Aston in 1900
The following extract from the Leeds Mercury describes Aston as it was in 1900
A gentle aclivity from Swallownest, and then the road runs almost straight as a die for a mile to Aston, whose church tower, and park trees and old fashioned cottages may be seen all in good time. One might reasonably look here for a village green, a stump cross, a May-pole, a Whipping-post, Horse-block, and Stocks; but Aston, although so typically conservative of appearance, is absolutely devoid of all these invaluable bits of rustic furniture.
Strange contrast, nevertheless, to Swallownest, which one might reasonably expect to be the last long home of some rural poet or ornithologist, and the bourn of pilgrims for present and future.
Aston ranks as the great shrine of this district, for here laboured and here sleeps no less a person than William Mason, who came within an ace of the Poet Laureateship after Cibber’s death, and whose claims - like Montgomery, Elliott, and Congreve - to revival of memory in the Pantheon of Yorkshire’s great men, I shall duly present. Truly, when one comes to compare the natural differences of the two spheres of labour in which Montgomery and Mason respectively served for practically half a century, one thinks it might have been possible for the former, if he had been living then, and toiling in his smoky, noisy "Iris" office, to begrudge Mason those calmer leisure hours devoid of worldly anxieties amid these sylvan scenes. And to be buried in the very heart of his own shrine must be sweeter to the slumbering poet, like the Cowper of the North, to be buried in a city cemetery. Yet while the writer of the Yorkshire Olney Hymns is remembered and retains his devotees by the thousand, who love to muse around his tomb and study his face with rapture (for the life size bronze statue at Sharrow is a speaking likeness), poor Mason lies in the cold gloomy church neglected and still, and nobody comes nigh his grave, or cares to find out if the mission of his life was ever fulfilled. Dr. Erskine Stuart, in his 'Literary Shrines of Yorkshire', has evidently been confused by the similarity of the two adjacent place-names, Aston and Anston, for he erroneously places Mason at the latter. South Anston, the next parish to Aston, lies three miles to eastward on the same road. About Mason’s village I shall speak more fully hereafter.
In the church there is a very curious register showing an unbroken list of rectors from 1257, though many of the characters are illegible. One incumbent, Sir William Wilson (the Sir being, in no manner of doubt, an equivalent of Reverend), by his will, dated 1539, gives to Sir William Almond his best gown, to every priest at his funeral 8d., to every parish clerk 4d., and to every scholar singing and reading 1d. 'To Robert Hirst, one short gown and one pair of hose, and my buckskin doublet. To the parson of Todwick, my best bonnet.'
Dr. Lockier, made Dean of Peterborough in 1725, was rector of Aston for a period of nine years. He paired with Drysden, Poet-Laureate, as Mason, Residentiary Canon of York, did with Gray, who refused the Laureateship. Both Lockier and his more famous successor at Aston were Royal Chaplains; and while the one has a permanent place at Malone's 'Life of Dryden,' the other is inseparably connected with the biography of Gray. Little of Lockier remains except a sermon preached before the House of Commons on January 20th, 1725. His valuable library he bequeathed to his friend, Bishop Pearce. Gray, who imagined the Laureate’s crown to be prickly, characterised Lockier’s friend, Dryden, a previous wearer of it, as 'disgraceful to the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses.' Lawrence Eusden, another Laureate of Yorkshire birth and breeding, the son of a vicar of Spofforth, is characterised as 'a person of great hopes in his youth, though at last he turned out a drunken parson.'
The Church of All Saints looks almost entirely Perpendicular from the outside; the inside tells a different story. Substantially it is in the late Norman and Transitional styles, with filleted hood-mouldings to its round arches. The north aisle has attic bases, with alternate round and octagonal pillars, in connection with which there are five Norman and four Gothic arches, all very perfect. The south-east corner, which appears to have been a chantry, has a piscine and a window, both in the Decorated style, some of the antique heraldic glass showing the D'Arcy arms. One monument (date 1628) is compartmental, and boasts effigies of John, Lord D’Arcy, with his three wives. A hagioscope commanding the chancel here from has been blocked up. A small lancet, vulgarly regarded as of the leper variety, has also been blocked up presumably because there was no further use for it. The corbels of the east window are well carved, so are the heads which decorate the porch; these latter evidently intended to represent Edward III and his Queen. In the vestry is preserved an ancient stone altar. It is a remarkable fact that the chancel is built in limestone, whereas the rest of the edifice is of red sandstone, so that I better take this opportunity of warning the poets against the danger of making 'hoary old tower' fall into rhyme. It is far gone in its decay, surmounted by a mass of black pinnacles and arcades, in and out through the louvers of which fly numerous birds.
On the nave's south side are some patchy limestone tablets very deeply carved, but ludicrous as to their subjects. The gargoyles match them in ugliness. As usual, the principal actor is Belial, represented in one stone picture as blowing a horn, and in another as taking a semi-human being into his jaws leg first. Such designs may have prototypes in some work on the Acts and Deeds of the Devil, in which there was a mixture of the jocose with the moral and theological, designed for the gratification of the lower classes in the Middle Ages. And, in all probability, the builders of old meant by their hideous exterior wall decorations to symbolise a contrast between the disquietude of the world outside the church and the beautiful calm sanctity within, where wicked spirits dare not face the cross elevated on the altar. The vile, excommunicated spirits seem to scoff at the faithful as they enter by the sacred portal.
