Lancashire also possesses numerous small sheets of water, varying from a mile to a hundred yards in length, and called "tarns." The situations of all of these are romantic and wild-in some instances almost inaccessible. Such are the lakes contained in that part of the Hundred of Lonsdale, distinguished as "North of the Sands," separated from the rest of the county by the great bay of Morecambe, and generally reckoned part of the lake country. It consists of the Lordship of Furness and the Parish of Cartmel. Furness has been described as an island, and called so by one of its old Abbots, from being surrounded, with the exception of a few yards at the water-shed, on the pass where the three counties meet, by river, lake and sea. It is divided into High and Low Furness, or Furness Fells and Furness Plain; and it is the mountainous part of Furness, rich in topographic and scenic, and not deficient in historic interest, that I propose to bring under the notice of this Society, in a short series of papers; and, taking its metropolis, humble as it is, as properly first, I shall devote this to the description and history of the town of Hawkshead.

Readers of Wordsworth will remember that in his principal poem, The Excursion, he relates that he first knew the pedler-hero of his narrative

In a little town obscure,

A market-village, seated in a tract

Of mountains, where my school-day time was passed.

The "little town obscure" was Hawkshead, which at the period of Wordsworth's youth was famous for its Grammar School.

Besides the late poet-laureate, another bard, one of a very different stamp, has honoured Hawkshead with his notice. Richard Braithwaite, author of that eccentric and witty doggerel, Drunken Barnaby's Journal, names it as one of the resting-places in his "Itinerary," thus

Donec Hauxide specto sensem;

Illinc sedem Lancastrensem.

In the English version

66

Thence to Hauxide's marish pasture;
Thence to th' seat of old Lancaster.

On this meagre passage one of Braithwaite's annotators remarks" HAUXIDE.-This place, as well as a few others, are only named to say 'farewell,' as though Barnaby made "no long tarrying therein. For these partial omissions it is "difficult to assign a reason, unless it may be conjectured "that it is not attributable to dearth of incident, but that "Braithwaite knew himself to be too intimately known in "the neighbourhood of particular towns to remain, if they were described, long undiscovered as author of the poem.' This is exceedingly probable ;-Braithwaite, having relations resident at Hawkshead and his family-seat at no great distance, would be known there as a country gentleman of dignity and state, and could not wish to be identified with such a disreputable vagabond as he has left us in his "Drunken Barnaby." Amongst his Remains after Death the following occurs :—

Vpon the late Decease of my much-lamented friend and kinsman,
Allen Nicholson, a zealous and industrious member of Church
and Commonweal.

Hauxide laments thy death; Grassmyre not so,
Wishing thou had'st been dead ten years agoe,
For then her market had not been so done,

But had suruiu'd thy age in time to come;

And well may Hauxide grieue at thy departure,
Since she received from thee her ancient charter.

Except in the works of these two very dissimilar bards and of some merely local writers, Hawkshead, so far as I am aware, has no other place in literature. Its place in history

I shall notice hereafter. Meanwhile I may attempt a description of it as seen in our own time.

It is one of the smallest market towns in the kingdom, consisting of about eighty houses and about four hundred inhabitants. Its appearance is pretty accurately described by "A Gentleman," who made and published A Tour from London to the Lakes in 1791- "A small market town, where the houses seem as if they had been dancing a country dance, but, being all out, had stood still where "the dance ended." That it is little altered in seventy years may be inferred from the following quatrain by a resident rhymer, not much known, describing its present appearance:

A quaint old town is Hawkshead and an ancient look it bears.
Its church, its school, its dwellings, its streets, its lanes and squares
Are all irregularities-all angles, twists and crooks,

With penthouses and gables over archways, wents and nooks.

Its squares are two, one of which may be called a square with all propriety. The other would defy a more able mathematician than I to define its figure. Of streets, accurately speaking, it possesses one, of varying contour, and width frequently and awkwardly encroached upon by gabled shops standing out at right angles to the roadway and houses, by aggressive corners, and by low upper stories projected far beyond the foundation line of the buildings. For the paucity of streets in Hawkshead, however, we are more than compensated by the number of its lanes, entries, wents, passages and "nooks." The most important of these last is called Grandy nook—that is, Grandmother's corner-the way through which, though it affords the only access to the parsonage and some other residences, has long offered a puzzle to the drivers of even single-horsed vehicles. Altogether it is not easy to imagine a town laid out in a more eccentric manner, or the same number of houses shaken or huddled together with less regard to order, arrangement or convenience; nor is it possible

to conceive anything more angularly irregular than its ground plan, or more rudely picturesque than the outlines of its walls, chimneys and roofs.

The situation of Hawkshead is singularly pleasant and cheerful. It lies at a short distance from the head of Esthwaite lake, on the north-western side of a fine valley, open to the north-east and south-west, and bounded on the western side by a long range of elevated moorlands, which separate it from the vales of Coniston, Grizedale and Dalepark; and on the east by a shorter extent of similar heights, dividing it from a part of Windermere.

The town has immediately on its western side a curious but very beautiful accumulation of glacier-formed hummocks (moraines), locally called "Hows." Equally immediately to the east it has the broad green meadows which form part of the floor of Esthwaite vale, and, becoming marshy near the lake, justify Drunken Barnaby in calling them Hawkshead's "marish pasture."

Notwithstanding its lack of shelter, or perhaps in consequence of the free sweep of the winds preventing the stagnation of vapours, miasmatic or otherwise, Hawkshead is remarkably salubrious, the death rate of the whole parish being under one per cent. per annum, or considerably less than one half the average rate of the whole kingdom.*

Instances of longevity are not infrequent, for octogenarians have been numerous, and nonogenarians not singular there. Of what the ratio of increase might be, were it not for emigration and other reducing causes, we may judge by the case of Prudence Nicholson, an old lady of eighty-two, who boasts a living progeny equal in numbers to the years of her life; and the case of another has been quoted, whose descendants at her death numbered 119.

It has, however, of late years been visited with low fever of a mild type, occasioned, as is supposed, by the frequent inundation of the meadows.

Its name is stated by Mr. Ferguson to be derived from Hawkr, a Scandinavian proper name; while the late Dr. Whitaker, Vicar of Blackburn, who had a residence here, told me that it, as well as the local family name of Hawkrigg, must bear some reference to falconry. Like more of the reverend doctor's local etymologies, this derivation can hardly be accepted. I incline to the opinion that Mr. Ferguson may be right. It is very possible that some old Norse settler named Hawkr, or Auk, once possessed a hide of land there, and so left his name to the spot.

Hawskshead may fairly lay claim to a very respectable antiquity. There is reason to believe that it was a community and a chapelry at a date considerably anterior to the Norman Conquest. In the earliest annals of Furness Abbey we find it referred to as a place even then of some standing and importance, as I shall shew when I treat of its ecclesiastical and manorial affairs.

Perhaps the most interesting circumstance in the history of Hawkshead is that it was one of the stations selected for the mustering of recruits in that futile rising of 40,000 men called "The Pilgrimage of Grace" in 1537, which, as may be remembered, was instigated chiefly by the heads of the large religious houses after the smaller communities had been suppressed. Robert Aske, a gentleman of East Yorkshire, was the military chief of this insurrection; and his proclamation addressed to the people of Hawkshead ran as follows

:

To the Commyns of Hawkside Parish, Bailiffs or Constables, with all the Hamletts of the same.

Wel beloved, we greet you well; and whereas our brother Poverty, and our brother Roger goith forward, is openly for the aide and assistance of your faith and holy Church, and for the reformation of such abbeys and monasteries, now dissolved and suppressed without any just cause. Wherefore gudde brethers, forasmuch as our sayd brederyn hath send to us for aide and helpe, wee do not only effectually desire you, but also under the paine of