English literature -- England -- Lancashire; Legends -- England -- Lancashire
The person who adventured this dangerous personification of the Evil One
was never known. Whether some bold and benevolent individual,
interposing on behalf of the fatherless and famishing little ones, or
some being of a less substantial nature,--whether one of those immortal
intelligences of a middle order between earth and heaven, who at that
time were supposed to take pleasure in tormenting the vicious and
unworthy,--is more than our limited capacities can disclose.
It is said that on Easter Monday following the Black Knight died; and
though probably it had no connection with the circumstances we have
related, yet was his decease a sufficiently strange event in the
mysterious chapter of coincidences to warrant this memorial.
FAIR ELLEN OF RADCLIFFE.
In Percy's Relics, this ballad is called "The Lady Isabella's Tragedy,"
and is thus introduced:--
"This ballad is given from an old black-letter copy in the Pepys
Collection, collated with another in the British Museum, H. 263,
folio. It is there entitled, 'The Lady Isabella's Tragedy, or the
Step-Mother's Cruelty; being a relation of a lamentable and cruel
murther, committed on the body of the Lady Isabella, the only
daughter to a noble Duke, etc. To the tune of "The Lady's Fall."'
To some copies are annexed eight more modern stanzas, entitled,
'The Duchess' and Cook's Lamentation.'"
Dr Whitaker says, "The remains of Radcliffe Tower prove it to have been
a manor-house of the first rank. It has been quadrangular; but two sides
only remain." A licence to kernel and embattle shows the date of its
erection, or rather rebuilding, to be in the fourth year of Henry IV.,
by James Radcliffe, who, we find by the pedigree, was the eldest son of
William Radcliffe. He married Joan, daughter to Sir John Tempest of
Bracewell, in the county of York.
"The noble old hall is forty-three feet two inches in length, and in one
part twenty-six feet, in another twenty-eight feet in width. The two
massy principals which support the roof are the most curious specimens
of ancient wood-work I have ever seen. The broadest piece of timber is
two feet seven inches by ten inches. A wall-plate on the outside of one
beam, from end to end, measures two feet by ten inches. The walls are
finished at the square with a moulded cornice of oak.
"At the bottom of the room is a door opening into one of the towers, the
lower part of which only remains, of massy grout-work, and with three
arches, each furnished with a funnel or aperture like a chimney. On the
left side of the hall are the remains of a very curious window-frame of
oak, wrought in Gothic tracery, but square at top. Near the top of the
hall, on the right, are the remains of a doorway, opening into what was
once a staircase, and leading to a large chamber above the kitchen, the
approach to which was by a door of massy oak, pointed at the top.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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