The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends". Charles G. Harper

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      THE DARK ENTRY, CANTERBURY.

      "Now nay, dear Uncle Ingoldsby, now send me not I pray,

       Back by that Entry dark, for that you know's the nearest way;

       I dread that Entry dark with Jane alone at such an hour,

       It fears me quite—it's Friday night!—and then Nell Cook hath pow'r."

      "And who, silly child, is Nell Cook?" asks Uncle Ingoldsby; and the King's Scholar answers:

      "It was in bluff King Harry's days, while yet he went to shrift,

       And long before he stamped and swore, and cut the Pope adrift;

       There lived a portly Canon then, a sage and learned clerk;

       He had, I trow, a goodly house, fast by that Entry dark.

      "The Canon was a portly man—of Latin and of Greek,

       And learned lore, he had good store,—yet health was on his cheek.

       The Priory fare was scant and spare, the bread was made of rye,

       The beer was weak, yet he was sleek—he had a merry eye.

      "For though within the Priory the fare was scant and thin,

       The Canon's house it stood without;—he kept good cheer within;

       Unto the best he prest each guest, with free and jovial look,

       And Ellen Bean ruled his cuisine.—He called her 'Nelly Cook.'"

      It is not a very proper story that the King's Scholar unfolds; of how a "niece" of the Canon comes to stay with him, and arouses the jealousy of the good-looking cook, whose affections that "merry eye" of the Canon had captured. Nell Cook thereupon successfully poisons the Canon and the strange lady with "some nasty doctor's stuff," with which she flavours a pie destined for the Canonical table, and the two are found as the Scholar tells:

      "The Canon's head lies on the bed,—his niece lies on the floor!

       They are as dead as any nail that is in any door!"

      Nell Cook, for her crime, says Tom Ingoldsby, adapting to his literary uses the legend long current in Canterbury, was buried alive beneath one of the great paving-stones of the "Dark Entry"; when, local history does not inform us:

      But one thing's clear—that's all the year, on every Friday night,

       Throughout that Entry dark doth roam Nell Cook's unquiet sprite.

      And whoever meets Nell Cook is bound to die some untimeous death within the year! Certainly, the Dark Entry is not a place greatly frequented after nightfall, even nowadays—but that is perhaps less by reason of superstitious fears than because it leads to nowhere in particular.

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

      THE CATHEDRAL: THE MURDER OF BECKET

      It is by the south porch that the Cathedral is entered. Let none suppose this to be the veritable Cathedral that Becket knew; that was replaced, piece by piece, in the succeeding centuries, all save the Norman transept where he met his fate. The nave, by whose lofty, aspiring perspective we advance, was built in 1380 upon the site of that of the twelfth century. According to the testimony of the time, it was in a ruinous condition. Conceive, if you can, the likelihood of one of those particularly massive Norman naves like those of Tewkesbury and Gloucester, which this resembled, becoming ruinous! The more probable truth of the matter is that the feeling of the time had grown inimical to those cavernous interiors of the older architects, and sought any excuse for tearing them down and building in their stead in the lightsome character of the Perpendicular period.

      This nave, then, much later than Becket's era, leads somewhat unsympathetically to that most interesting spot in the whole Cathedral, the north transept. Here is the "Martyrdom," as that massive Norman cross-limb where Becket fell beneath the swords and axes of his murderers is still called. You look down into it from the steps leading into the choir and choir-aisles, as into a pit. Little changed, in the midst of all else that has been altered, this north transept alone remains very much as it was when he was slain, more than seven hundred years ago, and the sight of its stern, massive walls does much to bring back to those who behold them that fierce scene which, in the passage of all those years and the heaping of dull verbiage piled up by industrious Dryasdusts and beaters of the air, has been dulled and blunted.

      Barham—our witty and mirthful Tom Ingoldsby—felt a keen personal interest in this scene, for was not his ancestor—as he conceived him to be—Reginald FitzUrse, the chief actor in that bloody scene of Becket's death? He is flippant, it must be allowed, in the reference he makes to the occurrence in the Ingoldsby Legends:

      A fair Cathedral, too, the story goes,

       And kings and heroes lie entombed within her;

       There pious Saints in marble pomp repose,

       Whose shrines are worn by knees of many a sinner;

       There, too, full many an aldermanic nose

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