and in due course come the ravaging and burning Danes;
and in due course still, the murdering and plundering
and scorning Normans. But all so quietly, like
the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of railway
celerity in the foreshortened retrospect; and after
the Normans have crushed themselves down into the
mass of the vanquished, and formed the English out
of the blend, there follow the many wars of the successions,
of the Roses, of the Stuarts, with all the intermediate
insurrections and rebellions. In the splendid
Histories of Shakespeare, which are full of York, the
imagination visits and revisits the place, and you
are entreated by mouth of one of his princely personages,
“I pray you let
us satisfy our eyes
With the memorials
and things of fame,
That do renown
this city,”
where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards
and Eleanors abide still and shall forever abide while
the English speech lasts.
[Illustration: Bootham bar and
the Minster]
Something of all this I knew, and more pretended,
with a mounting indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster
Week which was to turn us out of our hotel. We
began our search for other lodgings with what seemed
to be increasing failure. The failure had consolation
in it so far as the sweet regret of people whose apartments
were taken could console. They would have taken
us at other hotels for double the usual price, but,
when we showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved
that they had no rooms at any price. From house
to house, then, we went, at first vaingloriously,
in the spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into
any side street, wherever the legend of Apartments
showed itself in a transom. At last, the second
day, after being denied at seven successive houses,
we found quite the refuge we wanted in the Bootham,
which means very much more than the ignorant reader
can imagine. Our upper rooms looked on a pretty
grassy garden space behind, where there was sun when
there was sun, and in front on the fine old brick
dwellings of a most personable street, with a sentiment
of bygone fashion. At the upper end of it was
a famous city gate—Bootham Bar, namely—with
a practicable portcullis, which we verified at an
early moment by going up into “the chamber over
the gate,” where it was once worked, and whence
its lower beam, set thick with savage spikes, was
dropped. Outside the gate there was a sign in
the wall saying that guards were to be had there to
guide travellers through the Forest of Galtres beyond
Bootham, and keep them from the wolves. Now woods
and wolves and guards are all gone, and Bootham Bar
is never closed.
