William Bass very soon withdrew from the carrying business, which was left to other members of his family and eventually absorbed by the firm of Pickfords, in whose service there remained many years, until his death at an advanced age, a Michael Bass, great-uncle, I believe, of Lord Burton.
Ashbourne, although a town of four thousand inhabitants, is now a very quiet place, and there is little to stir the pulses, except the annual Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday game of football through the streets, between the rival “Uppards” and “Downards” ends. The goals are placed three miles apart at Sturston and Clifton mills, on the Henmore, and there the excited scrimmages in the water, and the consequent duckings, often ending in fights, seem to exhaust all the energies of Ashbourne until the next Shrovetide.
[Illustration: CHURCH STREET, ASHBOURNE.]
Ashbourne has a good many claims to notice. Among them is that of possessing a Grammar School which has twice, through bad management, been reduced to one scholar. According to Cotton, fellow-angler with Izaak Walton, the town held an invidious distinction in his day, being famed for the best malt and notorious for the worst ale in England. Prominent among its features is the church of St. Oswald, “the Pride of the Peak.” It is not near the Peak, but that is immaterial, nor is it, as George Eliot says, “the finest mere parish church in the kingdom”; but it is, at any rate, an exceedingly large and very beautiful building, with a graceful spire rising to a height of 212 feet. Boswell styled it “one of the largest and most luminous churches that I have seen in any town of the same size.” The church was built in the Early English period, as the dedication plate, still existing, proves. There are many very beautiful and interesting monuments here, but none—not even that of Penelope Boothby—more beautiful than the modern stained-glass window erected to one of the Turnbull family. It is a fine piece of varied colouring, notably in the gorgeous blue of the angel’s robe.
The old lords of Ashbourne, the Cokaynes and the Boothbys are represented plentifully in epitaphs and chiselled stone and marble in the north transept. For more than two centuries—from 1372 to 1592—the Cokaynes ruled, and after them came the Boothbys, for two hundred and fifty years. The Cokayne monuments are very fine, although Ruskin will only allow them to be blundering journeyman attempts at imitating Italian workmanship of the same date. They look, however, very grim old knights and dames who thus lie in stark effigy, in rows, the knights in their chain or plate armour, the dames in their horned or butterfly head-dresses, when compared with the effigy of little Penelope Boothby, the only child of the last of the Boothbys of Ashbourne Hall.