From the churchyard, Easby Abbey is seen in the distance in a
romantic spot by the river: and the walk there is delightful, along the
terrace above the Swale. Like the rest of these fine structures, it was
destroyed by the vindictive Henry in 1535. The water close at hand,
the old abbot's elm, and the little church and gatehouse beyond,
altogether make this a spot in which to linger and ruminate. The
church walls are covered with curious and very well preserved
paintings of the twelfth century, giving a good idea of the costume of
the period. The tempting serpent, too, is shown twisted in artistic coils
around a very pre-Raphael looking tree; and in another scene the
partakers of the fruit are doubled up with remorse, or dyspepsia.
So close at hand as is Bolton on Swale, to the east, it would be a pity
not to mention Henry Jenkins, who died there in 1670, aged one
hundred and sixty-nine!—a man in Charles II.'s reign who
remembered the dissolution of the monasteries, and who recollected
as a boy assisting in carrying arrows in a cart to the battle of Flodden
field (where veteran soldiers remembered the accession of King
Edward IV.), was a wonder compared with the feeble memory of our
present-day centenarians, who rarely recollect anything worth
recording. When we think how nearly we are linked with 1670 by the
life of Mrs. William Stuart, who died in the late queen's reign, and who
heard from the lips of her grandmother how she had been taken to
Court in a black-draped Sedan when Whitehall was in mourning for
the death of the king's sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans,—it
would have been possible for the little girl to have spoken with old
Jenkins, and thus with only three lives to have linked the early part of
the reign of Henry VIII. with that of Victoria.