Chapter I.

Otago Witness, Issue 941, 11 December 1869, Page 18

Chapter I.

. j ',' ' n THE TADCASTER London, '.at that /time, possessed only •one, bridge, London- bridge, \ with' houses built , upon it, , I This bridge connected London with Southwark, a suburFirr^gu•larly paved' witKpebbles from the Thames, „and orowded with jjropden ; houses of ithe „ .most, s inflammable materials, as , Was \'proyed inA666. ; Southwark was thenpro^ * npymo&d, Jjoudtic, > now-a-days it is pro- ■ nounced..iSbWoMore, ; ,or , something , very like it. For the r,esfc, an excellent plan of pronouncing English,name» is .not to pro- ; nounce them at all. Thus, for, Southampton, jsay Stptii. . It was the time when Chatham was pronounced Je €aime. Southwark of< that, day. resembled Southwark of the present aboub as much aa Vanjirard resembles Marseilles. It was, a suburb, it is a town. For all this it was . even then busy with navigation.. In a huge Cyolopean wall on the batiks^ of the Thames were fixed rings, to which were moored a number of , river- boats. This, wall was called the Effroc-Btone. York, when it was Saxon, was called Effroc. The legend ran that a oertain Duke of Effroc had drowned* himself at the foot of this wall. In truth, the water, was quite deep enough to drown even a duke. At low water there were six good fathoms. The excellence of this little anchorage was an attraction even for seagoing vessels, and an old Dutch lugger called the Vograat was generally moored, alongside the EfFroc-stone, making weekly .voyages to and from London to Rotterdam. Other boats left twice a day for Deptford, Greenwich, or Gravesend, going down with one tide and coming up with the other. The distance to Gravesend, although twenty miles, was done in six hours. The "Vograat was built after a model one now only sees in marine museums, and was something like a junk ; for in those days while France copied Greece, Holland copied China. One of the inconveniences of her build was that the decks were almost entirely exposed to the wash of the sea. There was, in fact, little or no bulwark to the raised portion of the deck, and the result was the frequent loss of men overboard. The "Vograat sailed direct to Holland without even stopping at Gravesend. About the Effroc-atone, in the bend of the Thames, almost opposite the palace of St. Jamea, behind Lambeth-house, not far from the promenade then called Foxhall (probably Vauxhall), there was, between a porcelain, pottery and a colouredbottle factory, one of these largo open plots of ground, covered with short grass, called in France cultures et mails, and in English, bowling-greens. Of the word bowling-green, a green carpet on which to roll a ball, we have made houlingrin. Now-a-days -we have this meadow in our houses, only it is put on a table ; a cloth takes the place of the turf, and it is called " billiards.'' For the rest, it is difficult to say why, having such a word as boulevard (green ball), which is the same as bowling green, we have taken the trouble to make out boulivgrin. It is surprising that such a (grave personage as a dictionary should indulge in such useless luxuries. The bowling-green at Southwark was called Tarrinzean-field, having formerly belonged to the baronial family of Hastingß, who were also barons'of Tarrinzoan and Mauohlino. From the Hastings family, Tarrinzean- fields had passed into the possession of the Lords of Tadcaster, who had let it out as a public ground, just as afterwards a Duke of Orleans let out the Palais Royal, and it became in time a town common. Tarrinzean-fiold was also a sort of permanont fair-grouud. Orowded with cardsharpers, tumblers, mountebanks, travelling musicians, and with what Archbishop Sharp would oall " fools who came to see the dovil"— to see the devil was to go to the theatre, j Round tho field were several inns which \ drove a thriving trade among the frequenters of these travelling theatres. They were simple stalls, inhabited only byday, for in the evening the innkeeper put the key in his pooket and went away. One only was a house. There was, in fact, no other stationary building on the whole bowling-green, for the caravans on the fair-ground could be movod at any moment of that vagabond life peouliar to mountebanks. This inn, called the Tadoaster Inn, after the ancient lords of the manor, was more a wino shop than a tavern, more a hostelry than a wino shop ; but it had a great entranoe door, and a court-yard of some gfee.

i" Tttii^tr^eMdbo^ opening ; out Sin! $i .ike green, was thVregttlar 1 entranwtoi tM inn, but there was a smaller door at the side/p referred by the, customers. This door opened, on what , might be called! the, drinking-room, a/krw, ceilinged smoky barni furuißhed iwith tables* Above it, was a window on the first (floor, from which hung. the .sign- of the,.inn. ™ ■greats door* permanently , barred and bolted; remained' closed. 1 :,»•«:-,, To enter the courfc-yjird it Was necessary to'pasS tnroughthe driuking-rdom. ' In 'this Tadcaster Inn there was a master and a boy.*,'; The master^as called "" faster Nicless," the , boy " Govicum.'; Master" "Nioless was an avaricious old curmudgeon, in perpetual fear of the law. As for. the boy of 14, who poured out the beer, and answered to the name of G-ovioum, he was a stout happy fellbw with &n apronycldaely, shorn as a sign of servitude. He slept'on the ground floor, in a place where a dog' had formerly been kept, with a Bky-light looking out on the bowling-green.