro- 
 nounced guilty of his murder at a further inquest 
 held on August i8th. Next day Aram was arrested 
 at King's Lynn, and two days later he was brought
 
 EUGENE ARAM 91 
 
 to York Castle. In the following June 1759 
 Houseman turned King's Evidence, and it was 
 chiefly due to him that Aram, on being brought up 
 before Mr. Justice Noel, on August 3rd, was found 
 guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged at 
 York on the 6th, and his body was gibbeted at 
 Knaresborough on the 7th, on the right-hand side of 
 the road leading to Plumpton, near the Low Bridge. 
 The beam from which it hung in chains was after- 
 wards built into a room at the Brewers' Arms Inn, 
 where, until quite recent times, it was an object of 
 great interest to visitors to Harrogate and Knares- 
 borough. 
 
 Aram was doubtless found guilty on Houseman's 
 evidence, supported by some very damning facts. 
 As to Houseman's account of the affair, given in 
 the witness-box, it is thus epitomised by Mr. 
 Watson : 
 
 " Houseman . . . deposed . . . that he went 
 one night, about Candlemass, 1744 [5] to Aram's 
 house . . . that between two and three in the 
 morning Aram and Clark went out of the house, 
 asking him to take a walk with them, which he 
 complied with ; that they walked up the street 
 together ; that there was another man, unknown to 
 him, on the other side of the way ; that they pro- 
 ceeded to a close, where St. Robert's Cave is ; that 
 Aram and Clark went into it over the hedge ; that 
 he saw them quarrelling, and saw Aram strike Clark, 
 but he could not see if Aram had any weapon . . . 
 that, on seeing Clark fall, he made the best of his 
 way home ; that he knew not what Aram did
 
 92 HARROGATK AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 the body till next morning, when Aram called on 
 him, and told him he had left it in the cave, but 
 threatened vengeance on him if he ever disclosed 
 what had passed the preceding night." In a foot- 
 note, Mr. Watson observes, " the whole was palpably 
 untrue," but he gives it as his opinion, in concluding 
 his book that " everything in Aram's conduct points 
 to his guilt of deliberate murder without a shadow 
 of excuse," and that " this was exactly how his 
 crime appeared to contemporaries : " he also affirms 
 that had Aram been tried in our own times " he 
 would have had no chance at all." 
 
 What had Aram himself to say as to the circum- 
 stances of Clark's death, or disappearance ? Before 
 Mr. Thornton, the magistrate, at Thornville, to 
 whom he was carried on his arrival from King's 
 L,ynn, he said that Daniel Clark, in February, 1744-5, 
 was endeavouring to defeat his creditors, and meant 
 to run away with what property he possessed ; that 
 on the night of February 7th Clark and Houseman 
 came to his, Aram's, cottage with a quantity of 
 plate, which belonged to Clark : another man, 
 Perry, an inn-keeper, brought more, also belonging 
 to Clark ; that all four men went down to vSt. 
 Robert's Cave, and there beat the plate flat so that 
 Clark could the more conveniently carry it away ; 
 that by the time they had finished this task it was 
 full morning, and too late for Clark to go ; that 
 Clark accordingly remained hidden in the Cave, to 
 which Terry brought him victuals during the day ; 
 that next night he, Aram, went with Terry and 
 Houseman to the cave again, but on this occasion
 
 EUGENE ARAM 93 
 
 he himself did not enter it, he staying to keep watch 
 while the others went hi ; that he heard noises there 
 until they came out ; that they then told him Clark 
 had gone, and that they had bought from him the 
 plate, watches, and rings, which they then had with 
 them in a bag. He further deposed that Terry 
 afterwards told him that after first burying the plate 
 on Howe Hill, he carried it away to Scotland, and 
 there sold it. Of Clark's actual fate, he professed 
 utter ignorance. 
 
 At his trial before Mr. Justice Noel, Aram 
 delivered a speech which has been much discussed 
 ever since. Mr. Watson, who gives Bristow's version 
 of it, devotes a chapter to the question of its real 
 authorship. It was very largely devoted to dis- 
 puting the authenticity of the remains which the 
 prosecutor alleged to be those of Daniel Clark, and 
 there was a great deal of learned talk about the 
 bones, skeletons, and so on which have been turned 
 up in different places at different periods. He 
 pointed out that at Knaresborough, where much 
 fighting had taken place in the course of history, 
 human remains were in plenty, and suggested that 
 there was nothing to prove that those found in this 
 particular case were really those of Clark. Alto- 
 gether, there was a great deal of ingenuity, skill, and 
 scientific knowledge displayed in the speech, and it 
 is, perhaps, not to be wondered at that certain folk 
 disputed Aram's ability to compose it he, actually, 
 read it in court from a manuscript. One such 
 suggestion is notable. In 1863, Mr. Hopkinson, a 
 Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, at a meeting
 
 94 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 of the Bath Literary and Philosophical Associa- 
 tion, boldly stated that " the defence was written 
 by Mr. Mauleverer," a barrister of the Northern 
 Circuit, and that he said this on the best authority. 
 But Mr. Watson dismisses this with emphasis. 
 "Nothing," he says, "in the matter or manner of 
 the address is inconsistent with the view that Aram 
 composed it. It is the effort of a scholar remote, 
 indeed, from his books not of a barrister." 
 
 Popular opinion in Knaresborough, at the time 
 of the trial, was highly unfavourable to Houseman 
 not merely because he turned King's Evidence, but 
 from a genuine belief in his guilt. After Aram's 
 execution, and while his body was still hanging in 
 chains near I^ow Bridge, Houseman returned to the 
 town. On his appearing in public, according to a 
 contemporary newspaper account, " a cry, almost 
 universal, of ' Scape-Gallows ! ' arose, and so furious 
 did the multitude become, that although some one 
 opened him a house of refuge, his life was with 
 difficulty preserved." His effigy was carried about 
 the streets, and after being knocked on the head with 
 a pick-axe was hanged and burnt. I,ater, his house 
 was attacked and damaged by a mob, led, or 
 incited, by two Oxford undergraduates who had 
 at one time been Eugene Aram's pupils. Eventually 
 he retired to a neighbouring village, where he was 
 always an object of dislike and suspicion, and it is 
 said that when he died a good deal of Daniel Clark's 
 property was found to have been in his secret 
 possession. And while there is little doubt that 
 Aram was guilty of murder, whether as the actual
 
 EUGENE ARAM 95 
 
 murderer, or as an accessory, there seems just as 
 much certainty that Houseman and Terry were 
 equally guilty, and that the watches, rings, plate, 
 for which Clark was done to death that February 
 night, were shared amongst all four.
 
 X. BLIND JACK OF KNARES- 
 BOROUGH 
 
 OOMEWHERE about the year 1735 an assembly, 
 O or long, room was added to the Green Dragon 
 inn at Harrogate, and in it, of an evening, the guests 
 of the house assembled for dancing. There were 
 doubtless many notables to be seen in this humble 
 gathering-place in those days, for already the 
 aristocracy and gentry of the northern counties had 
 begun to frequent Harrogate in its season. There 
 may be records of their names and states in some 
 hidden documents ; letters, receipted bills, house- 
 books and the like ; otherwise their identity is lost 
 to us. But we may safely conceive that out of all 
 those gay throngs not one person was of such real 
 character and eminence as a certain blind man who, 
 at first alone, afterwards with one or two assistants, 
 made music on his fiddle for the visitors to dance to. 
 Nobody perhaps took any particular notice of him 
 blind fiddlers were by no means uncommon. If the 
 young men of fashion or the country squire's 
 daughter glanced at the fiddler at all, it was probably 
 because his physique was not one usually associated 
 with such a gentle art as that of music. A big, 
 finely built, six-foot man, evidently of herculean 
 
 96
 
 JOK^METCALF AGED 
 
 P. 96
 
 BUND JACK OF KNARESBOROUGH 97 
 
 strength, active, alert ; a man of a handsome, 
 mobile countenance, and so sprightly of movement 
 and expression that it often came as a shock and a 
 surprise to folk when they found out that his eyes 
 were sightless such was Blind Jack of Knares- 
 borough in the days when he riddled every evening 
 in the long room of the Green Dragon at Harrogate. 
 John Metcalf, one of the very greatest of all great 
 Yorkshiremen, a shining example of the way in 
 which man can rise superior to one of the heaviest of 
 human afflictions, was born at Knaresborough in 
 August, 1717, the son of poor working people who 
 put him to school when he was four years old and 
 kept him there until he was six, when he became 
 totally blind as the result of an attack of small-pox. 
 He was a highly intelligent, active child, and within 
 six months of his recovery from his illness had begun 
 to make his way unaided about the neighbourhood 
 of his father's cottage ; before he was ten he could 
 go anywhere in the town, and had achieved a reputa- 
 tion as a daring and skilful bird's-nester, who climbed 
 the highest trees and most difficult crags. By the 
 time he was thirteen he could ride a horse ; at 
 fourteen he was an expert swimmer and had saved 
 life in the River Nidd. By this time, too, he had 
 become a fairly expert performer on the violin, his 
 father having paid for a course of lessons for him, and 
 he began to play at the fortnightly assembly at 
 Knaresborough. But his inclinations were always 
 for outdoor life and sport, and in spite of his blind- 
 ness he went hunting, kept game-cocks, and generally 
 made light of his affliction. In 1732 he began to 
 
 G
 
 98 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 fiddle at the Harrogate assemblies, and he became 
 so popular with his patrons that he was lodged free 
 of charge at the Green Dragon, and stabling was 
 also found for his horse. Out of the season he was 
 much in request at the neighbouring country houses, 
 and he began to travel about the country a good 
 deal, going as far as Scarborough, and subsequently 
 to I/ondon, whence he made an excursion up the 
 Thames Valley. Eventually he ran away with 
 the handsomest young woman in Harrogate, on the 
 very eve of her marriage to another man, prompted 
 to this daring act by her sudden declaration that 
 she would rather starve with him than live in luxury 
 with any other. The marriage turned out a highly 
 successful one, and Metcalf built for himself and his 
 bride a house at Knaresborough, getting the stone 
 from the bed of the river, and doing the mason work 
 with his own hands. 
 
 Still continuing to play at the Harrogate 
 assemblies, and spending his spare time in his 
 sporting adventures, going a-hunting, playing bowls, 
 fighting his game-cocks, Metcalf at this period set 
 up the first public conveyances in the rising watering- 
 place ; a four-wheel chaise and a one-horse chair. 
 Even then he had not enough to do, so he began to 
 trade in fish. He bought horses, fetched the fish 
 himself from Scarborough and other coast towns, 
 and sold it in Leeds and Manchester. He was 
 engaged in this fashion until the events of the 1745 
 rebellion. Nothing would then suit him but to go 
 with Captain Thornton's company to the North, 
 and he went through the campaign under General
 
 BLIND JACK OF KNARESBOROUGH 99 
 
 Wade, and was present at a great deal of the righting 
 in Scotland ; he also fiddled at various entertain- 
 ments given by his officers in Edinburgh and else- 
 where. Returning home to find his wife and children 
 in good health and circumstances, he determined to 
 make use of his Scottish experiences by setting up as 
 a vendor of wares in cotton and worsted ; he also 
 began to trade in galloways and horses, and for some 
 time was constantly travelling between Scotland 
 and Knaresborough. Some idea of his extraordinary 
 quickness in getting about may be gained from the 
 fact that he once made the journey between Knares- 
 borough and Newcastle, seventy-four miles, between 
 three in the morning and six in the afternoon. As 
 if all this was not enough for his activities, he also 
 engaged in smuggling the profits of contraband 
 trade, he naively remarks in his reminiscences, were 
 at that period much more considerable than the 
 risks which smugglers ran. And in 1751 he set up 
 a stage-waggon, to ply between York and Knares- 
 borough, and conducted it himself ; it ran twice a 
 week in summer and once in winter, and as it was 
 the first conveyance of this sort in those parts, its 
 proprietor found its working very profitable. 
 
 But Metcalf's true work lay yet in front of him, 
 nor did he begin it until he was halfway through his 
 long and remarkable life. About 1764 an Act of 
 Parliament was obtained for the making of a road 
 between Harrogate and Boroughbridge, and through 
 the influence of Ostler, its surveyor, Metcalf was 
 entrusted with the construction of the three miles 
 between Minskip and Ferensby, How a blind
 
 ioo HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 man came to be selected for engineering work of so 
 important a nature is a mystery, but Metcalfe's 
 extraordinary capabilities were well known to many : 
 he was one of those men who can do anything. His 
 ability was at once manifested in this undertaking ; 
 as the gravel for the surface was to be taken from 
 one particular pit, he immediately fixed up quarters 
 for his men close by it, erected stables for his horses, 
 and made all arrangements for the provisioning of 
 horses and men ; while the work was in progress he 
 constantly walked out from Knaresborough, carrying 
 five stones of meat on his shoulder, and would be 
 with his gang by six o'clock in the morning. The 
 result was that his piece of highway was completed 
 to general satisfaction, well in advance of the 
 stipulated time. While it had been going on Metcalf 
 taught himself a great deal about road-construction 
 and measurement by ingenious methods of his own. 
 He soon afterwards secured a contract for building 
 a bridge at Boroughbridge, and when that was 
 successfully accomplished he undertook to make a 
 road between Knaresborough and Harrogate, over 
 the bog, which he covered with whin and ling a 
 method afterwards adopted by him in some of his 
 work on the Derbyshire borders. For this he 
 received four hundred pounds. 
 
 He was now fairly embarked on his road-making 
 adventures (for adventures they were, with no little 
 true romances attending them), and for the next 
 sixteen years he was busy in many districts : Metcalf, 
 more than any engineer of his time, can justly be 
 credited with having made the northern highways
 
 BUND JACK OF KNARESBOROUGH 101 
 
 what they are. Smiles, in his " Lives of the 
 Engineers," summarises what the blind man accom- 
 plished. " In Yorkshire he made the roads between 
 Harrogate and Harewood Bridge ; between Chapel- 
 town and Leeds ; between Broughton and Adding- 
 ham ; between Mill Bridge and Halifax ; between 
 Wakefield and Dewsbury ; between Wakefield and 
 Doncaster ; between Wakefield, Huddersfield, and 
 Saddleworth ; between Standish and Thurston 
 Clough ; between Huddersfield and High Moor ; 
 between Huddersfield and Halifax ; and between 
 Knaresborough and Wetherby." Metcalf also made 
 the roads connecting Yorkshire and Lancashire, and 
 many in Lancashire itself those between Ashton 
 and Stockport, Bury and Blackburn, Skipton and 
 Burnley, and Stockport and Mottram are his work. 
 In Cheshire and Derbyshire he made the highways 
 which connect Macclesfield and Chapel-en-le-Frith ; 
 Whaley and Buxton, and Wilmslow and Congleton. 
 And he not only made the roads, but furnished them 
 with culverts, retaining-walls, and bridges, and it 
 was his boast in after years that none of his bridges 
 ever fell, however they might be tested by traffic or 
 flood. In all, he received sixty-five thousand pounds 
 in payment for his labours. 
 
 How came a blind man totally blind, be it 
 remembered, from very early childhood to be able 
 to undertake work which required so much know- 
 ledge, so much personal supervision ? Metcalf must 
 surely have been possessed of some extra sense. 
 One who knew him at the time of his road-making 
 undertakings has left a remarkable picture of him :
 
 102 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 " With the assistance only of a long staff, I have 
 several times met this man traversing the roads, 
 ascending steep and rugged heights, exploring 
 valleys and investigating their several extents, 
 forms, and situations, so as to answer his designs in 
 the best manner. The plans which he makes, and 
 the estimates he prepares, are done in a method 
 peculiar to himself, and of which he cannot well 
 convey the meaning to others. His abilities in this 
 respect are, nevertheless, so great that he finds 
 constant employment. ... I have met this blind 
 projector while engaged in making his survey. He 
 was alone, as usual, and amongst other conversa- 
 tion, I made some inquiries respecting this new 
 road. It was really astonishing to hear with what 
 accuracy he described its course and the nature of 
 the different soils through which it was conducted. 
 Having mentioned to him a boggy piece of ground 
 it passed through, he observed that ' that was the 
 only place he had doubts concerning, and that he 
 was apprehensive they had, contrary to his direc- 
 tions, been too sparing of their materials.' ' 
 
 An example of Metcalf's ingenuity is seen in 
 his treatment of a piece of marshy ground on the 
 high-road between Huddersfield and Manchester. 
 The surveyor who had laid out the line to be followed 
 had in one place carried it over a veritable bog, 
 which Metcalf found himself expected to dig out 
 until he came to a solid bottom. Instead of doing 
 this he set several hundreds of men to work on a 
 plan of his own a plan afterwards adopted by 
 George Stephenson when confronted by a similar
 
 BLIND JACK OF KNARESBOROUGH 103 
 
 difficulty in carrying his railway over Chat Moor, 
 between Manchester and Liverpool. " His plan," 
 says Smiles, " was this. He ordered heather and 
 ling to be pulled from the adjacent ground, and 
 after binding it together in little round bundles, 
 which could be grasped with the hand, these bundles 
 were placed close together in rows in the direction of 
 the line of road, after which other similar bundles 
 were placed transversely over them ; and when all 
 had been pressed well down, stone and gravel were 
 led on in broad-wheeled wagons, and spread over 
 the bundles, so as to make a fish and level way. 
 When the first load was brought and laid on, and the 
 horses reached the firm ground again in safety, loud 
 cheers were set up by the persons who had assembled 
 in the expectation of seeing both horses and wagons 
 disappear in the bog. The whole length was finished 
 in like manner, and it proved one of the best, and 
 even the direst, parts of the road, standing in very 
 little need of repair for nearly twelve years after 
 its construction." 
 
 The blind man's curious passion for engaging in 
 all sorts of trades and ventures lasted to the end of 
 his life. One of his daughters married a Stockport 
 cotton-spinner, and Metcalf, finding that trade was 
 very brisk there, determined to try his fortune in 
 it, though he was at that time fully engaged in road- 
 making. He set up spinning- jennies, a carding 
 engine, and looms for manufacturing calicoes, jeans, 
 and velveteens. But he was not satisfied with 
 results, and eventually made over his business to his 
 son-in-law and went on with his road-construction.
 
 104 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 The last road he made ran between Accrington 
 and Haslingden ; when this was finished he retired 
 to a small farm which he had at Spofforth, near 
 Wetherby, and there he combined farming with 
 buying and selling hay and wood. During the last 
 years of his life he remained remarkably active. 
 He made long journeys to country-houses, where he 
 was received with great affection and honour ; he 
 visited York, and recognised the alterations and 
 improvements which were being made in its streets ; 
 in mind and body he was alert and vigorous to the 
 last. He dictated his reminiscences to an 
 amanuensis, and had the satisfaction of knowing 
 that his book was highly popular. Finally, he died, 
 at the age of ninety-three, leaving behind him four 
 children, twenty grand-children, and ninety great- 
 grandchildren. He was buried in the churchyard of 
 Spofforth, and I/ord Dundas erected a stone there 
 in memory of him. But, so far, Yorkshiremen have 
 not raised a monument to John Metcalf, who, of 
 all worthies of the county, merits perpetual fame 
 as an example of courage, perseverance, and cheerful 
 acceptance of calamity.
 
 XI. HARROGATE IN 1830 
 
 WHEN the nineteenth century began Harro- 
 gate was already well established in public 
 favour. It was not only famous as a health resort, 
 but as a place whereat fashionable folk could amuse 
 themselves in consonance with the spirit of the 
 blessed word "Genteel." In those days it was well- 
 nigh impossible for such a resort to become vul- 
 garised. There were as yet no railways, and it was 
 not so much by stage-coach as by private convey- 
 ance or post-chaise that folk came to the wells. 
 Consequently it was only the well-to-do who came. 
 Moreover it was by no means an inexpensive business 
 to visit Harrogate. There were by that time several 
 hotels, and the modern lodging-and-boarding house 
 was beginning to show itself, but the accommoda- 
 tion was still limited, and visitors had to pay high 
 prices. Altogether, whoever visited Harrogate in 
 the days when George the Third was still king, and 
 indeed up to the time of Queen Victoria's accession, 
 might count on finding himself amongst very select 
 society. Popularism if one may coin a word 
 had not yet set in, and week-end visits and day 
 excursions were not even dreamed of. 
 
 About 1812 Hargrove of Knaresborough, a 
 105
 
 106 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 bookseller, who was also a good deal of an antiquary 
 and a writer, and who, on the testimony of its editor 
 sometimes " enriched " the Gentleman's Magazine 
 of those days, published for its anonymous author 
 a curious rhymed account of " A Week at Harro- 
 gate," written in a " series of letters addressed from 
 Benjamin Blunderhead, Esq., to his friend Simon." 
 A second edition appeared in 1813, the first having 
 been " in very great demand." In this there are 
 " three neat plates." The first is a view of the 
 Chalybeate Well, at High Harrogate, an octagon 
 building with a country mansion set amidst trees 
 on one side, and a wind-mill, also embowered, on the 
 other. The second is a picture of the Sulphur Well 
 at lyow Harrogate, a domed erection supported by 
 pilasters : it, too, is surrounded by trees, and gives 
 one the impression of rural solitude, though there 
 figures in one corner of it a sort of walled-in prome- 
 nade, wherein fashionable folk are walking, or 
 sitting on benches. The third is a highly fanciful 
 view of St. Robert's Chapel, with an elaborate, 
 apparently painted-glass window, and a figure of 
 St. Robert himself in something closely resembling 
 the habit of a Cistercian monk. There are also in 
 the book some of the quaint head-and-tail pieces 
 with which Hargrove decorated most of his pro- 
 ductions some of them, there is reason for sup- 
 posing, came from Bewick's hand. 
 
 In this rhymed chronicle Blunderhead tells 
 what he did with himself during a week's stay at 
 " this celebrated watering-place." Tired of Bath, 
 he sets out for its northern rival. He reaches York
 
 HARROGATE IN 1830 107 
 
 and looks round the city, which, he thinks, resembles 
 old Rome ; thence, he proceeds by way of Marston 
 Moor and Knaresborough to Harrogate. He drives 
 in turn to the Crown, the Crescent, and the White 
 Hart all are full, or say they are ; they will not, at 
 any rate, take him in ; the real reason of this, he 
 finds out later, is because he has no servant man 
 attending him. So he seeks lodgings : 
 
 " I inquir'd of a woman who stood at the door 
 If they'd room and she answer'd with Oh ! to be sure ! 
 Though a deal o' fine folks du to this house repair, 
 I think we, at prissant, have yan room to spare / ' " 
 
 Settled down, he proceeds to look around him. 
 He finds there are two villages, " not very small " ; 
 one is High, the other Low Harrogate. There are 
 several inns, a library, and numerous shops " all 
 arranged, in a row, on the side of the green " and 
 before he retires on his first night he learns that 
 Harrogate is now visited every year by thousands 
 " from town and from country, from city and court." 
 Next morning he begins his week by consulting the 
 physicians, whom he describes. That day he spends 
 in walking about High Harrogate and calling at 
 Hargrove's Library a fashionable resort. On 
 Tuesday he attends at the Sulphur Well, meets the 
 company, experiences the salubrious effects of the 
 water, and makes an excursion to Plumpton. On 
 Wednesday he drinks the waters at both wells, 
 hangs round the library again, and visits some of 
 the principal inns. On Thursday he repairs to the 
 ruins of Fountains Abbey, goes thence to Studley 
 Royal, and takes a glance at Ripon and Hackfall :
 
 io8 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 the round, now so familiar, was even then, one sees, 
 in fashion. On Friday, after inspecting " the warm 
 bath," he pays a visit to Brimham Rocks, and to 
 Aldborough, and to Newby, and on his return 
 inspects the shops at High Harrogate. On Saturday 
 he visits Knaresborough " there a whole day most 
 agreeably spent " and sees the Dropping Well and 
 the other lions of the town ; he is so impressed by 
 what he hears of Eugene Aram that on his return 
 to Harrogate he must needs call in at Hargrove's 
 shop and buy the tenth edition of " The Trial " 
 he finds Aram's defence " so ingenious, so learned, 
 and clear, That its equal, I'm certain, did never 
 appear." That evening he spends at the theatre, 
 which, he says, is " very neat " : next morning he 
 goes, like a decorous Englishman, to the Chapel-of- 
 Ease, another " neat little building, on the midst of 
 the moor." With his account of the service there 
 he brings his narrative to an end. 
 
 The anonymous author of this rhyme throws a 
 good many sidelights on the condition of Harrogate 
 at the time of his visit, which we may set down as 
 having been paid about 1810-12. He tells of the 
 fine views obtainable from High Harrogate ; of a 
 race-ground there, and of a theatre ; he mentions 
 " three excellent inns on the side of the green " ; 
 the Queen, the Granby and the Dragon ; he also 
 speaks of numerous good shops. There is half a 
 mile distance, he tells us, between the High and the 
 I,ow Town ; at the I^ow, in addition to the house 
 kept " by the famed Mrs. Binns," there are five 
 inns, the Crown, the Bell, the Crescent, the Swan and
 
 HARROGATE IN 1830 109 
 
 the White Hart. He specifies the doctors of the 
 day ; the " renowned Dr. Jaques " ; the " fam'd 
 Dr. Murray " ; Dr. Cay ley ; and Dr. Campbell. 
 " a man of great merit." He gives us a picture of 
 Hargrove's Library, evidently a place of fashion : 
 
 " So many young ladies, gay sparks, and new books, 
 I wish you had seen how exalted my looks ! " 
 
 He gives particulars of the tradesmen of the time 
 there was Gledhill, who sold cloaks and beautiful 
 bonnets ; and Robey, who had " bright jewels, gold 
 watches, neat seals " ; and Gilbertson, who " could 
 make in ten minutes a new suit of clothes " ; and 
 Smith, the milliner, from New Bond Street ; and 
 Batchelor, who was a rival of Robey ; he tells also 
 of two dentists, both first-rate hands at their work, 
 and of a surgeon, whose labours he distinguishes 
 from those of the consulting doctors. Altogether, he 
 gives one the impression that although Harrogate 
 was still well outside the world, the folk who made 
 their way to it a hundred years ago found there 
 almost everything that fashionable and moneyed 
 people could desire. As to the character of his 
 fellow visitors he now and then gives us a few graphic 
 vignettes : 
 
 Playfair was there, and the Countess of Care, 
 Both lately arrived from the banks of the Air ; 
 With Madam Plotine, and old Counsellor Trounce, 
 Tom Quill, and the pompous Sir Hildebrand Bounce, 
 Whose flight, with Miss Ready, the fates had decreed 
 Should be stopped by her guardian on this side the 
 Tweed.
 
 no HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Lord Booby, a man whom his country reveres. 
 Who does so much honour to England's new peers, 
 With General Sulphur, whose worth and good name 
 Resound through the world, from the trumpet of fame ! 
 And a rich Indian Nabob, o'erburdened with wealth, 
 Who has come from the East, to recover his health." 
 
 Hargrove, so often mentioned by the author of 
 Blunderhead's adventures, was a prominent person 
 in his day, at both Harrogate and Knaresborough, 
 as writer, printer, publisher, and proprietor of a 
 library, which, as we have seen, was a fashionable 
 resort. His " History of Knaresborough " went 
 through many editions ; in the seventh, published 
 in 1832, he gives a very good account of Harrogate 
 as it was at the end of the reign of George the Fourth. 
 Naturally, he first gives his attention to the far- 
 famed waters. More discoveries had been made 
 since the century began. In 1819 two new springs 
 had come to light in the garden of Mr. John Wood ; 
 one resembled the waters of Cheltenham ; the other 
 was a chalybeate spring. Mr. Wood provides a 
 woman to attend to them ; each person drinking 
 the water pays half a crown a week for the privilege, 
 and is expected to give the woman something ; as 
 a sort of bonus, subscribers have the pleasure of 
 walking in Mr. Wood's tasteful garden. In 1822, 
 Mr. Thackwray, of the Crown Hotel, makes a similar 
 discovery in his grounds, and over his spring erects 
 a neat building in the manner of a Chinese Temple ; 
 he, too, provides " a female " to attend to the water- 
 drinkers. At first Mr. Thackwray intended his 
 spring to be reserved for his own guests ; now, 
 however, he has very generously thrown it open to
 
 HARROGATE IN 1830 in 
 
 the public. So now there are quite a number of 
 springs, and various sorts of water at Harrogate ; 
 in 1830 Dr. Hunter, of Leeds, publishes a minute 
 and accurate analysis of their properties, and Har- 
 grove gives equally minute instructions to visitors 
 as to the use of these aids to health, telling them how 
 many half-pints to drink per diem, and when, and 
 where : the doses at a time vary from half a pint to 
 two pints. He also gives some instructions and 
 warnings about bathing in the Harrogate waters, and 
 adds, quaintly enough, the information that " Baths 
 are to be met with in almost every house." 
 
 By this time, however, the original Hargrove 
 Ely Hargrove has disappeared ; no doubt he 
 is dead : his name only survives on title-pages. 
 Where he flourished there is now Langdale's 
 Library, which Ely had in his time conducted for 
 fifty years ; it contains " a valuable and numerous 
 collection of books," and annexed to it is a spacious 
 reading-room, provided with the newspapers and 
 the magazines, which is, as of yore, the resort of 
 fashion. There are other amusements. The Race- 
 Ground, laid out under the supervision of Colonel 
 Wolseley in 1793, has recently been much im- 
 proved. There are three public dress balls a 
 week ; on Mondays at the Dragon, on Wednesday 
 at the Crown ; on Friday at the Granby ; dancing 
 begins at nine o'clock, and each person present 
 pays three shillings. The usual excursions are still 
 in favour, and those who care for it may indulge 
 in the genteel sport of archery. When the weather 
 is unfavourable for outdoor pursuits, there is the
 
 H2 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 Promenade Room to turn to : its erection was 
 suggested by Dr. Cayley in 1805 and it is seventy- 
 five feet in length and thirty in breadth ; its doors 
 are open from seven o'clock in the morning until 
 sunset, from May to November. But since Benj amin 
 Blunderhead's visit, twenty years ago, the theatre, 
 for some unstated reason, has ceased to exist, and 
 has been converted into dwelling-houses. 
 
 At this time Harrogate is showing the first 
 signs of modern progress. The old chapel-of-ease, 
 built in 1749, has been pulled down, and a new 
 church erected in its place. Just sixty years after 
 the opening of the chapel, Colonel Marshall (of 
 the Honourable East India Company's service) is 
 moved to begin collecting subscriptions for a church, 
 and he does so well that in 1830, Mr. Gates, architect, 
 of Huddersfield, begins building operations ; he 
 gets his task completed by the October of the 
 following year, when the new fabric is solemnly 
 consecrated by the Rt. Rev. J. B. Sumner, Lord 
 Bishop of Chester, in whose diocese Harrogate is 
 situated. It holds 1250 people ; 800 of the sittings 
 are declared free and unappropriated for ever ; 
 the total cost, " including the catacombs," is not 
 far short of 4500 : the parish which it is to serve 
 has been detached from that of Knaresborough. 
 So there are now, in 1832, two churches at Harro- 
 gate, for Low Harrogate got one, St. Mary's, in 
 1824 ; it, too, was built by subscription. And 
 there are two chapels ; the Methodists have one, 
 " on a foot-path between High and Low Harrogate," 
 and the Independents another, near Prospect
 
 HARROGATE IN 1830 113 
 
 Place. Also there are schools the National School 
 at High Harrogate accommodates one hundred 
 children ; two hundred children attend the Sunday 
 School. And near Grove House, on the road 
 leading to Bilton, is a curious establishment called 
 the Bachelors' Garden School, founded and endowed 
 by two single gentlemen, Francis and Richard 
 Taylor, in 1793, who left sixteen acres of land, a 
 house and garden, for the purpose of educating an 
 unlimited number of boys and girls in reading, 
 writing, arithmetic, and the principles of the 
 Established Church. Moreover, there is a clothing 
 society, and a visiting society, " on the plan recom- 
 mended by the Bishop of Chester," and altogether 
 Harrogate, when William the Fourth came to the 
 throne, seems to have been flourishing and pros- 
 perous. But it was still a simple, rural, and un- 
 pretentious place, and that it did not appeal to 
 everybody we may gather from the fact that 
 Sydney Smith, visiting it at about this time, had 
 the bad manners to describe it as the most Heaven- 
 forsaken place under the sun.
 
 XII. NEW TOWN AND OLD BOROUGH 
 
 FOUR years after the accession of Queen Victoria 
 Harrogate came under the care of a govern- 
 ing body styled the Improvement Commissioners, 
 which remained in power from 1841 to 1884, and 
 during its forty-three years of rule worked vast 
 changes in the town. Its first care was to improve 
 the wells which had become Harrogate's greatest 
 asset. Over the old sulphur well the spring dis- 
 covered in the very early days it built the Royal 
 Pump Room ; it covered in the original Tewit 
 Well, the chalybeate spring discovered by Dr. 
 Stanhope in 1631 ; and the magnesia wells ; it 
 founded the Victoria Baths ; erected a market hall ; 
 purchased and laid out irrigation farms ; and 
 instituted a complete system of drainage : alto- 
 gether, the work of these Improvement Commis- 
 sioners laid the foundation of the Harrogate of 
 to-day. Progress was continuous ; in 1846 a gas 
 company procured an Act of Parliament which 
 enabled it to light the growing town ; two years 
 later similar powers were obtained by another com- 
 pany in respect to a water supply. The water was 
 first got from the neighbourhood of Haverah Park, 
 and stored in reservoirs on the west of the town : 
 
 114
 
 NEW TOWN AND OU) BOROUGH 115 
 
 of recent years further supplies have been brought 
 from the moorland country near Kirkby Malzeard. 
 In 1884 the old body of Improvement Com- 
 missioners came to its end, having done many 
 great things, and Harrogate became a municipal 
 borough, with a Mayor and Corporation of its own. 
 Now the Corporation owns all the springs in the 
 town and has so managed matters that Harrogate 
 may justly claim to be the leading watering-place 
 in England, worthy to rank with the most famous 
 spas of the Continent. Few places, either in this 
 country or abroad, are so richly endowed with 
 mineral waters. The medical experts divide them 
 into classes. The strong sulphur water, only ob- 
 tainable at the old Royal Sulphur Well, is said to 
 be the strongest of its kind. There are seventeen 
 springs of mild sulphur water ; two of saline chaly- 
 beates, five of pure chalybeates, and one of magnesia ; 
 in the Bog Wells there are no fewer than thirty 
 springs of one sort or another, and according to 
 the advertisements put out by the authorities there 
 are now over eighty in the district. The waters 
 are drunk by vast numbers of people in the season : 
 there is an average attendance of from a thousand 
 to twelve hundred drinkers at the old well before 
 breakfast every morning. And for a long time 
 there has been no need for visitors to take their 
 baths in the lodging-houses, as was the custom hi 
 Benjamin Blunderhead's time. There are four 
 principal bathing establishments, three of which 
 belong to the Corporation. The Royal Baths, 
 opened in 1897 by the late Duke of Cambridge,
 
 replaced the old Montpellier Baths, and cost 100,000. 
 Opposite to these are the Victoria Baths, built in 
 1871 at a cost of 30,000. Heavy expenditure, it 
 will be seen, is a matter of little importance in 
 anything relating to Harrogate. There are other 
 bathing establishments at Starbeck and at Harlow 
 Car. Nor are the baths of Harrogate strictly 
 confined to the use of the rich folk who go there. 
 In 1824 a bathing establishment was founded for 
 the benefit of poor people, free of all charge ; sixty- 
 five years later it was rebuilt at a cost of 30,000. 
 There are numerous other hospitals, convalescent 
 homes, orphanages, and infirmaries in the town, 
 and no one need spend a penny in drinking the 
 Harrogate waters for his health's sake, for outside 
 the original sulphur well there is a free tap to 
 which any person may resort at his pleasure. 
 
 Harrogate, according to the latest returns, had 
 in 1911 a population of 33,706 and a rateable value 
 of 274,812 ; its birth-rate was 147 ; its death- 
 rate 1 2 '4. But its population during the season 
 is probably nearer 100,000 than 30,000, and the 
 authorities have to provide for its needs rather 
 than for those of the lesser one of the winter months. 
 During the last hundred years the place has been 
 changed out of all knowledge. There are in Harro- 
 gate over thirty miles of streets and roads ; oppor- 
 tunities for indoor and outdoor amusement and 
 recreation are profuse. There is a kursaal (why 
 furnished with a most unfitting name no one knows) 
 which has accommodation for sixteen hundred 
 visitors \ an opera house, and a theatre. Music
 
 NEW TOWN AND OUD BOROUGH 117 
 
 of the finest quality is to be heard every day in 
 the season. Mr. Carnegie some years ago pre- 
 sented the town with a handsome building under 
 his library-providing scheme. There is a School 
 of Art, and a Technical School, and the two schools 
 of a hundred years ago have increased in such 
 fashion that if the private establishments are taken 
 into account it would be difficult to number them. 
 Harrogate, indeed, is one of the towns most favoured 
 by the private schoolmaster and schoolmistress 
 because of its fine situation and bracing air ; few 
 places in England are so richly endowed with wide, 
 open spaces, nor set in such a healthy environment. 
 And while the schools have multiplied, so, too, 
 have the churches and chapels. The two churches 
 of 1832, which served High and I,ow Harrogate 
 have been supplemented by seven more, and all 
 the principal dissenting communions are represented 
 by buildings worthy of the general architectural 
 status of the town. 
 
 One of the great advantages of Harrogate as 
 a health resort is its nearness to some of the most 
 famous and interesting places and scenery in York- 
 shire. One might easily spend a month in the town 
 and go out from it to some new scene every day. 
 The fine and extensive views from Harlow Hill, 
 the breeziness of Harlow Moor, the mountain scenery 
 of Birk Crag, the old-worldness of Plumpton, the 
 many things to be seen in Knaresborough all these 
 are close at hand to the great modern hotels, palatial 
 boarding-establishments, and private lodging-houses. 
 Within a few miles are Brimham Rocks ; one of the
 
 n8 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 most remarkable natural curiosities in the country 
 Alms Cliff, overlooking Wharfedale ; Aldborough, 
 the Isurium of the Romans, full of deeply interesting 
 Roman remains ; Boroughbridge, still reminiscent of 
 the old coaching days ; Wetherby, another typical old 
 English town ; the great Oak of Cowthorpe, reputed 
 to be at least 1500 years old, and Spofforth and the 
 ruins of its castle, once the seat of the Percies, Earls 
 of Northumberland. Somewhat farther away, but 
 easily accessible by rail or road, are Bolton Priory 
 and Bar den Tower ; Kirkstall Abbey and the old 
 castle and fine modern house at Harewood ; Foun- 
 tains Abbey and Markenfield Hall. And Harrogate 
 has the further advantage of being close to both 
 York and Rip on two cities which no Englishman 
 should ever weary of exploring. 
 
 While Harrogate has been transformed into a 
 modern town which must always be unique in its 
 arrangements because of its possession for ever of 
 the great open space called the Stray, Knaresborough 
 has remained stationary there has been little 
 appreciable change in its old streets for many a 
 long year. While many of the old Yorkshire towns 
 have become modernised by the spread of coal- 
 mining or of manufacturing, Knaresborough, having 
 neither coal-mines nor mills in its vicinity, has 
 retained much of its old-world air. Yet it was once 
 a manufacturing town itself, turning out first woollen 
 cloths and then linen, and in 1788, the quantity of 
 linen manufactured weekly was a thousand pieces 
 of 20 yards in length by 35 inches in breadth, each 
 piece being worth from 133. to 303. At this time
 
 NEW TOWN AND OLD BOROUGH 119 
 
 it also made cotton : in 1808 four hundred pieces a 
 week were being produced. In 1818 flax was being 
 manufactured to the quantity of 1700 tons ; 740 tons 
 more were manufactured between Knaresborough 
 and Pateley Bridge. But from that year the linen 
 trade began to decline. It took too long to get 
 Knaresborough goods to the London markets ; other 
 places, more favourably situated, got the trade. In 
 1826 came a commercial crisis, in the course of which 
 many of the smaller manufacturers were ruined ; 
 workmen emigrated, and the old industry succumbed, 
 though as recently as 1851 there were specimens of 
 Knaresborough linen on view at the Great Exhibition 
 in Hyde Park. 
 
 There is little to chronicle in the modern history 
 of such a quiet, old-world town as Knaresborough ; 
 its story lies in the far past. But during the last 
 hundred years some touches of the new spirit came 
 to it, though they did not always materialise. In 
 1800, where the townsfolk were feeling themselves 
 under great disadvantages of transit and com- 
 munication, a project was put forward for making 
 a canal from the river Ure at Ellenthorpe to a point 
 near Knaresborough. The cost was estimated at 
 230,000, and the plan came to naught. Eighteen 
 years later there was another scheme of making a 
 railway and a canal which between them would link 
 up Knaresborough with the Ouse ; this, which 
 would have cost 93,000, also failed ; so, too, did 
 a plan of making a line of railway up the Nidd valley. 
 But in 1847 railway enterprise began at Knares- 
 borough with the construction of a line connecting
 
 120 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 the town with York : it began, too, with disaster. 
 Over the river Nidd was built a high viaduct of 
 four arches, three hundred feet in length and ninety 
 feet in height. The first stone of this was laid in 
 April, 1847, and it was nearly completed when, on 
 March 11-12, 1848, the whole structure collapsed 
 into the river far beneath. The loss amounted to 
 ^10,000, but the viaduct was quickly rebuilt and the 
 line finished, and, with the old Leeds and Thirsk 
 railway, begun in 1845, brought Knaresborough into 
 closer touch with the outside world. 
 
 Towards the end of the nineteenth century the 
 old town lost one of its most ancient privileges 
 that of direct representation in the House of 
 Commons. Although Knaresborough had been 
 created a free borough by Edward II., early in the 
 fourteenth century, it was not called upon to send 
 representatives to Parliament until 1553. Its first 
 two members were Reginald Beisley, Recorder of 
 Scarborough and Admiral of the North Parts, and 
 Ralph Scrope ; during the next hundred years the 
 names of Slingsby, Hutton, Bethell, Benson, are 
 found in the roll of members. At first the franchise 
 was confined to a specified number of houses called 
 burgages ; of these there were in 1611 about eighty- 
 five. Early in the eighteenth century the practice 
 began of buying up the burgages, in order to ensure 
 the election of some particular candidate, and from 
 1720 to 1832, when the Reform Bill was passed, the 
 town was virtually a pocket borough of the Dukes of 
 Devonshire. Whenever an election was held the 
 burgage holders, who were the Duke's tenants from
 
 NEW TOWN AND OLD BOROUGH 121 
 
 his estates in Wharfedale or in the East Riding, 
 were brought into the town to vote, given a good 
 dinner at one of the inns, and sent home again. 
 This naturally caused much dissatisfaction amongst 
 the residents, and faction fights were frequent, and 
 one, in 1805, resulted in proceedings at York Assizes. 
 After 1832 the franchise was enlarged, and the 
 number of voters increased to 278. It was obviously 
 ridiculous that so small a constituency should return 
 two members, and after a reduction to one, the 
 representation was withdrawn altogether, and the 
 town included in one of the county divisions. 
 
 The proudest thing which Knaresborough can 
 boast of during the nineteenth century, perhaps 
 during all its life as a town, is that it was the birth- 
 place of one of England's greatest historians, the 
 late Bishop Stubbs. His father, William Morley 
 Stubbs, was a solicitor of the town, whose family 
 had been connected with the Forest for many 
 centuries. The late Bishop of Oxford was born in 
 the High Street of Knaresborough in June, 1825, 
 and if Knaresborough has reason to be proud of 
 him, he, too, felt it a proud thing to have been born 
 in Knaresborough. " I was born," he said in a 
 speech delivered at Reading in 1889, " tinder the 
 shadow of the great castle in which Beket's mur- 
 derers found refuge during the year that followed 
 his martyrdom, the year during which the dogs 
 under the table declined to eat their crusts. There, 
 too, as customary tenants of the Forest, my fore- 
 fathers had done suit and service to Richard, King 
 of the Romans, and after him to Queen Philippa and
 
 122 HARROGATE AND KNARESBOROUGH 
 
 John of Gaunt, long before poor King Richard was 
 kept a prisoner in the king's chamber. My grand- 
 father's house stood on the ground on which Earl 
 Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner by Edward 
 II., on the very site of the battle of Boroughbridge ; 
 he, too, was churchwarden of the chapel in which 
 the Earl was captured. The first drive that my 
 father ever took me led us across Marston-Moor ; 
 our great-grandfather lived in an old manor-house 
 of the monks of Fountains ; another had a farm in 
 the village where Harold Hardrada fell before the 
 son of Godwin. Then, within a radius of ten miles, 
 we returned ten members to Parliament from five 
 boroughs, two lying in the same parish, and one or 
 other and all together using every different franchise 
 known to the law before the Reform Act." In one 
 of the very last letters written by Bishop Stubbs 
 April, 1901 he says, " So long as I last I continue a 
 devout Yorkshireman." His interest in all matters 
 of Yorkshire history and archaeology was deep and 
 great, and he left a truly valuable legacy to his 
 fellow Yorkshiremen of like tastes in the Genealogical 
 History of his own family, prepared by himself, and 
 printed for the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, at 
 the expense of his eldest son, after his death. In 
 that volume those who would know more of the 
 Forest of Knaresborough will find much curious and 
 interesting detail as to the lives of many generations 
 of dwellers in its solitudes.
 
 INDEX 
 
 ARAM, Eugene, 86 ff., 108 
 
 BACHELORS' Garden School, 
 
 "3 
 
 Beket, Thomas a, 20 ff., 28 
 Blind Jack (see Metcalf, 
 
 John) 
 Brimham Rocks, 108, 117, 
 
 CISTERCIANS, The, 13, 30, 32 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 71, 72, 75 
 
 DEAN, Dr. Edmund, 58 ff. 
 Domesday Survey, 14, 67 
 
 EUZABETH, Queen, n, 58, 
 68 
 
 FOUNTAINS Abbey, 13, 16, 
 29 ff., 107, 118, 122 
 
 GAUNT, John of, 44, 45, 122 
 Gaveston, Peter de, 41, 42 
 Gentleman's Magazine, The, 
 36, 1 06 
 
 HARGROVE, Ely, 16, 41, 49, 
 
 64, 72, 105 ff. 
 Hastings, I^ady Elizabeth, 
 
 81 
 
 JOHN, King, 27, 32, 38 
 
 KNARESBOROUGH Castle. 
 12 ff., 20, 26, 32, 38 ff., 
 43, 46, 57, 68 ff., 73 
 
 Knaresborough Forest, 9 ff., 
 33. 4. 43. 45 ff-. 5, 67, 
 
 82, 122 
 
 LEI,AND, John, 46, 48, 49 
 Lilburn, John, 69 ff. 
 
 METCAI,F, John, 83, 96 ff. 
 Moreville, Hugh de, 21 ff., 
 28 
 
 NEAI,E, Dr. George, 61 ff. 
 Nidd, The river, 9, 13, 14, 
 28, 31, 46, 97, 119, 120 
 
 PARIS, Matthew, 33 
 
 SAINT Mungo's Well, 61, 79 
 Saint Robert, 28 ff., 47, 57, 
 
 1 06 
 
 Shipton, Mother, 48 ff., 86 
 Slingsby, The family of, 32, 
 
 35. 36, 57. 59. 63, 67 ff., 
 
 120 
 
 Slingsby Chapel, The, 32, 
 
 76 
 
 Smollett, Tobias, 84, 85 
 Stanhope, Dr , 60 ff. 
 Stubbs, Bishop, 121, 122 
 
 123
 
 124 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Stuteville, Wm. de, 28 ff. 
 
 TEWIT Well, The, 58, 59, 
 
 67, 114 
 Thoresby, Ralph, 62 ff., 77, 
 
 80, 8 1 
 Thornton, Wm., 83, 92, 98 
 
 Trinitarians, Order of, 34 ff , 
 
 129 
 
 , W., 26, 33, 39, 
 
 44 
 
 Wolsey, Cardinal, 49, 50, 
 
 54 
 
 PRINTED BV WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLBS.
 
 THE STORY OF THE ENGLISH TOWNS 
 
 Bath E. THOMPSON and C. SPENDER 
 
 Birmingham CANON J. H. B. MASTERMAN 
 
 Bristol PROF. G. H. LEONARD 
 
 Cambridge A. GRAY 
 
 Chester Miss M. V. TAYLOR 
 
 Halifax J. S. FLETCHER 
 
 Harrogate and Knaresborough J. S. FLETCHER 
 
 Hastings L. F. SALZMAN 
 
 King's Lynn PROF. E. TYRRELL GREEN 
 
 Leeds J. S. FLETCHER 
 
 Leicester S. H. SKILLINGTON 
 
 London, The City of P. H. DITCHFIELD 
 
 Newcastle PROF. F. J. C. HEARNSHAW 
 
 Nottingham ... ... ... . L. GUILFORD 
 
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 St. Albans W. PAGE 
 
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