Yorkshire Dales and Fells. Gordon Home
The Barley Cross, which stood near the larger one, must have been quite an interesting feature. It consisted of a lofty pillar with a cross at the top, and rings were fastened either on the shaft or to the steps upon which it stood, so that the cross might answer the purpose of a whipping-post. The pillory stood not far away, and the may-pole is also mentioned.
But despite all this squandering of the treasures that it should have been the business of the town authorities to preserve, the tower of the Grey Friars has survived, and, next to the castle, it is one of the chief ornaments of the town. Whitaker is by no means sure of the motives that led to its preservation—perhaps because he knew the Richmond people too well to expect much of them—for he writes: ‘Taste, however, or veneration, or lucky accident, has preserved the great tower of the “Freres” of Richmond.’ Certainly none of these causes saved any other portions of the buildings, for the beautiful Perpendicular tower stands quite alone. It is on the north side of the town, outside the narrow limits of the walls, and was probably only finished in time to witness the dispersal of the friars who had built it. It is even possible that it was part of a new church that was still incomplete when the Dissolution of the Monasteries made the work of no account except as building materials for the townsfolk. The actual day of the surrender was January 19, 1538, and we wonder if Robert Sanderson, the Prior, and the fourteen brethren under him, suffered much from the privations that must have attended them at that coldest period of the year. At one time the friars, being of a mendicant order, and inured to hard living and scanty fare, might have made light of such a disaster, but in these later times they had expanded somewhat from their austere ways of living, and the dispersal must have cost them much suffering. Almost in this actual year Leland writes of ‘their Howse, Medow, Orchard, and a litle Wood,’ which he mentions as being walled in, and, seeing that the wall enclosed nearly sixteen acres, it appears probable that the gray-cloaked men can scarcely have been ignorant of all the luxuries of life. Notwithstanding this, they stoutly refused to acknowledge the King’s supremacy, and suffered accordingly.
Going back to the reign of Henry VII. or thereabouts, we come across the curious ballad of ‘The Felon Sow of Rokeby and the Freres of Richmond’ quoted from an old manuscript by Sir Walter Scott in ‘Rokeby.’ It may have been as a practical joke, or merely as a good way of getting rid of such a terrible beast, that
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