Studio: international art (3.1894)

Sketching Grounds.—No. IX. Shrewsbury

in that curiously-named street Wyle Cop. Here seen, not to be adequately pictured in prose. But

we stayed while we made ourselves acquainted the very names of these places are ear-compelling :

with Shrewsbury, and came in and went out, day few towns retain so many singular nomenclatures,

by day, rubbing shoulders with market folk and Wyle Cop, of which I have already spoken, is a

strange characters from outlying villages. We took somewhat lurid-looking name : its meaning, how-

our meals in a little slip of a room that looked out ever, is simple enough, being just " Hill Top," and

upon the courtyard where carriers' carts and far- no more; but the un-English words have a strange

mers' traps rattled over the cobble-stones under the sound, and a fascination that seems to have not

archway leading from the street. The most striking been lost upon Tom Ingoldsby, in his legend of

feature of this room was a china mantel-ornament " Bloudie Jack of Shrewsburie "—

-it?

//

STOKESAY CASTLE

In the place that's still called the Wylde Coppe."

that purported to be a likeness of Louis Napoleon, Your trunk thus dismantled and torn,
seated, apparently, on a humorous carthorse. As Bloudie Jack ;
you could never Otherwise have guessed this to They hew and they hack and they chop ;
be intended for Napoleon III., perhaps it is And to finish the whole
as well that his name has been placed on the T , They stuck up a pole
pedestal, so that there may be no doubt about the
identity of this warrior bold, who looks like some " Mardol" = dairy-fold, is the name of another
gay Lothario of mediseval times, or an Alonzo thoroughfare; Dog-pole, or Duck-pool, the title of
from the romantic and Italian pages of Mrs. Rad- a street near Saint Mary's Church ; Murivance, the
cliffe. survival of an ancient term applied to the neigh-
But if our inn was quaint, how shall I describe bourhood of the Town Walls ; and Shop Latch is
the quaintness of the old timbered shops of Shrews- the extraordinary corruption of Shutte Place, the
bury ? the mediaeval Butchers' Row, the tottering residence, once upon a time, of an old Shropshire
tenements of the old suburb of Frankwell, crying family. Belstone, Belmont, Mardol Head, The
aloud to be sketched before they are either burnt Dana, and Pride Hill are other unusual names,
by accident or destroyed by vandalic intent; or the The site of Shrewsbury, like those of so many of
crazy stalls of Mardol ? These things are to be our ancient towns and cities, was originally selected

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