EGGLESTON ABBEY. BY THE REV. J. F. HODGSON. CHAPTER I. OF THE SITE, ETYMOLOGY, AND FOUNDATION. THE beautiful remains of the Abbey Church of Eggleston, together with some few fragments of its dependent offices, are situate on the extreme northern verge of what was known formerly as the "terra Alani Comitis," or great earldom of Richmond,' about a mile below the town of Barnard Castle. The site is one of fascinating and ideal loveliness. Unlike the Cistercian Furness, Fountains, or Rievaulx; the Benedictine Finchale; the Augustinian Brinkburn; or the sister Praemonstratensian houses of Easby and Blanchland—all 1 "The County of Richmond," says Dr. Whitaker, "though merely a portion of the North Riding of Yorkshire, has the peculiar merit of unity. In the Saxon era it consisted, according to Domesday, of lordships, holden under one common lord, but not under any common title, nor united under one common head. After the Conquest, which introduced into England the regular gradations of feudal law, properly so called, this extensive district having been created into one great earldom, a magnificent castle was built, as its seat and centre, to which all the mesne lords of manors, within its limits, owed suit and service. Between this and their princely domain in Bretagne the first earls divided their attention; here they held splendid courts, maintained a post little inferior to that of royalty, and distributed to their most favoured dependants lands and lordships with a liberality which laid the foundations of some of the greatest families in the kingdom.... Though liberal in confirming donations to religious houses, they were the immediate founders of none; and their places of interment were either at Begar in Bretagne, where their ancestors before the conquest of England appear to have been deposited, or at some favoured house in the south of England." (Richmondshire, i, p. 2.) VOL. XVIII. 66 2 Abbayes and Priories upon Tese (Leland). Egleston, citer. ripa, a priory of white chanons a mile beneth Barnarde's castel, that is on the farther ripe. About a quarter of a mile beneth Egleston is a faire quarre of blak marble spotted with white, in the very ripe of Tese." Here, however, the worthy itinerant makes two mistakes. In the first place, the house was not a priory, but an abbey; and in the second, though marble was, indeed, won hard by, it was of a bluish grey tint, uniform throughout, and not, under any circumstances, of black spotted with white. Marble of this sort is found, not in the Tees, but in the Wear Valley, at Frosterley, near Stanhope, where it continues to be very extensively worked. Scott's description is perfectly accurate where he speaks of the Tees as Condemn'd to mine a channell'd way O'er solid sheets of marble grey. All over Richmondshire and the County of Durham grave covers and fonts, the former often of gigantic size, were made of this grey Tees marble. The great octagonal basin of the Lavatory of Durham Abbey, as well as the colossal slabs of Bishop Beaumont's brass in the church there, may also be instanced among divers other illustrations of its use. I of which lie nestling in deep, sequestered glades-Eggleston, though backed by somewhat higher ground, crowns the summit of a precipitous acclivity, and, as Leland says of the adjacent fortress, "stondith stately upon Tese." Yet not quite literally so; for, cutting in at an acute angle between the two, and about halfway in the church's length, appear the lovely little dell and stream of Thorsgill -"fairy Thorsgill's murmuring child"-which there debouch upon the broader and more important stream. In his delightful and splendid work on Richmondshire, Dr. Whitaker remarks upon the striking resemblance which the position bears to those commonly selected for Roman stations-an illustration of which statement may still be seen close by, in that of Concangium (? Greta Bridge). With respect to the nomenclature of both Thorsgill and Eggleston, the etymology has been much disputed, and quite as erroneously resolved. As to the former, Sir Walter Scott, in his poem of Rokeby, would ascribe it, as in the case of so many other local names, to the gods and fabled heroes of Scandinavian mythology : "When Denmark's raven soar'd on high, That held in fight the foremost place, To Odin's son, and Sifia's spouse. Near Startforth high they paid their vows, : And gave the dell the Thunderer's name." (Rokeby, canto iv, i.) And yet Sir Walter himself, whose lively fancy for the moment probably outstripped his judgment, is compelled, from the very fitness of things, to repudiate incontinently his own conclusions, for he proceeds: "Yet Scald or Kemper err'd, I ween, And every little sunny glade, And the blithe brook that strolls along 1 "From Barnardes Castelle over the right fair Bridge on Tese of 3 Arches [two] I enterid straite into Richemondshire, that still streacceth up with that Ripe to very Hed of Tese. From this Bridge I ridde a Mile on the stony and rokky Bank of Tese to the Bek caullid Thuresgylle, a mile from Barna des Castelle, and there it hath a Bridge of one Arche and straite enterith into Tese. The Priory of Egleston joinith hard to this Bekk, and also hanggith over the high bank of Tese." (Leland, Itinerary.) Its pebbled bed with summer song, For where the thicket groups recede, (Ibid., ii.) Poetry, indeed, as spontaneous and beautiful as its descriptive details are minutely exact; but alas for the glamour of romance ! for the "Thunderer," as unimaginative history shows, was merely simple parishioner of Startforth, where in the days of King Edward he held two, and his brother Torfin four, carucates of land.1 So much for Thorsgill. And now as to Eggleston, about which much more confident opinions have been expressed. To begin with: the name has been held to have a close and intimate connection with the Latin "ecclesia," from the church having been the most salient and important feature of the place. But the same authority which settles the identity of Thor, proves that it was so named above a century before any church existed there at all, so that such a designation would have been a complete misnomer. This one fact alone, therefore, suffices to dispose effectually of any such derivation. But other, and more plausible ones, have been advanced. "With respect to the etymology of the word Eggleston," writes Dr. Whitaker, "had not Thorgill obtained a prescriptive right which cannot now be shaken, I should have supposed that it was corrupted from Eagilston,' the Town on the Watery Gill. But another resource is at hand. It may have been 'Aikhilston,' the town by the Hill covered with Oaks, which is precisely the character of the place; and the Saxon 'ea,' or 'ai,' we know from the example of Aysgarth, was softened in ancient pronunciation to 'e."" ་ That such a derivation is both facile and ingenious can hardly be denied; yet how entirely mistaken and uncalled for it was, might have been discovered at once, had it but occurred to Dr. Whitaker 1 Domesday Survey (facsimile edition), p. 24. to refer to Domesday, where he would have found that all such descriptive titles as "Church town," or "Town by the Watery Gill," or "Town by the Hill of Oaks," or other of a like kind, were utterly excluded; the real name of the place appearing there as "Eghiston" and "Egheston," that is to say, as a purely personal one-the abode, or "ton," of "Eghi," or "Eggi"-the primitive owner and occupier of the spot. Nor is this by any means the only local instance of such change, or corruption, of place-names. For, curiously enough, a second and exactly parallel transformation of a personal, into a descriptive, appellation occurs some few miles lower down the Tees, on the Durham side, in the case of a village which, within living memory, was universally known as "Egglescliffe," but has now during the last few years, and mainly through the instrumentality of the railway authorities, been still further corrupted into "Eaglescliffe," though the ancient form was "Eggesclive," ie. the cliff of Eggiprecisely as in the case before us. But between the days of the old Saxon landlord who gave his name to the place, and those of the founders of the Abbey, in which its present interest chiefly centres, the interval, though uncertain, is a wide one, since it brings us down probably from the age of the first northern settlers to the closing years of the twelfth century. And here again still further difficulties occur, owing to the loss of all the original documents; for, like those of so many other north-country houses, they would seem in all likelihood to have been deposited in the gate-tower of S. Mary's Abbey at York, where, during the siege of 1644, when that structure was blown up by the Parliamentary forces, they, in common with the greater part of its other contents, were consumed and scattered. And SO we find that diligent antiquary, Dr. Burton, lamenting that, even in his day, he could find. neither register, nor cartulary, nor any original charters belonging to the place. Camden, indeed, and Speed, who copied him, affirm, though without quoting any authority for the statement, that the founder was no less a person than Conan, Earl of Richmond.' But that, at the utmost, could only be true, whether of himself or any of his successors, in the sense of their assenting to, or confirming, the grant of some sub-feudatory; for the heads of the house of Bretagne, as has already been stated, were the direct founders of no religious house in Richmondshire. And as regards the present instance, there can be no doubt whatever as to the accuracy of Dr. Burton's con 1 Conan IV, Duke of Bretagne, and Earl of Richmond, died in 171, some twenty years or more before any evi dences of the foundation, either documentary or structural, can be adduced. |