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THE WOODD FAMILY AND CHARLES I. writer states that his father's Chancellorship and practice, to the value of a thousand pounds per annum, had been taken away, and that he died at Oxford while serving the king, having also been plundered of all his goods contained in his house at Greenwich, which house the writer sold for £400 in order to support the family. He then goes on to set forth his own services, and to record the wounds and injuries which he received in the Civil Wars, together with the services and sore plight of his brothers, Thomas, sometime Fellow of Merton College, and John, cornet to Colonel Stewart in the Earl of Cleveland's brigade. The whole summing up of the matter is pathetic in its brevity, and is no doubt but one more instance of the way in which more than one family was brought to something like beggary by a zealous devotion to the Royalist cause during the troublous times of the Civil War :—

". . . . Wee are much in debt. Our plate, horses, and money that wee spent upon Chirurgeons, and armes, and other necessaries in the warres comes to a considerable summe, besides the loss of my ffather's chancellorship and practice, and the plundring of us in Oxfordshire, and the loss of our time, so that wee were brought to ruine for our Loialty."

CHAPTER XXXVIII

The Nidd Valley

SCRIVEN AND THE SLINGSBY FAMILY-SCOTTON, THE BIRTHPLACE OF GUY FAWKES NIDD-RIPLEY AND THE INGILBYS-HAMPSTHWAITE-PETER BARKER, THE BLIND JOINER-DARLEY-GREENHOW HILL-DACRE— LOW HALL AND THE BENSONS-BRIMHAM ROCKS.

I

HE surroundings of the Nidd in the stretch lying between Knaresborough and Pateley Bridge are entirely different in character to those which enclose its lower reaches. The wide, level pasture-lands of the Vale of York give place to romantic scenery, and every successive mile covered by the traveller presents him to new features of increasing interest. Knaresborough itself is so full of charm, viewed only from a picturesque standpoint, that one might excusably doubt whether the glories of the dale had not concentrated and exhausted themselves in it. But Knaresborough is only the threshold of the Nidd valley, just as Pateley Bridge is the key of Nidderdale proper. From Knaresborough onwards the valley opens up a remarkable stretch of country, as rich in associations as in picturesqueness and beauty. The valley of the Nidd at this point is often compared to the valley of the Rhine, but the English character of the former is never lost sight of there is no suspicion of anything foreign to English scenery in its villages and hamlets, and the dale folk met alongside the river are Yorkshire men and women to the heart's core. This bit of Yorkshire, indeed, is in more respects than the mere geographical one the very heart of the county; it was settled at a period going far back beyond the coming of the Romans, and is closely allied with some of the most remarkable events and prominent characters of Yorkshire history. In many of these Nidd-side villages history is bridged over in wonderful fashion, and the mind taken back at a leap to days when the world moved under very different conditions. It is only necessary to walk a little distance out of Knaresborough to come across a place identified

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with the fortunes of one family for nearly a thousand years. Scriven Park, the ancestral home of the Slingsbys, lying on the north bank of the Nidd amidst ideal surroundings, appears at first sight to be of no more significance than usually attaches to a country seat. Its Elizabethan mansion, standing in a park which encloses 400 acres, tells little of the folk who have lived in it. Yet here, or hereabouts, in close touch with this particular corner of the county, there have been first Scrivens and then Slingsbys since the Norman overswept the land. When the Royal Forest of Knaresborough was made, a de Scriven was appointed Hereditary Master Forester, charged with collection of all fees, fines, and other customary dues and exactions. When the last male of the direct line of Scrivens died, in the person of Henry de Scriven, the manor and the hereditary office passed to William de Slingsby, who had married Henry's daughter and heiress, Johanna, in 1328. From that time onward the Slingsbys of Scriven did many things which loom large in the history of the county. Between 1572 and 1761 they supplied the folk of Knaresborough with fifteen members of Parliament. Some of them were soldiers; some of them were in their time High Sheriffs of Yorkshire; one of them proved his loyalty to the Stuarts by suffering death on the scaffold. Near the village green of Scriven is the old house in which the Slingsbys lived before the present mansion was erected, but it has been largely modernised and little of its sixteenth-century quaintness remains save the Slingsby coat-of-arms over the doorway.

More associations with famous names and deeds await the traveller at Scotton, the next village along the north bank of the Nidd, going towards Ripley. Here at various periods dwelt the families of Scotton, Nessfield, Percy, and Pulleine, and here more than once there have been extremely interesting discoveries of antiquities, which prove that the place must have been settled long before history began to be written. When the new church was about to be built here, ten years ago, it was found necessary to remove a large mound of earth which had long been a conspicuous object in the village, and which no one appears to have thought worthy of any examination. Beneath this mound, which was about 60 feet in length by 24 feet in width, there were discovered various cavities, arranged in a circle, all of which contained calcined ashes. In a field at a little distance there have been found during recent years numerous copper and steel remains, chiefly pitchers and battle-axes, and at Scotton-Thorp, in the same parish, a labourer some years ago turned up a gold ring of very fine workmanship. There is no doubt that Scotton was an important settlement in Anglo-Saxon times, and that the tumulus discovered in 1889 has some connection with that period. The chief interest attaching to Scotton, however, lies in the fact that it was the early home of Guy Fawkes, the conspirator. In a pamphlet entitled "The Fawkeses of York," published anonymously at Westminster in 1850, but held to be the work of Robert Davies, F.R.S., Town Clerk of York, there is a very painstaking account of Guy Fawkes's connection

with the county and with the old Hall at Scotton. His father, Edward Fawkes, was an advocate of the Consistory Court at York, and married one Edith, whose surname has never been discovered. They had four children, of whom Guy (baptized at the church of St. Michael-le-Belfry, York,

April 16, 1570) was the second. Edward Fawkes died in 1578, and his widow married Dionis Bainbrigge, a gentleman residing at Scotton, to which village she and her children of course at once removed. Here Guy Fawkes spent a good deal of his boyhood, and made the acquaintance of the various families in the neighbourhood. The author of the pamphlet just referred to argues that he was under Protestant influences until he went to Scotton, and that he there fell under Papist influence, the Bainbrigges, Percys, Winters, and others of his acquaintance there being all staunch adherents of the ancient faith. This part of Nidderdale, indeed, supplied no less than six out of the seven conspirators who hatched and engineered the Gunpowder Plot Guy Fawkes, Thomas Winter, Robert Winter, Christopher Wright, John Wright, and Thomas Percy. The Winters were nephews of Sir

William Ingilby of Ripley; Percy was a kinsman of the Percys of Spofforth; the Wrights were his brothers-in-law. Thus the first beginnings of the most famous conspiracy in English history may be said to have originated in one of the quietest of Yorkshire villages.

Between Scotton and Ripley there is an ancient village named Nidd, around which various historical associations centre. According to Bede, it was at Nidd that the Synod which restored Wilfrith to the Archbishopric of York in 675 was held. Until about thirty years ago there was here a very interesting church, which must have been one of the smallest in England. It was of very primitive construction, and only accommodated

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sixty persons. In the porch was a holy-water stoup, and it is said that the folk of the district had formed a habit of placing their fingers in this ere they entered the church, and that the custom was only broken down by the destruction of the ancient edifice. There is an old cross in the churchyard here, but it is devoid of inscription or decoration. At a little distance from the modern church, an imposing structure in the Early English style, in which the thirteenth-century font is still preserved, are the traces of something like an encampment, which is supposed to have been the site of a Saxon settlement. Here, some years ago, a vault was opened which contained two skeletons, but nothing definite has been ascertained as to the exact character of the place.

The small market-town of Ripley, which lies close to the Nidd, is one of those model places which would be more picturesque if they were less neat and formal. At the beginning of this century it was a very quaint, old-world place, full of low-walled, thatched-roofed cottages and houses, intersected by narrow lanes paved with cobble-stones. A good many of the houses were half-timbered, and they were in many instances so much below the level of the streets that it was necessary to descend into them by a flight of steps. All this old-world air, however, has disappeared from Ripley. About seventy years ago Sir William Ingilby pulled it to pieces and rebuilt it, and though its church is ancient enough, and its marketsquare, or green, possesses a pre-Reformation cross and the old parish. stocks, it is a place of modern and model appearance. Its church is old and full of interest, and contains some remarkably fine altar-tombs and monuments. The early history of its foundation is obscure, but there are grounds for believing that it existed before the Norman Conquest and had been partly destroyed by the Danes. It was restored or completely rebuilt by one by one of the

Ingilbys about the end of the fourteenth century, and though it has undergone numerous renovations since then, it still remains a very excellent example of Decorated Gothic architecture. It consists of nave, north and south aisles, transepts, chancel with side chapels, north and south porches, and a square tower at the west end. In the south chapel there is a magnificent twelfth-century rood

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