Darlington in 100 Dates E-Book

Chris Lloyd

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 123

Beschreibung

Experience 100 key dates that shaped Darlington's history, highlighted its people's genius (or silliness) and embraced the unexpected. Featuring an amazing mix of social, criminal and sporting events, this book reveals a past that will fascinate, delight and surprise residents and visitors alike.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Introduction & Acknowledgements

Darlington in 100 Dates

1503 19 July

1585 7 May

1594 26 July

1603 14 May

1624 5 June

1642 1 December

1661 22 August

1687 24 September

1746 16 April

1782 21 May

1786 20 November

1807 19 February

1820 22 March

1821 19 April

1825 27 September

1829 1 February

1831 30 October

1845 4 February

1849 28 September

1850 23 May

1853 21 December

1858 31 July

1861 9 March

1861 21 March

1862 10 June

1863 13 March

1864 2 May

1865 26 September

1868 25 October

1870 1 January

1871 9 September

1872 26 January

1872 8 February

1872 17 July

1872 4 November

1873 29 May

1875 28 March

1879 23 February

1885 23 October

1886 25 January

1887 1 July

1889 28 January

1894 9 October

1894 8 November

1895 24 June

1897 22 June

1897 30 December

1901 20 January

1901 13 April

1901 31 December

1903 18 August

1905 5 August

1905 13 September

1906 6 August

1909 12 December

1910 20 August

1910 1 October

1911 25 April

1911 11 December

1912 15 April

1912 4 July

1916 18 September

1918 23 April

1925 1 August

1925 4 September

1927 17 November

1928 4 June

1928 27 June

1928 3 July

1928 23 December

1929 21 October

1930 13 December

1934 30 March

1935 20 October

1941 6 January

1943 8 April

1943 6 October

1944 13 June

1945 13 January

1945 5 March

1946 3 April

1958 17 December

1964 8 December

1965 15 May

1966 2 April

1967 2 February

1970 27 May

1972 25 September

1973 25 November

1974 23 June

1976 19 October

1983 24 March

1989 2 June

1989 30 June

1989 2 September

1991 3 November

1992 27 August

1994 11 November

2001 31 March

2008 15 August

Bibliography

Copyright

Introduction & Acknowledgements

These are 100 of my favourite stories that have appeared in my ‘Memories’ column in The Northern Echo since I started writing it twenty-five years ago. Back then, I was just a trainee and it was merely a picture caption which no one wanted to write; now I’m Deputy Editor and it is a twelve-page weekly supplement that is one of the most popular parts of the paper.

I became interested in the local history of Darlington as I tried to understand the town where I had generously been offered a job after leaving university, despite only having set foot a couple of times on Bank Top station platform – which means, I now know, that I got a step closer than Queen Victoria, who only gazed out of her carriage window.

I’m not sure I am any closer to my desired comprehension but I think I have uncovered some great stories – fascinating and often funny – about a great place.

My researches often start in Darlington Centre for Local Studies, and successive editors have always supported me, most notably Peter Barron, who currently keeps W.T. Stead’s chair warm. My wife, Petra, has been with me every step of the way, and I have been guided by my readers, whose knowledge, interest, enthusiasm and ability to stay awake during my talks never ceases to amaze me.

My thanks to them all, and I’m already looking forward to finding out about the next 100.

Chris Lloyd, 2015

DARLINGTON IN 100 DATES

1503

19 July

Margaret, the 13-year-old daughter of Henry VII, slept in the Bishop’s Manor House in Darlington on her way to meet her new husband, James IV of Scotland, for the first time. Margaret’s hand had been part of the deal that had sealed the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace between the feuding countries. She married James by proxy (i.e. the bridegroom was absent) in Richmond Palace on 25 January 1503, and then journeyed to meet him.

She rode on horseback, but when she came within 3 miles of a town, she jumped into a richly decorated bed and was carried in style by two footmen. The footmen picked their way over the Tees into Neasham, where the Abbess of Neasham, the Bishop of Durham and a ‘fayr company’, including forty horsemen, offered her a cross to kiss.

She was conveyed into Darlington, greeting knights and sheriffs on the roadside, and at the gates of St Cuthbert’s church, the vicar and ‘folks of the church’ welcomed her.

Margaret slept in the Bishop’s Palace – where the town hall is today – and a special lock was fitted to her chamber door (for centuries, its key was one of Darlington’s most prized possessions). Next morning, she left for Durham ‘in fayr array’.

The Treaty of Perpetual Peace lasted ten years before James invaded England in 1513.

(Longstaffe: History and Antiquities of Darlington)

1585

7 May

Between the hours of 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. there took hold ‘a most fierce and terrible fire as [if] it had been wildfire, which burned most faire houses in the Towne. It took good holde of pitch, tar, rossen, flax, gunpowder and such like commodities, and ceased not until it had burned 273 houses.’

Fanned by a ‘boisterous wind’, the timber houses rapidly burned. The wells were dry because of a drought, so people had either to run to the Skerne for water, or toss liquids like milk and beer onto the flames.

Much of High Row and Skinnergate was destroyed, including the house of the leading Eure family. Prosperous merchant Francis Oswell lost goods valued at £1,000, and in total the fire was said to have caused £20,000 of damage.

Although the area around St Cuthbert’s church was untouched, the Great Fire of Darlington rendered about 800 of Darlington’s 1,200 inhabitants homeless. They sought shelter in barns in nearby villages. A pamphlet, ‘Lamentable Newes from the Towne of Darnton’, told of the ‘poor distressed people’ in need of help. Their distress deepened in the autumn when the farmers evicted them from the barns so they could store their harvest.

Although the town was rebuilt on the old medieval street layout, it took several generations for Darlington to recover.

(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2011)

1594

26 July

George Swalwell was the last person to be publicly executed in Darlington. He had been sentenced to death in Durham three days earlier for treason as he refused to renounce his Catholicism. He was trussed to a cart and taken to his hometown, where four priests beat him with a rod across the Market Place to the gallows on Bakehouse Hill.

‘To terrify him the more, they led him by two great fires, the one made for burning his bowels, the other for boiling his quarters,’ recorded Bishop Richard Challoner.

The rope was put around Swalwell’s neck and, as he urged Catholics in the crowd to pray for him, he was pushed off the ladder. He was cut down before he lost consciousness and the hangman ‘drew him along by the rope yet alive, and there dismembered and bowelled him, and cast his bowels into the fire’, said the bishop.

At the taking out of his heart, he lifted up his left hand to his head, which the hangman laid down again; and when the heart was cast into the fire, the same hand laid itself over the open body … Then the hangman cut off his head and held it up saying: ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ His quarters, after they were boiled in a cauldron, were buried in the baker’s dunghill.

(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2002)

1603

14 May

King James VI of Scotland was making his journey south to London to be crowned King James I of England when he came across the stunning view of Teesdale, to the west of Darlington. At Bolam, he stopped and sat with his back against an ancient, arthritic stone finger and drank in the view.

‘I have taken possession of the promised land,’ he sighed. ‘It is a bonnie, bonnie country.’ As he was sitting cross-legged, the stone finger was immediately nicknamed ‘Leg’s Cross’ (another explanation is that the stone was erected by the Romans’ 20th Legion of Piercebridge, but the weathering of time meant that only ‘LEG X’ survived of their carving).

The king adjourned to Walworth Castle for the night, where his host was Elizabeth Jennison. Her late husband, Thomas, had been Queen Elizabeth I’s Auditor General for Ireland and had restored the ruined castle in the 1580s.

The king ‘was so bountifully entertained that it gave his excellency very high contentment’, says a contemporary account. ‘After his quiet repose there that night and part of the next day, he took leave of her with many princely gratulations.’

In the seventeenth century, the Saxon village of Walworth, which was to the north of the castle, was cleared by the castle owners to improve their view. Since 1981, the castle has been a hotel.

(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2005)

1624

5 June

Xpofer Simpson, a labourer from Thornaby, was discovered strangled near the confluence of the Baydale Beck and the River Tees at Low Coniscliffe. The alarm was raised and Xpofer’s nephew, weaver Ralph Simpson, was seized at Aldborough St John and dragged back to the scene where deputy coroner Francis Raisbie swore in fourteen men as the jury.

They heard that Xpofer and Ralph had been to Gunnerside to buy a little black horse for 10s. Witnesses reported seeing them en route, but ‘before the sunne did arise’, Ralph was spotted alone. Constable Thomas Emerson turned out Ralph’s pockets and found ‘a cord made of throumes (the warp ends of weaver’s web) which was bloody’.

The jury reported: ‘Wee applied the cord to the circle that was about the necke of the party murthered, and it did answer unto the circle; and wee caused the said Ralph to handle the bodye; and upon his handlinge and movinge, the body did bleed both at mouth, nose and eares.’ As Shakespeare said, ‘blood will have blood’ – an old belief that a body would bleed afresh when approached by the murderer.

Due to such incontrovertible proof, Ralph was found guilty. He was hanged at Durham before the week was out, and the balladeers made a fortune selling copies of their new composition, ‘The Baydayle Banckes Tragedy’.

(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2011)

1642

1 December

The Battle of Piercebridge was fought between Royalists led by William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Colonel John Hotham, a Parliamentarian commander.

Cavendish was marching to Yorkshire with 8,000 men when he discovered ‘Hotham’s Roundheads’ dug in on the high ground of Cliffe on the Yorkshire bank of the Tees. They were a much smaller force: three troops of horsemen and four companies of foot soldiers with two guns, commanded by Captain Hatcher. When the Royalists rushed at Piercebridge, Hatcher rained fire upon them, forcing them to retreat. Roundheads on horseback swept down the steep Yorkshire bank and chased after them, killing several.

Cavendish regrouped. He brought his heavy guns onto the higher Durham bank of the Tees, at Carlbury, and began a bombardment. It destroyed some of Piercebridge’s Roman remains, but the Roundheads fled, and Cavendish crossed the bridge unhindered into Yorkshire.

However, his victory came at some cost. Colonel Thomas Howard, grandson of a Cumberland nobleman, was the most senior Royalist officer killed that day. He was buried at St Edwin’s church, in High Coniscliffe, although the twenty or so lower ranks that were killed in the rush onto the bridge were lobbed into a common grave near Carlbury Mill, along with their dead horses. Their skeletons were discovered in 1828.

(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2011)

1661

22 August

The newly enthroned Bishop of Durham, John Cosin, wrote of the scene that had greeted him in the middle of the River Tees at High Wath, Neasham, when he entered his bishopric for the first time from the south.

More than 1,000 people, many on horseback, stood in the river waiting to present him with the Conyers falchion – the enormous sword that Sir John Conyers once used to slay the Sockburn Worm, or dragon.

The bishop wrote:

The confluence and alacritie of the gentry, clergy, and other people, was very great, and at my first entrance through the river of Tease, there was scarce any water to be seene for the multitude of horse and men that filled it, when the sword that killed the dragone was delivered to me with all the formality of trumpets, and gunshots, and acclamations that might be made.

Sir John had required the strength of the Holy Spirit to wield the falchion against the ‘fiery flying serpent’ that had terrorised people in Saxon times, and so the sword represents the strength of the faith of the people of Durham. For centuries, it has been presented to the new bishop when he crosses into Durham, although since High Wath closed in 1790, the ceremony has been performed on Croft Bridge – most recently in 2014.

(Longstaffe, and Lloyd: Rockliffe)

1687

24 September

On this day, Sir Gilbert Gerard, the High Sherriff of Durham, died. His wife Dame Mary is the most likely source of the story of Darlington’s most famous ghost.

Mary and her younger sister Frances were the daughters of John Cosin, the Bishop of Durham. They married brothers, Sir Gilbert and Sir Charles Gerard (or Jarratt), and during the English Civil War (1642–51), they moved into the Bishop’s Palace in the Leadyard (now the location of the town hall) for safety. But Puritan soldiers burst in, demanding money. Lady Gerard protested that she had none – so they tried to take the jewel-encrusted ring on her finger. But no matter how hard they pulled, it would not come. Hearing Lady Gerard’s husband approaching, a soldier hacked off her arm with his knife, and hastily departed. Blood spurting from her wound, Lady Gerard slumped down the wall and died.

Days later, her arm, minus the ring, was found by a fisherman in the Skerne, and until the palace was demolished in the 1930s, a red stain down a wall could never be covered by whitewash. Lady Gerard is regularly seen in a long white silk dress in the Leadyard, searching for her lost limb:

The lady who in violence died

Left her blood that none could hide,

Her desolate vigil still to keep,

While Darlington folk are sound asleep.

(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2001)

1746

16 April