Category Archives: Places

A Belvoir Blank

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As Ben Jonson approached Belvoir castle from the east, he will have seen it from some distance, standing proud on its rock overlooking the Vale of Belvoir; in fact, pretty much the same effect as you get today as you drive along the A607. A ‘Pindaric Ode upon Belvoir Castle’ of 1679 thus describes,

Belvoir, Art’s master-piece, and Nature’s pride,
High in the regions of etherial air,
Above the troubled atmosphere…
See with what comely state
It unconcern’d o’erlooks the humble plains,
And, from its eminence, commands
The fruitful vale, and far out-stretched lands.

Belvoir in its nineteenth century incarnation, the castle Jonson stayed in having burnt down

And as Jonson climbed the 200 steps up the hill to the castle, he will have been able to look out over the Vale, to see the spires of Lincoln Cathedral on its own mound and those of the myriad of warm sandstone churches in between, a ‘most delicious and pleasing prospect, being accounted one of the best prospects in the land’. Leland described the Vale ‘barren of wood [but] very large and very plentiful of good corn and grasses’. The spires will have included that of Bottesford where still lie the ancestors of Jonson’s host that day, the earl of Rutland (more on this in the next blogpost).

Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland

Francis, 6th earl of Rutland, had inherited the title from his lively brother Roger in 1612. The family had close connections with the court, and the literary world: Roger’s wife had been Elizabeth, daughter of the famed Elizabethan poet, Sir Philip Sidney. She had been one of Jonson’s patrons, the addressee of several of his poems, and had also performed in court masques. Jonson described her to Drummond of Hawthornden as ‘nothing inferior to her father [Philip Sidney] in poesy’. Sadly for Jonson, she too died prematurely a fortnight after her husband in 1612. The new earl’s countess was Cicely Hungerford, a known recusant, and Francis had also embraced Catholicism, which added a frisson of danger to their household in a militantly Protestant period. But despite this Francis was a trusted advisor to the king. He was also a patron of the arts, commissioning an impresa from William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in 1613 for that year’s accession day tilt, and took part in a couple of Jonson’s court masques.

Theirs was a busy and numerous household as befitted their noble status, and lofty surroundings. The Rutlands’ accounts portray a rich picture of generous hospitality, and varied entertainment, and a vivid example of what was expected of a noble establishment in Jacobean England. That summer, for instance, ‘one rundlet of muscadell’, a cask of 17 gallons of sweet white wine, was sent to Belvoir, so Jonson will have drunk well. Jonson meets Andrew Marks, a gentleman of the household, its music master, and lutenist, and Captain Stratford, a veteran of the Low Countries military campaigns, the earl’s general factotum. The Rutlands, like other nobles, had a private chaplain too, reputedly a Catholic, though they also had close ties to the very Protestant vicar of Bottesford whom Jonson was to meet a couple of days later.

Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester, or, Instructions how to play at billiards, trucks, bowls, and chess, 1674

The earl spent a fortune on silverware and goldware for gifts and important occasions, hiring extra gilt bowls for royal visits, with neighbouring nobles lending hangings and furnishings for such occasions. Several payments were made for travelling musicians to play for the household, in addition to its own musicians. The Rutlands’ involvement at court necessitated appropriate clothing, in 1616 a goldsmith being paid £30 for 25 yards of silver velvet; 2 yards of crimson mantua velvet cost £10 a few years later. The countess had received a gold chain set with 138 small diamonds costing £251 in 1613, and the earl’s chains for Garter ceremonies had diamonds added to them. Francis Rutland liked to gamble too, while bowling ‘at the Greene’ with the king, or playing chess or ‘pennie pricke’, a betting game of throwing something at a coin as target, or gleek, a card game. In 1615, 20 shillings were delivered to the earl whilst playing pennyprick with Captain Stratford and other gentlemen in the Great Chamber at Garradon.

In temporary residence that July at Belvoir, was Robert Bertie, Lord Willoughby, Francis Rutland’s close friend, colleague in the drainage of Lincolnshire fens, and his regular hunting companion. This last was probably why Willoughby was there that week, for it was ‘venison season’ which according to Aubrey’s Brief Lives was the months of July and August, the traditional months too of King James’s summer progresses, as he hunted his way around the shires. Rutland’s accounts show he was a keen huntsman, of deer, foxes and hares, as well as enjoying hawking for pheasants, and he was also careful to preserve the hunting in his region for the king, in 1619 appointing gamekeepers to look after the game there ‘for the King’s sport’. Jonson was to see this earl hunting, as he was to see several other instances of this pastime, benefitting indeed from it in the sides of venison that he to receive…

Belvoir remains the home of the earls of Rutland, though much of the castle that Jonson will have stayed in has long disappeared, damaged in the Civil Wars and a nineteenth century fire. What’s more, the account is sadly silent on the nature and extent of his entertainment here – Jonson’s companion was ill, it seems, and not party to whatever transpired. In the light of the very full household records preserved in the Rutland manuscripts, we can conjecture: but in this instance, the ‘Foot Voyage’ itself doesn’t fill in the blanks.

Daylight Robbery

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One of the more intriguing references in the ‘Foot Voyage’ is the brief mention of Stangate Hill:

Frecked by rain, we were fain to take an alehouse at a place called Stukeley, where the minister came to us whose name was Seaborne; where we were warned of Stangate in the Hole…

Why would they be ‘warned’ about this place, a stretch of Ermine Street between Little Stukeley and Stilton? Daniel Defoe, writing nearly a hundred years later, provides an answer:

Hence we came through Sautrey Lane, a deep descent between two hills, in which is Stangate Hole, famous for being the most noted robbing-place in all this part of the country.

We tend to think of highwaymen as an eighteenth century phenomenon, but they were an acknowledged danger to travellers as early as the mid-sixteenth century – earlier, in fact, if you take some of the tales of Robin Hood into account. The term ‘highwayman’, as Gillian Spraggs has shown, was in use by 1617. Places like Stangate Hole (sometimes confused with Stangate in Lambeth) and Shooter’s Hill in Kent were proverbially notorious for ‘robberies committed daily’, as one writer put it in 1606.

Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey 2As Dick Turpin would later become a legendary figure, so the highwaymen of this earlier age were similarly commemorated. One of the most notorious at the beginning of the seventeenth century was Gamaliel Ratsey, a former scholar and soldier from a respectable family who pursued his criminal career in the east midlands; in 1605, after his conviction and execution, he was the subject of a couple of pamphlets recounting his ‘mad pranks’ and celebrating his generosity to the poor. At least one of these exploits – the robbery of a lawyer – is said to have taken place at Stangate Hole.

Interestingly, there’s another Jonsonian connection. In the opening scene of The Alchemist, when Face and Subtle are having an explosive argument, the former threatens the latter’s defamation through, among other things, having an engraving made of him with a ‘face … worse than Gamaliel Ratsey’s’. The suggestion is that Ratsey wore a grotesque mask to help him terrify his intended victims, though this is only speculation.

Later in the ‘Foot Voyage’, it becomes clear that Jonson and his companion are carrying pistols. It was presumably the threat of latterday Ratseys, lurking in some of the dingier parts of the highway, that made this a sensible expedient.

No ‘Ordinary’ House: Inns, Alehouses and Taverns

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As Jonson ‘came weary to bed’ at Huntingdon on the night of Wednesday 15 July he will have been glad to find this red-brick hostelry which still operates as an inn today, positioned on the old burgh’s limits. In 1598, The George was owned by Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchingbrooke, of a local gentry family, and grandfather to the future Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. It is possible that by 1618, The George was in the hands of the family of Oliver’s father, Robert, who had inherited property in Huntingdon from Sir Henry.

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The George, Huntingdon

Huntingdon was then a busy market town given its position on the Great North Road. The George was one of several such inns servicing the travellers, traders, and dignitaries that passed through, though it was probably grander than most of the others – The Bull, The Cock and Hoop, and The Swan on Temple Lane, and The Falcon on St Mary’s Lane amongst others. In 1598, Sir Henry Cromwell had paid 11s 11d rates on it to the borough, considerably more than the 3 pennies paid by the owner of The Falcon.

Inns were the nexus points in a network of roads that linked towns in the regions to each other, and to London. They provided lodgings and sustenance for travellers, the place in which to entertain visiting grandees, local JPs often met there to hold their assizes, and horses were replenished. Although no mention is made of any accompanying horse, Jonson will presumably have had one to carry his bags. In addition, one innkeeper in each of the larger towns on the Great North Road will have also acted as postmaster, the inn providing a staging post for the carriers of the royal mail.

Innkeepers thus became important figures in any journey, and travellers’ tales often recount the quality of their entertainment. John Taylor, the water-poet travelling to Scotland the same summer of 1618, thought innkeepers should be ‘the Mirror of Goodfellowship, the Pattern of true Friendship, and the nonparallel of jovial Entertainment’. At Huntingdon he had stayed at The Crown, the postmaster’s inn. His host being

Informed who I was, and wherefore I undertook this my pennilesse Progress, came up into our chamber, and supped with us, and very bountifully called for three quarts of Wine and Sugar, and four Jugges of Beer. He did drink and begin Healths like a Horse-leech, and swallowed downe his cuppes without feeling. In a word, as he is a Poste, he drank poste, striving by all means to make the Reckoning great…

which he left to a disgruntled Taylor.

Jonson was to stay in such inns when on the Great North Road, but appears to have had a happier experience than Taylor in most, except one hostelry at Chester-le-Street where ‘mine host was a drunken, disordered fellow’. Some, like the Nag’s Head on Sandhill in Newcastle, and The George, ‘the famous ordinary’, in York’s Coney Street have gone. But several of them, such as The Falcon in Puckeridge as well as The George at Huntingdon, retain their original operations today. Some erstwhile inns have been converted to other purposes – the oldest part of the White Hart at Newark, for example (of which more in a later blog post) is now the office of a building society.

white hart

The White Hart, Newark

Jonson will have stayed overnight in inns, but there were other grades of hostelry where he could expect different fare. An ‘ordinary’ was any type of establishment where a meal could be had at a fixed price, the more elevated of these turning into gambling clubs for the urban elites in the later part of the seventeenth century. Innkeepers usually had wine licences, their annual dues helpfully (for us) recorded in the Exchequer Accounts at the National Archives in Kew. Thomas Kay’s at York was a pricey £4 10 shillings pa, whilst only £2 was due from William Carver who hosted Jonson, and judges on their circuits, at Doncaster (Carver soon made his money back, one judges’ bill coming to over £11). A step down was to the more prolific alehouses, where Jonson and his companion will have slaked their thirsts in the heat of the day, drinking small beer or ale rather than the heavier canaries and hullocks of the finer inns.

Taylor CosmographieBut the prevalence of alcohol and ‘mine hosts’ throughout our journal attests to the centrality of such establishments in seventeenth century life. In the absence of a sufficient town hall, the better sorts of inns became a central meeting place of the civic elites. Borough accounts throughout England include payments, such as at Doncaster in 1618 for the five shillings and 10 pence to an innkeeper ‘for a gallon of Claret a pottle of sack a pottle of white wine for my Lords grace of yorke & a quart of Claret & sugar for Mr Maior’. Jonson, the frequenter of the Mermaid and other such London taverns, was to indulge liberally in the liquid fare of their country cousins.

Reverend Strange’s ‘Little Commonwealth’ at Buntingford

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Alexander Strange’s chapel, Buntingford

As Jonson crossed the little bridge into Buntingford on Saturday 11 July 1618 he will have seen a building site on his left. This was to be a small ‘chapel-at-ease’ on which work had begun in 1614, but was not finished until 1628 at a cost of £420. St Peter’s, as it became known, was the great project of Buntingford’s minister, the Rev Alexander Strange, in order to spare the town’s inhabitants the trials of crossing a swollen river to the parish’s main church in Layston. You can still visit it today, though its Victorianisation in 1899 means that it has been altered from the building whose foundations Jonson will have seen. In the western transept, however, there is a plain wood-paneled gallery front from around 1615, and a stone on the east gable bears the inscription DOMUS ORATIONIS 1615.

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Rev. Strange’s signature in his memorandum book

Inside, a brass plaque of 1620 hangs on the south wall depicting the minister preaching to his congregation in a small Renaissance chapel, thought to represent Strange and his parishioners, on which is inscribed ‘In Stature small, yet great in mental powers,/ Good Alexander built this Church of ours’. Rev. Strange appears to have been a singular fellow, and we are lucky that his memorandum book survives, his distinctive hand recording the parish accounts and administrative decisions, his advice and a tract on poverty. From its pages emerges a deeply conscientious and intensely godly man, whose concern for his parishioners and the poor amongst them results in several schemes to help them.

The first was to ensure their godly souls by erecting this convenient new chapel, and money was set aside for vicars to include thanks in a sermon to those, like Jonson, ‘at whose expense the chappell was built’. Then Rev Strange himself donated several lands whose income was to be used for the poor. He encouraged wealthy Londoners also to make charitable grants, such as one by a goldsmith in 1623 who gave £20 ‘to be ymployed in the buying of flax to sette the poore to work’.

But Buntingford had a problem common to other towns on the main arterial roads in London’s hinterland. A population explosion in southern England had forced many from their villages in search of work. These itinerant families created a pressing problem in towns such as Buntingford, their numbers outstripping the capacity of the rates collected for poor relief. As Rev Strange wrote in his Advice of 1636, ‘I see and am sorry to see the misery into which Buntingford’s residents are fallen …. I will be bold to tell you the Causes of it. Your misery is this, there are come into your parish within the space of these twenty years past, no less than twenty Families, all of which receive’ the parish’s alms. At the same time, the increased pressure on housing led Rev Strange to castigate his parishioners for having fallen victim to ‘the roote of all evill, covetousness’ in their raising of rents.

Jonson and Strange will have had something in common (if not the minister’s more puritan godliness) since Strange had a library filled with classical volumes, including eight volumes of Tulley. At almost the same age (b.c.1570) as Jonson, both had enjoyed an education shaped by classical humanism, its influence plain in Strange’s Advice of 1636 in which he terms Layston and Buntingford a ‘little commonwealth’ where it was every citizen’s duty to play his part.

ermine stJonson was to experience a number of these ‘little commonwealths’ as he progressed north, towns in which their civic communities fretted equally about how to look after, and control the poor, at Huntingdon, Stamford, Newark etc. And as he left Buntingford, he walked along the road that joined them, a route still marked by road signs bearing its medieval name of Ermine Street. It’s a remarkably straight route, and one I’ve driven now several times at dusk, imagining Ben’s weary footsteps as he toiled up long slopes towards the light and warmth of a welcoming inn.

Foot Voyages

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Making the trip from London to Edinburgh was hardly unusual in Jacobean Britain. In fact, it was the Jacobean creation of something called ‘Great Britain’ that made it no longer unusual – when James VI became James I he united the crowns of England and Scotland, and gave an antiquarian term of slightly uncertain reach (did it refer to the whole island? Or just the extent of the old Roman province?) new currency. James wanted to be called King of Great Britain. He minted new coinage with his ambitions stamped upon it, and ordered the design of a Union flag; he renamed the border counties either side of the Tweed the ‘middle shires’ and established a commission of representatives from both kingdoms to investigate how best to pursue full union.

Designs_for_the_Union_Flag_c.1604

Designs for the Union Flag, c.1604

But his grand ambitions could not, then, be fulfilled. Many in the English parliament were alarmed by the kind of radical constitutional change that union would apparently require, and wouldn’t countenance it unless it was essentially the incorporation of Scotland into a greater England; the Scots, for their part, had no desire for their unconquered kingdom to be subsumed by its larger neighbour, as had happened to Wales a century earlier. So plans for full union stalled, and James had to settle for a long game. His two peoples would be brought together piecemeal, one aristocratic marriage at a time.

In the meantime, both peoples had plenty to discover about each other. Scots courtiers found themselves serving in the royal household in England, to the great discontent of English rivals unwilling or unable to get their heads round the dual nature of James’s court. Such courtiers became regulars on the roads between James’s capital cities, and they were joined by others who had a part to play in the increasing business between the kingdoms. When Jonson came to travel these roads in 1618, he was following a familiar route. Indeed, King James himself had made the journey to Edinburgh from London in the summer of 1617, in what was his only return journey to Scotland after his departure for England in 1603.

So a journey north was no longer a great adventure. Promising to walk all the way, however, would turn it into something special. The account in the Aldersey manuscript draws attention to this defining aspect of the journey in its title: this was, it says, a ‘foot voyage’. A similar emphasis on the fact of Jonson’s walking occurs in most other contemporary mentions. Francis Bacon made a literary joke out of it, saying he ‘loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactylus and spondaius‘. This particular twist would make Jonson’s journey as noteworthy as the clown Will Kemp’s nine day dance to Norwich, or one of John Taylor’s strange excursions – his trip down the Thames in a paper boat, or his own 1618 walk to Edinburgh, made without spending any money along the way. It would be another ‘Famous Voyage’, like some of the comically grand adventures mentioned in Jonson’s disgustingly scatological poem of the same name. It might be made the subject of a wager or two.

Will_Kemp_Elizabethan_Clown_Jig

Will Kemp dancing to Norwich, from Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder (1600)

Such voyages still take place today. The comedian Tony Hawks hauled a fridge round Ireland, and took his own inspiration from people who’d unicycled across America, or run a backwards marathon. (Funnily enough, one of the feats mentioned by Jonson in the ‘Famous Voyage’ is a walk from London to Berwick undertaken backwards.) Simon Armitage conducted his own ‘penniless pilgrimage’ along the Pennine Way, busking like a modern troubadour. Jonson’s walk was clearly also a public feat (pun intended), even a performance piece. And in choosing to go on foot he was travelling like a pilgrim, eschewing courtly grandeur, bringing his own status and reputation back down to the common earth.

The Outline of a Walk

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An initial inspection had provided some clues to the provenance of the Aldersey manuscript – at least, what could be gleaned from looking at how it was put together and the signs of early usage. But that first encounter with the manuscript also raised all sorts of questions relating to the account of the walk itself. Scanning the first page had confirmed, pretty much beyond doubt, that the star of this particular show was indeed Ben Jonson – 8 July, the departure date, was a Wednesday in 1618, just as the opening sentence said, and Lady Mary Wroth would hardly have turned out to greet just anyone along the road at Waltham.

But that confirmation itself brought the slightly stunned realisation that there were bound to be more revelations in the pages that followed. And there were quite a few pages – another 40, in fact. There wasn’t going to be time that day to transcribe it all, so it became a matter of trying to get something like a handle on the scope of the whole thing, rather than focusing on particular details. The fine-grained stuff would have to wait.

So a quick estimate of the word count: those 41 pages contained, it appeared, something like 8,000 words. A pause to take that in. Then, back to scanning the first page to see what could be said, initially at least, about the style and manner of the account. Was this the work of a proto-Boswell, following an earlier larger-than-life Mr Jonson and jotting down his words? Would this give us further glimpses of Ben Jonson’s trenchant opinions on his contemporaries and their writing?

Robert Mansell

Sir Robert Mansell (c.1570-1652), by an unknown artist

Perhaps surprisingly, given Jonson’s reputation for sounding off, it appeared not. The account continued as it began – focused on the itinerary of the journey, and a careful and presumably pretty comprehensive listing of who they met. Proper names – of places and people – began to pile up. Some of them, like Mary Wroth, I knew well. Others rang a muffled bell or two – wasn’t this Robert Mansell, for example, something to do with the Jacobean navy? Others still were utterly unknown to me – they’d need some investigation. But here they all were, attendant on Ben Jonson as he walked his way up the road to Edinburgh.

As I skimmed the pages that followed, I could see that these early emphases were sustained throughout – days on the road passed, and the itinerary grew longer. Moments of colour and detail came into view: something on the weather here, a reference to drink or food or the mood and manner of ‘mine host’ there, over the page an encounter with minstrels or tinkers. Belvoir Castle seemed to flash by; but it looked as if the travellers were spending plenty of time at Welbeck Abbey. In passing, the account described visits to long vanished places such as  the original Worksop Manor and an unslighted Pontefract Castle. There were inns and ordinaries, postmasters’ houses, hospitable widows. And throughout it all the cast list grew longer and even longer. By the time that obviously Scottish names began to dominate, it was clear that there were hundreds of people mentioned here: this was nothing less than a cross-section of society along the road linking King James’s two largest kingdoms.

Worksop_Manor

The original 16th century Worksop Manor, burned down in 1761

And then, abruptly, the account came to a halt in a list of Scottish harbour towns. But the writing in this hand continued: some odd bits and pieces, which looked like jests of some sort (Ben was known for his jokes, wasn’t he? Wasn’t there a popular eighteenth century book actually called Ben Johnson’s Jests?).  Some strange details re kidney stones, followed by what looked like historical notes mainly relating to York. And then four pages which were something about ‘Doggs Language’. What on earth..?

This was going to need some sorting out. There would have to be visits to archives and record offices, lengthy enquiry into local, regional and national histories, cross-checking against all of Ben Jonson’s work. There were going to be puzzles and conundrums and unanswerable questions. It was clearly going to take a while. In fact, and so far, four years.