It has been attempted of late to refer the peculiar interlaced and serpentine ornaments, such as exist in the tower of Barnack, to a Danish origin; but the Danes must be hailed as the destroyers rather than the builders of churches. That they pierced inward as far as Northampton is certain, that town having suffered much, under Sweyn and Canute, from 917 to 1015. We have disposed of the popular legend which brings them to Da'entry, but local tradition not unreasonably connects them with Daneshill, near Northampton, and lays the scene of a battle at Danesmoor, in the parish of Edgcote, where is also preserved this rhyme : 'If we can Padwell overgoe and Horstone we can see, Then lords of England we shall be.' The lines refer to a neighbouring spring and landmark; but the prophecy probably belongs to the battle fought on this spot in 1469, in which a large body of Welsh under the Earl of Pembroke were utterly routed by the Yorkists. The old belief in Danish sacking and burning still holds among the common people; and the trace of their power is discovered in the name Danes-money, given to the old coins found by the rustics, and in the Dane-weed (Eryn, gium campestre), which, from its only known habitat, is oftener called the Watling-street thistle-either name emphatically rejecting it from the indigenous British flora. 6 The Norman period was an important one for Northampton ; and various historical personages group round the central figure of Simon de St. Liz. He had come over in the train of the Conqueror, who designed to reward him with the hand of his niece Judith, the wealthy widow of Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland, by some called first Earl of Northampton; but, luckily for Simon, he was lame of a leg, and Judith-she is called by Ingulphus impiissima Jezabel'-scorned a limping bridegroom. Whether her daughter Maude had much choice given her does not appear; but on the mother's refusal, the king made over the young heiress to the brave knight, whose personal defect was more than compensated by the noble qualities of his mind. This is the first great name in Northampton annals. He it was who rebuilt and fortified the town, raised the castle on the hill towards the west-gate, and refounded and endowed with All-Hallows and the other ten churches of the town and divers estates, the great Cluniac priory of St. Andrew's, which yet, with Norman heart, he made a dependency on the Abbey of St. Mary at la Charité on the Loire. The town had been given him by the Conqueror to find shoes for his horses: thus its sporting and shoemaking were early combined, and its prentice hand tried in iron, not in leather. Simon went as a crusader to the Holy Land, and was making his second second pilgrimage when he died on his road thither, and was buried in the Abbey of St. Mary, on the banks of his beloved Loire. Though no historical document connects the Round Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Northampton with his name, and though it was not among those assigned by him to St. Andrew's Priory, but made over to that community by Henry I., there can be little doubt, from the style of the architecture of the church and from the antecedents of the crusading Earl of Northampton, that this interesting building is connected with him, either as its founder or as a memorial raised by his widow to her husband's devotion to the sacred and salutary' Church of the Resurrection in the Holy Land. There is evidence of Maude's faithful interest in the town of Northampton and in her husband's memory; but, in the kingly disposal of rich widows, she was soon bestowed by Henry I. on his brother-in-law David, afterwards king of Scotland, whose name appears as confirming grants, probably in right and in regard of his wife, to St. Andrew's Priory. How Henry I. kept high festival here at Easter, and Stephen held councils, must pale before the scene in which Thomas-àBecket stands forth, the pre-eminent figure, as ever, in the history of his time. At the castle of Northampton met, in 1164, the great council to which Becket was summoned on his refusal to ratify the Constitutions of Clarendon. The Archbishop lodged at St. Andrew's Priory near at hand, and as he rode, day by day, to the castle, with that skilful horsemanship so witching to the crowd, he gracefully reined in his palfrey before the throng of favouring citizens who pressed round their Saxon primate. On the morning of the 18th of October, apparelled in the gorgeous vestments in which he had celebrated the mass of St. Stephen, as he approached the castle, he seized the crozier from the hand of him who usually bore it, and entering the great hall, made his solemn appeal to the spiritual Cæsar of Rome, and slowly and haughtily withdrew. In the dead of that same night, disguised as a monk, with two companions and a single attendant, he fled, making on foot the first twenty-five miles of the journey, which eventually landed him on the coast of Flanders. Three hundred years after, the memory of his extraordinary fate was familiar enough to lead the citizens of Northampton to found the hospital of St. Thomas of Canterbury; and a spring, on the outskirts of the town, violated with the Gothic of the nineteenth century, yet retains the name of Becket's Well. The importance of Northampton from the twelfth century is fully established by the many councils held there, and the privileges and visits with which it was favoured by the migratory sovereigns of those times. Hither William King of Scotland was brought after his capture at Alnwick; here the division of circuits for the King's justices was ordained, in 1179; and here the convention was held which ordered the affairs of the realm before King Henry II. set out to visit his foreign dominions. The privilege of minting was granted in the following year, though, according to Hartshorne, the town had enjoyed a like power, with nine other towns, as early as the tenth century. Its central position must have marked it out as a favourite gathering point for the Crusaders; and no doubt the round nave of St. Sepulchre's has heard many a fervent vow whispered upon its pavement, of those who came to gather from its suggestive form some faint image of the older and holier shrine to which they were bound; doubtless too, within its walls, Cœur de Lion, who, in the first year of his reign, had inaugurated his crusading party in the neighbouring abbey of Pipwell, knelt in thankful remembrance, when on his return from his captivity he kept high festival in this town in the Easter of 1193. We may conclude this notice of the connexion of Northampton with the crusades, by mentioning the meeting here in 1240 of a party under the Earl of Cornwall to set out for Jerusalem; and in 1267, another gathering, when Prince Edward and a hundred knights assumed the cross in presence of King Henry III. and his court. King John appreciated the excellence of the forest-hunting, and rarely failed to visit every year his castle at Northampton; sometimes in his restless mood paying it three or four visits in one year; and Shakspeare, accordingly, with that wonderful instinct which, however it might miss the letter, ever seized on the spirit of history, opens his play of King John' at Northampton. The town bore its unenviable share in the horrible atrocities inflicted by combined bigotry and greed on the unhappy Jews. In Edward I.'s reign three hundred of the exiled Chosen were executed in the town on the charge of clipping the King's coin, and two years afterwards fifty more were dragged at horses' tails to the scaffold, on that strange traditional accusation, current in the East to the present day, of crucifying a Christian boy on Good Friday. A small crucifix in stone, built up in the wall of St. Sepulchre's churchyard, which is really a part of a churchyard or gable cross, has tended to keep alive this cruel tradition among the vulgar. Northampton was one of twenty towns from which citizens were summoned to the parliament of Acton Burnell in 1283; it also sent two out of seventy-six knights and burgesses to the first truly representative parliament at York in 1298. Its own age probably gloried more in having been favoured with one of the four quarters of David, Prince of Wales, barbarously exe cuted cuted at Shrewsbury at this time. But there are more agreeable associations with the reign of Edward I. in the two crosses still existing at Geddington, and in Hardingstone parish, a mile from Northampton-in memory of his Queen Eleanor, whom,' in his own words to the abbot of Cluny, living he loved dearly, and whom dead he shall never cease to love.' Art has seldom been more gracefully and happily employed than in these records which preserve the memory of Edward's devoted affection. While many a battle and a parliament schooled into our young heads is forgotten, all remember their early lesson of archæology and architecture in the Eleanor crosses erected on the spots where the Queen's body rested from Harby to Westminster. Charing-Cross has only left its name, Waltham shows little more than a restored ruin, and the rest have altogether passed away, but Northamptonshire boasts two almost perfect examples of these memorials. Of the Northampton cross, which is an octagon, with figures in the alternate sides, portrait statues of fine and native work, very curious records still exist.* That of Geddington, not mentioned in the Rolls, is less known and far simpler, being triangular, with the figures at the angles, not on the sides, an arrangement which viewed at certain points gives a strange and awkward perspective. Its site may be accounted for by the palace of Geddington close at hand. Parliaments continued to be held at Northampton during the reigns of Edward II. and III., and Richard II. Of the latter was one which originated the poll-tax that led to Wat Tyler's insurrection, and which sat for thirty-three days in the old chancel of All Saints' Church. On the 18th of July, 1460, occurred the great battle of Northampton between the Lancastrians and Yorkists, which gave the first decided advantage to the Duke of York. The army of Henry crossed the Nene from Northampton on the previous day, and entrenched themselves, with the abbey of Delapre on their right; they were driven back upon the river with great slaughter, and the cemeteries of St. John's Hospital and of the Grey-Friars received the bodies of many of the nobles and knights who fell fighting near the King's tent. A succession of similar victories, which finally placed the crown on the head of Edward IV., procured for Northamptonshire the honour of giving a queen to the throne of England. In a hedge-row * Fuller and very interesting particulars are given in Hartshorne's Northampton, p. 173. Item, Willielmo de Hibernia, pro factura quinque imaginum ad crucem de Norhamtona,' &c., which has led to various conjectures where the fifth figure could have stood; but, as in the first payment to William of Ireland, it is stated as being for five statues at Northampton and elsewhere,' it necessarily leaves but four at least for the Northampton cross. between between Grafton and Pury parks still stands, venerable in its decayed majesty, a tree which the country-people point out as the Queen's Oak. Four hundred years ago it was a stalwart tree, and the bleak winds of January, 1464, had scarcely stripped it of its brown leaves, when Edward IV., out a-hunting in Whittlebury Forest, and perhaps moodily turning over in his mind his marriage with the princess of Savoy which Warwick was then abroad negociating, was suddenly stopped under its branches by a fair stranger, who asked him where she might find the King. It was Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Woodville, Earl Rivers, who was on her way from her father's house at Grafton to entreat the King for the reversal of the attainder against her late husband Sir John Grey. When the King declared himself to be the person she sought, she instantly fell on her knees, to be raised as quickly by the too gallant monarch, who failed not to see the fair stranger home. There the fascination of the beautiful widow and the dexterous management of her ambitious mother, Dowager Duchess of Bedford, which an act of parliament afterwards solemnly pronounced the sorcery and witchcraft of Elizabeth and her mother,' led to her secret marriage with the King in a private chamber at Grafton in the following May. It was well for Elizabeth that on that May-day morning which set the crown to her ambition she did not foresee the miseries which awaited the future Queen-the murder of her father, her two brothers, and three of her sons; nor her own forlorn state when she sat alone alowe on the rushes all desolate and dismayed' in the Sanctuary of Westminster; nor her penury, when, in her short will, having no worldely goodes' to bequeath to her children, she gave them all she had to give her blessing. One comfort at least in her sorrow she must have found, that in the height of her royal prosperity, by completing the unfinished foundation left by Queen Margaret of Anjou, she had caused the name of Elizabeth Woodville to be gratefully remembered by Queen's College, in Cambridge. Though thus early connected with the crown, Grafton attained not its augmentation of title, till by Henry VIII. Grafton Regis became a King's honour or seignory, with fifty-three inferior manors annexed; and was again the scene of royal hunting and love-making, when Cardinal Campeggio, accompanied by Wolsey, came to take his leave on his returning to Rome in the matter of Queen Catherine's divorce, and where he found the shameless monarch already in deep flirtation with Anne Boleyn. Wolsey was at that time supposed to be in great disgrace with his master, and Cavendish gives a most graphic account how carefully the courtiers watched the King's countenance and bearing; how blank they |