Mary Howitt, the well-known authoress, born 1799, also lived to the age of eighty-nine.  A fair record for a small country town!  John Wesley preached in the marketplace, in the centre of which was a fountain erected to the memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the distinguished lexicographer.  His father, whose home was at Lichfield, was a bookseller and had a bookstall in Uttoxeter Market, which he attended on market days.  The story is told that on one occasion, not feeling very well, he asked his son, Samuel, to take his place, who from motives of pride flatly refused to do so.  From this illness the old man never recovered, and many years afterwards, on the anniversary of that sorrowful day, Dr. Samuel Johnson, then in the height of his fame, came to the very spot in the market-place where this unpleasant incident occurred and did penance, standing bareheaded for a full hour in a pitiless storm of wind and rain, much to the surprise of the people who saw him.

[Illustration:  THE WHITE CATTLE OF CHARTLEY.]

We now bade good-bye to the River Dove, leaving it to carry its share of the Pennine Range waters to the Trent, and walked up the hill leading out of the town towards Abbots Bromley.  We soon reached a lonely and densely wooded country with Bagot’s Wood to the left, containing trees of enormous age and size, remnants of the original forest of Needwood, while to the right was Chartley Park, embracing about a thousand acres of land enclosed from the same forest by the Earl of Derby, about the year 1248.  In this park was still to be seen the famous herd of wild cattle, whose ancestors were known to have been driven into the park when it was enclosed.  These animals resisted being handled by men, and arranged themselves in a semi-circle on the approach of an intruder.  The cattle were perfectly white, excepting their extremities, their ears, muzzles, and hoofs being black, and their long spreading horns were also tipped with black.  Chartley was granted by William Rufus to Hugh Lupus, first Earl of Chester, whose descendant, Ranulph, a Crusader, on his return from the Holy War, built Beeston Castle in Cheshire, with protecting walls and towers, after the model of those at Constantinople.  He also built the Castle at Chartley about the same period, A.D. 1220, remarkable as having been the last place of imprisonment for the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots, as she was taken from there in 1586 to be executed at Fotheringhay.

[Illustration:  THE “BANK INN,” CHARTLEY.]

[Illustration:  BEGGARS’ OAK, BAGOTS WOOD.  “We soon reached a lonely and densely wooded country with Bagots Wood to the left, containing trees of enormous size—­remnants of the original forest of Needham.”]

We were interested in these stories of Chartley Castle, for in our own county cattle with almost the same characteristics were preserved in the Parks of Lyme and Somerford, and probably possessed a similar history.  That Ranulph was well known can be assumed from the fact that Langland in his Piers Plowman in the fourteenth century says: