The Annals of Willenhall by Frederick William Hackwood (13 ebook reader TXT) 📕

(Water).

The other room is oblong, with beams across dividing its ceiling into four parts. In these parts there are four well-drawn figures, one believed to be Bacon, with beard, moustache, whiskers, and in Elizabethan costume; two close cropped heads, carried on noble necks, believed to be respectively Julius Caesar and Mark Antony; and the fourth is said to be Homer, with the customary curly hair and beard, but showing a collar of some sort, and apparently wearing a skull cap. Over the mantel, painted on canvas, is the Coliseum, showing the Arch of Titus and a pool in the foreground.

In the main room upstairs is still to be seen the portrait of Dr. Wilkes, painted on canvas, over the mantelpiece. He is depicted as a clean shaven man with benevolent face, bluish or blue-grey eyes, a good forehead, nose, mouth and chin well-defined, and wearing a wig. His costume includes a high-cut waistcoat, bearing ten buttons, opened in front nearly all the way down to show cravat and frilled shirt, the cravat having a buckle--probably jewelled in front. The outer coat is without a collar, cut a little lower than the waistcoat, sloping from above outwards, showing eight buttons, and apparently of greenish-brown velvet.

The pool which formerly ornamented the garden had disappeared; but the boathouse is still there, and the room above it in which the Doctor used to keep his Antiquarian Collection and other artistic treasures. As to the lawns, shrubberies, gardens, orchards, and pleasaunces, there is scarcely a remnant left.

Of the once sweet and pellucid stream, spanned by an ornamental bridge, which conducted the rambler to the pleasant meads beyond, nothing remains but the name, "Willenhall Brook"--it is now little better than a dirty open sewer.

It may not be generally known that a passing allusion is made to Wilkes in Boswell's "Life of Johnson."

In the IV. chapter of Vol. I. of this monumental biography we read that in 1740 Dr. Johnson wrote "an epitaph on Phillips, a musician, which was afterwards published with some other pieces of his, in 'Mrs. Williams's Miscellanies.' This epitaph is so exquisitely beautiful, that I remember even Lord Kaines, strangely prejudiced as he was against Dr. Johnson, was compelled to allow it very high praise. It has been ascribed to Mr. Garrick from its appearing at first with the signature G; but I have heard Mr. Garrick declare it was written by Dr. Johnson, and give the following account of the manner in which it was composed. Johnson and he were sitting together, when amongst other things Garrick repeated an epitaph upon this Phillips, by a Dr. Wilkes, in these words:--

Exalted soul! whose harmony could please The love-sick virgin, and the gouty ease; Could jarring discord, like Amphion, move To beauteous order and harmonious love; Rest here in peace, till angels bid thee rise And meet thy blessed Saviour in the skies.

"Johnson shook his head at the common-place funeral lines, and said to Garrick, 'I think, Davy, I can make better.'"

The great biographer goes on to state that Johnson, after stirring about his tea and meditating a little while, produced these lines:--

Exalted soul! thy various sounds could please The love-sick virgin, and the gouty ease; Could jarring crowds, like old Amphion, move To beauteous order and harmonious love. Rest here in peace, till angels bid thee rise, And join thy Saviour's concert in the skies.

Suffice it to add that the personage who inspired the lines was an eccentric genius named Claudius Phillips {88}, on whose memorial tablet in the porch of Wolverhampton Church were engraved the said lines, attributed to Dr. Wilkes, who strangely enough is described as "of Trinity College, Oxford and Rector of Pitchford, Salop"--a clergyman whose name was John, and who lived a century previously. We are further informed that our Willenhall worthy is spoken of by Browne Willis in the "History of Mitred Abbies," Vol. II. p. 189--Browne Willis being one of the most notable antiquarians of that period, and an eccentric individual withal.

All this points to the fact that Dr. Richard Wilkes was well known as a writer, and acknowledged as an authority.

[Picture: Decorative flower]

Chapater XVII(Willenhall "Spaw.")

 

It is difficult to imagine Willenhall as a health resort; yet it was no fault of Dr. Richard Wilkes that his native spot did not become a fashionable inland watering place.

It should be explained that during the eighteenth century there was almost a mania to discover and exploit wells and springs, and to regard them as fountains of health to which the fashionable and the well-to-do might be attracted. Before the newer fashion of sea bathing was introduced--which was early in the next century--there was a great number of these newly-invented places of inland resort. For instance, Dudley had its charming Spa on Pensnett Chace; and to show that Wolverhampton was not behindhand, we take the liberty of quoting from the MSS. of Dr. Wilkes:

"A medical spring has lately been discovered at Chapel Ash, in the south-west part of this town, which purges moderately and without the least uneasiness. A brown ocre, or absorbent earth, remains after evaporation, mixt with salt and sulphur; so that it seems to promise relief in all kinds of disorders proceeding from costiveness, and alcaline, fiery, and acid humours in the stomach and bowels, attended by a flow of feverish heat, eruptions on the skin called scorbutic, headaches, giddiness, flatulency, sour eructations, flying pains called nervous and rheumatic, the hemorrhoids or piles, asthma, and many other disorders which seem incurable by the most powerful medicines."

Truly the Doctor might have earned a good living nowadays by writing the advertisements for modern quack specifics.

Shaw's description of the Willenhall Spa says that "the spring arises on the north side of a brook which runs almost directly from the west to the east, and so very near to it that a moderate shower will raise the brook as to cover it. About 200 yards up this brook, on the same side, are several springs, one of which was much taken notice of by our ancestors, and consecrated to St. Sunday, no common saint. Over it is the following inscription:--

Fons occulis morbisque cutaneis diu celebris, A.D. 1726."

"Saint Sunday" must have been some local saint; or, more probably, a jocular embodiment of the sacredness of this day of the week with its peculiarly pagan name, to the cause of idleness, and so dubbed by the native wit of Willenhall; anyway, no saint of this name is to be found in the authorised Calendar of any church.

One of the Wilkes MSS. utilised by Shaw, and dated 1737, records the following experiment worked by the learned doctor with the local mineral waters:--

"I evaporated in a brass furnace 13.5 gallons to 3 quarts, then let it stand 3 days to settle, and poured the clear water from the foeces. This was a light smooth insipid earth of a yellow colour, fat between the fingers, insipid and impalpable, which being dried, weighed 93 grains. The remaining 3 quarts I evaporated in a brass kettle and had from it 53 grains of a very salt glutinous substance which dried into a solid mass of a brown colour. When the water came to a pint or thereabout, it began to smell like glew, and continued to do so when in a solid substance; it was then also as high-coloured as lye; but I am afraid this colour might arise from the brass kettle, in some measure, or too great a fire, being perhaps burnt."

Another of his scientific records runs:--

"Oct. 9th.--I put into a Florence flask as much of this water as filled it up to the neck within 5 inches of the top. This I placed in a sand heat and increased the fire gradually till it boiled; and so I evaporated ad siccitatem. Some volatile sal stuck to the glass even up to the top; at the bottom was a small quantity of dark coloured matter, like that above, but I could not get together 2 grains of either. Here it is plain this sal is so volatile as to be raised and fly away by heat."

In another place he writes:--

"On the 5th of November, 1737, I filled several glasses with this water, and put into them the following simples:--

Green Tea. This, in about 24 hours, made it of the colour of sack, and, by standing, it became much deeper coloured, like strong old beer. Fustic; not so deep, more like cyder. Red Sanders; almost the same colour in the light; but if I held the glass in the shade, it appeared of a blueish green, exactly like some old glass bottles I have formerly seen. Alkanet; deeper, like old mountain wine. Galls; paler than any of the foregoing. A large blue scum on the top, such as we see upon urine in fevers, and standing lakes of water, where there are minerals. With logwood, tormentil, cort, granat, etc., there are some spots of this kind, but with none so much as with galls.

"A little below the Spaw (continues our authority), on the other side of the brook, they meet with a white clay, full of yellow veins of a deep colour, like gumboge when it has been for some time exposed to the air. These two they temper together and make into cakes, which they sell to the glovers by the name of ochre cakes, and with them they give a yellow colour to leather.

"Near the surface of the earth the country is for the most part a strong clay, which makes good brick, but, for a small compass from this Spaw all along the village on the north side of the brook we have sand. Underground the whole country abounds with coal and ironstone."

The glovers' handicraft, it may be mentioned in passing, was once strongly represented in olden Darlaston.

The situation of Willenhall is by no means an elevated one, and the whole plain in which it is situated formerly abounded in Springs, ere the surface had been so much disturbed by mining operations.

On the edge of the valley, under the shadow of Sedgley Beacon, was the famous Spring known as the Lady Wulfruna's, and which gave the place its name, Spring Vale; from this spot the silvery stream flowed eastwards into Willenhall, seeking the cool shade of the pleasant woodland there.

The stream, as it came in from Bilston, and ran eastwards through Willenhall, till it met the Tame, was once called the Hind Brook, or Stag River. In Saxon times the Tame here seems to have been designated Beorgita's Stream; and Mr. G. T. Lawley, in his "History of Bilston," says that the original bed of this brook was discovered in Willenhall some years ago when extensive excavations were being made.

So far the scientific aspect of this once famous Well. The popular view of a much frequented mineral spring which had "long been celebrated for disease of the eye and skin" opens out an even wider aspect. As previously mentioned, the brook flowing past it ran from west to east; a stream so directed was always accounted by the Druids of old as a sacred watercourse. Being thus from the earliest dawn of history within sacred precincts, there can be little doubt the Willenhall fountain enjoyed the reputation of a "Holy well" for many centuries.