Bentley: Take Courage! 2  Setting

Geography and Local history

Bradford Map:

1 =Wetsgate, 2 = Kirkgate, 3 = Market place, 4 = Parish Church (now cathedral), 5 = Church Bank, 6 = Bolling Hall

 ‘Little Holroyd’ seems to be a fusion of ‘Little Horton’ and ‘Holroyd’ on the hills running south-west from the centre of Bradford.   The pattern of isolated farms, halls and churches has been swallowed up by the expansion of Bradford in the 19th and 20th centuries.  There is no mention of Bentley’s ‘Holroyd Hall’ being defensible, so it may be imagined as a large farm:

The South Pennines have many 'hall's that seem to be large farms: Oldfield Hall near Haworth. 

After the defence of Bradford collapses in the July 1643 attack, Pen’s house ‘The Breck’ is looted and Bentley draws attention to the wool trade even during the looting.  Two soldiers steal valuable bolts of cloth from the loom chamber.   Pen realises they must be cloth-workers who’d know the value: ‘They came from York, I supposed; there were many cloth-workers in York, and folk there were mostly Royalists, ‘ (IV.7.297).   Throughout the ordeal Pen’s hope is that the family looms will be undamaged and she is relived when they are spared (IV.7.298).   Though this incident is generic a more specific siege incident mentioned by local historians:

    one man was sent by his employer to by a cow from the Royalists. He returned to town with the    

    cow. That same after noon the cow was stolen again

https://e-voice.org.uk/claytonhistorygroup/bradford-in-the-civil-war/

is appropriated by Bentley and becomes part of Pen’s experience.    On p 307 she sends Lister to buy  back the family cow only to have it stolen again on p 308 (IV.7.307-8).    This takes place in what is now one of the most urbanised areas of Bradford’s expansion.

The Holroyd area and the surrounding hills to the west of Bradford are now one of the most heavily urbanised parts of Bradford. 

A similar modernisation has overtaken the roads in the centre of Bradford.   The routes and names of Kirkgate, Westgate and Church Bank, trodden by Bentley’s characters in peace and war still exist, though hardly unchanged.   Nevertheless, the city plan still shows the tight, claustrophobic pattern of Bentley's text,  in which neighbours are forced into contact and eventually conflict with each other.   

Kirkgate 

‘and went home up Kirkgate to dine’ (I.1.17)

Westgate 

Page 102 starts with Pen ‘sick with longing’ for Francis but by the end of the page she walks to church to hear her brother Will preach and ‘went fairly briskly down Westgate, and turned into Kirkgate,’ (II.6.102).   This leads them to ‘the steep Church Bank’ where the tension between Pen’s repressed sensuality and expressed piety will later be politicised as the death struggle between Royalist Francis and Parliamentarian Lister.

Church Bank.

Bentley incorporates a skirmish from the failed Royalist assault of December 1642 into her text: ‘the Bradford men's failure, through ignorance, to respond to a captured Royalist officer’s request for quarter. They said they would give him 'Bradford quarter' and promptly killed him,’ http://www.bradfordhistorical.org.uk/siege.html   Bentley skilfully peoples this incident with her characters.     The helpless officer is Francis, Pen’s lover, and his killer the family servant and fanatical Bible-quoting Protestant Lister:

      And then there came a sudden sharp cry of pain and fear, and the voice, in earnest this time,  

      repeated:

     “Quarter, you fools!  Quarter!”

     “Aye, we’ll quarter you!” screamed Lister madly, and he drove the spit through Francis’s heart.

(IV. 3.223)

Bentley hinges the killing around a dislocating pun where ‘quarter’ can mean either ‘mercy’ or ‘butchery’.  ‘Hanging, drawing and quartering’ was used as a punishment for traitors and parts of the dismembered body were sent to important towns in the kingdom.   Bentley sets this clash on Church Bank:

    he [Lister] sprang out into the road and charged fiercely up the Bank, holding his pole before him

    like a pike.   “In the name of the Lord will I destroy them!” he chanted,  (IV. 3.223)

The incident is remembered by the Royalists involved in the successful attack of July 1643, leading to the belief ‘the Earl of Newcastle has ordered no quarter to be given to Bradford to-morrow when the town is taken,’   (IV.5.281).   

  Bradford Cathedral 

Bradford Parish Church is Bradford Cathedral that was elevated to a ‘cathedral’ in 1919 https://www.bradfordcathedral.org/the-building/history/.   The church dominates Bentley’s book.   Pen’s father is a churchwarden of Bradford Parish Church (I.i.16) as Bentley’s father was churchwarden of St Jude’s, Halifax (“Oh Dreams, Oh Destinations”, IV.vi.31)

St Jude’s, Halifax, 1889

The first scene is set on ‘a Lord’s Day in June, in 1625’ at prayers in Bradford Parish Church (I.1.15).  characteristically Pen is ‘divided in mind’ between sensual pleasure ‘walk out in the sweet sunshine’ and ‘reluctance towards the visit at little Holroyd which would follow,’ (I.1.15).    This section of the book is called ‘Peace’.  The church becomes the focus of part IV ‘War’, where Chapter 5 is called  ‘Woolpacks Hang on a Bradford Steeple’.    This refers to the sacks full of wool hung from the church tower to protect it from the impact of cannon balls (solid projectiles of iron or stone that did not explode) when the church tower becomes the focus of Bradford’s improvised defences.  As the map shows in the 17th century the church would have stood almost alone, dominating the south and east sides of the town.   The cathedral is now cut off from the modern centre of Bradford by a mall and later generations have renewed the stone work to hide the scars of civil war.   Despite this the tower retains its impressive mass and it is easy to imagine it with ‘woolpacks .... already in position, hanging by ropes from the pinnacles of the steeple,’ (IV.5.271).    Here Bentley gives the cathedral a ‘steeple’, which is not mentioned in https://www.bradfordcathedral.org/the-building/history/.  Perhaps she simply means the top of the tower.   The upper rooms and top of the tower would have been commanding position for snipers or 'sharpshooters' as they were called at the time. 

The matchlocks of the day were heavy slow-loading guns.  Being able to use an embrasure to take the barrel's weight and having a wall to shelter behind during the long reloading process would have been popular with the musketeers.  

      The battlements of Bradford Cathedral could have been                                           Lower windows are likely to have been 

                           more than decorative.                                                                                      blocked and loop-holed.

Bradford Cathedral Tower

The fall of Bradford is represented by the fall of ‘the last woolsack, scorched and torn’ (IV.5.2782).  

Compared to the incorporation of Little Horton and Holroyd, the expansion on the other side of the valley has been less aggressive.  It has left Bowling Park and Bolling Hall.  The latter is a 16th century manor house built onto a medieval peel tower (defensible tower).

Bolling Hall 

Bolling Hall features in Take Courage, as it featured in history, as a Royalist outpost under Sir Richard Tempest (IV.5.271). 

A ghost story is attached to Bolling Hall.   This claims that during the Civil War siege the Royalist commander Lord Newcastle was persuaded to show mercy to the town when a White Lady appeared to him and cried ‘Pity poor Bradford!’ . (https://sites.google.com/site/historyofbollingestatebradford/pity-poor-bradford).  The story is rationalised by Bentley.  In Take Courage Pen visits Lord Newcastle in Bolling Hall duting the July 1643 attack.  She finds Bolling Hall: ‘a very fine tall house standing in parkland with handsome spreading trees,’ (IV.6.282).   It is she who speaks the words and is mistaken for ‘an apparition’ (IV.6.290):

       “Pity poor Bradford,” I reminder him softly.

     The servant entered.  I was standing by a panel of the wall, with my hood drawn up; I dare

     say my  face was white enough from emotion , and I held myself stiffly.  At all events the man, I

      believe,    took me for an  apparition; for he cried out and fled, crossing himself.  (IV.6.290).  

Rosemary Sutcliffe follows her lead.  In the Rider of the White Horse Lady Fairfax appeals to Lord Newcastle and offers him the ghost story as a means of saving face:

    “If you were to wake in the night, and find beside your bed a White Lady, wringing her

    hands and crying, “Alas and alas!  Woe to Bradford!  Pity poor Bradford!” and in the morning the

    guards before your door had seen nothing, would that turn you – even a little – towards mercy?”

(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1964 [1959] p156)

Coley Hall is a small hall surviving on a lane between Halifax and Bradford near Northoram.     It is the site Bentley uses to demonstrate the restored Royalists attempts to suppress free-speech by arresting dissenting  preachers who will not swear loyalty to the Crown, and hence the Church of England.   Thomas, Pen’s son, is one of these preachers.  He opposes being forced to swear to never rebel because ‘to extract an oath that it never be undertaken is to make the mildest rule a tyranny,’ (VI.3.458).    He is preaching to a private congregation in Coley Hall, belonging to Captain Hodgson, when there is a tip-off and he is forced to ‘ride hard’ and escape, (VI.3.458).   Pen and her husband John ‘had hardly reached the main road before we heard the horses’ hoofs, and jingling of bits and spurs, as the troop rode up from the other direction and surrounded Coley Hall,’ (VI.3.462).

Coley Hall  C 17th century