The ‘Swan’s Nest’—Haunted?—Clifford Chambers—Wincot—Quinton, and its club day.
Twelvemiles south of Stratford, across the level lands of the Feldon, you come to Chipping Campden, perched upon the outlying hills of the Cotswold country. The inevitable way southward out of Stratford town lies over the Clopton Bridge, and then, having crossed the Avon, the roads diverge. To the left you proceed for Charlecote and Kineton; straight ahead for Banbury and London; and to the right for Chipping Campden or for Shipston-on-Stour. The point where these roads branch and go their several ways was until recently a very charming exit from or entrance to the town. Here stands the old inn, the “Swan’s Nest,”ex“Shoulder of Mutton,” by the waterside, and opposite are the grounds of the old manor-house, enclosed behind lofty and massive brick walls.
The “Swan’s Nest” is a red-brick house of good design, built in 1677, when an excellent taste in architecture prevailed. The sign was then the “Bear,” a very usual name in these marches of the Warwick influence. It arose upon the site of a hermitage and Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene that had long subsisted upon the alms of travellers this way, generations before Sir William Clopton built his bridge, and remained for some time afterwards, until the Reformation swept all such things away.
The manor-house opposite is now to let, and long hasbeen. They say it is haunted—but “they”? Who then are they? No very reliable folk, be sure: only those irresponsible gossips who scent mysteries behind every board announcing “This Desirable Mansion to Let.” The more desirable the mansion, the more inexplicable that it should not be desired of some one and become let. As the months go by and lengthen into years and the house-agents’ boards begin themselves to show some evidences of antiquity, the mystery deepens and the ghost is born. I think this especial ghost was born in the bar-parlour of the “Swan’s Nest.” But it is difficult to get any exact information about this spirit. It would be: it invariably is. Whether the midnight spook be some mournful White Lady who looks from the dust-grimed windows of yonder gazebo upon the road, or some horrific spectre who like the ghost of Hamlet’s father “could a tale unfold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul” and make
“Each particular hair to stand on end,Like quills upon the fretful porcupine,”
“Each particular hair to stand on end,Like quills upon the fretful porcupine,”
I cannot say. But the local gossip will not lessen as time goes on and the place remains unlet. There couldnot, for one thing, be a much better setting for ghostly manifestations. It is true that the road is one much used by traffic, and by motorists in especial, whose dust and horrid odours might well disgust any but the hardiest of wraiths; but here is the old garden-pavilion or gazebo on the wall at the fork of roads, with its quaint roof and the windows from which the people of the manor would look out upon the traffic when it was not so dusty and did not stink so much, and here are still the trunks of the magnificent elms that until recently cast a grateful shade upon the road and made the bridge-end so beautiful a scene. But the elms have been lopped and show cruelly amputated limbs, and no one looks any more from the gazebo: it is an eloquent picture of the Past.
Clopton Bridge, and the “Swan’s Nest”
Beyond this spot we leave the Shipston road and turn to the right, coming in two miles to Clifford Chambers, which is not the block of offices or residential flats its name would seem to the Londoner to imply, but a picturesque village, taking the first part of its name from an olden ford on the Stour, and the second part from the manor having formerly been the property of the house-stewards, or “Chamberers,” of the great Abbey of Gloucester.
The village street of Clifford Chambers stands at an angle from the road, and so keeps its ancient character the better, for the way through it down to the Stour is only a rustic track. Clifford Chambers is therefore entirely unspoiled. Here is the church, grouping beautifully with the ancient parsonage, now a farmhouse again, as it was during the time of the plague at Stratford, in the year when William Shakespeare was born, and when a mysterious John Shakespeare was living here. “Mysterious” because nothing more is known of him, and because the question arises in some minds, “Was the John Shakespeare then living atClifford Chambers identical with the John Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon, father of William? Was William Shakespeare, in fact, born here, instead of at ‘the Birthplace’ in Henley Street, or did John Shakespeare remove his wife and infant son hither when the plague broke out in the summer of 1564?” Any question of this being the birthplace would seem to be at once disposed of by the undoubted baptism of William Shakespeare at the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon; but the summer retreat of the Shakespeares to this place may yet be a field for interesting speculation.
Clifford Chambers
There is not a more charming old black-and-white house in the neighbourhood than this, with its long range of perpendicular timbers, roughly-split in the old English fashion, which might well show some “restorers” how to do it; and the odd outside stairway at the gable-end, roofed over with its little penthouse roof. It comes well enough in black and white, but forms a feast of mellow colour, in the rich but subdued tints that the lichens and the stains of time and weather have given.
Facing up the rustic street, more like a village green than street, is another and a statelier house: the manor-house, enclosed within its garden-walls. It is of stone, in the early years of the eighteenth century, when Queen Anne reigned.
“Anna, whom three realms obey,Who sometimes counsel takes, and sometimes tay.”
“Anna, whom three realms obey,Who sometimes counsel takes, and sometimes tay.”
The view through the gates, flanked with imposing masonry piers crested with what the country folk call “gentility balls,” shows a delightful picture of old-world stateliness. Time within this enclosure seems to have stood still. You can imagine people living here who still take “a dish of tay,” who are “vastly obleeged” when you ask them how they do, and protest theyare “mighty well,” or have “the vapours,” as the case may be, instead of being, as they would be in other surroundings and in the vile phrases of to-day, “awfully fit,” or “feeling rotten.”
You can imagine, I say, the owners of this fine old manor-house drinking their dish of tay out of fine old “chancy,” as they used to call it; still speaking in the fashion that went out of date with the death of the great Duke of Wellington, who was among the last, I believe, to say “obleeged” and to call a chair a “cheer.” Now only the most rustic of rustics talk in this manner, and when they say “cowcumber,” and “laylock,” and speak of “going fust” they are thought vulgar and reproved by their children. But such was the pronunciation used by the best in the land in years gone by.
There are the loveliest gardens in the rear of this old manor-house, with orchards of apples and pears and wall-fruit beyond, and an older wing by a century or so.
The main road goes straight ahead for some miles, with Long Marston rather more than a mile on the right. It is fully described in these pages, in the first of the two chapters on the “Eight Villages.” On the left is the old farm-house which is all that is left of the hamlet of Wincot, the place where “Marian Hacket, the fat alewife,” mentioned by Christopher Sly in the induction to theTaming of the Shrew, had her alehouse, at which that drunken tinker had run up a score. Many of the hamlets round about are “cotts,” “cotes,” or “cots”; Grimscote, Foxcote, Hidcote, Idlicote, Darlingscott, and others. Wincot as a hamlet of Quinton finds mention in the registers of that church, and in them, November 21st, 1591, is still to be found the entry recording the baptism of Sara Hacket, daughter of Robert Hacket. The fat Marian, therefore, who alloweddrunken undesirables to run up scores, was probably a real person.
As we make for Quinton the tree-crowned height of Meon Hill, an outpost of the Cotswolds, forms a striking landmark in this vale. It is, according to the Ordnance Survey, 637 feet high, and its position gives it an appearance of even greater eminence. At its foothills lies the village of Quinton, in a district very little disturbed by strangers, and in summer days one of quiet delights. Coming over to Quinton one afternoon, from a day of hospitable entertainment at King’s Lodge, Long Marston, I cycled along the quiet sunlit road, past the old tollhouse with its little strip of wayside garden, and silently came upon a black cat, appreciatively and with much evident enjoyment smelling the wall-flowers growing there. One never before credited cats with a liking for sweet scents.
Only one event during the year disturbs the serenity of Quinton. At other times it drowses, like all its fellow villages of the vale; but this one occasion is like that in Tennyson’sMay Queen, the “maddest, merriest day.” It is the day when Quinton Club holds high revel. I do not know what is the purpose of Quinton Club, but the occasion of its merry-making is like that of a village fair, and all those travelling proprietors of steam roundabouts, cocoa-nut shies, shooting-galleries and popular entertainments of that kind who attend fairs make a point of visiting this celebration. And indeed I do not know what Quinton would do without them and the many stall-keepers who come in their train.
To say merely that Quinton is not a large place would be to leave some sort of impression that, if not a little town, it was at least a considerable village. It is, as a matter of fact, a very small one, but to it on this day of days resort the people of those neighbouring placesunfortunate enough to have neither club nor fair of their own, and you may see them trudging from all directions; driving in on farm-wagons seated with kitchen-chairs for this purpose, or cycling. Towards evening, when most of the countryside has arrived, the strident tones of the steam organ that forms not the least important part of the roundabout, the thuds of the heavy mallets on the “try-your-strength” machines, the shouting of the cocoa-nut shy proprietors, and the general hum and buzz of the fair astonish the stranger afar off. Near at hand, the scent of fried fish is heavy on the air and gingerbread is hot i’ the mouth, and in the centre of the hurly-burly the steam roundabout blares and glares, presided over by a very highly-coloured full-length portrait of no less a person than Lord Roberts, in the full equipment of Field Marshal; the surest test of a soldier’s popularity. Lord Kitchener has never yet become the presiding hero over the galloping horses of the steam roundabout: he is perhaps something too grim for these occasions.
I think, beneath the pictured face of Lord Roberts there lurks the countenance of he who was the popular favourite immediately before him; Lord Wolseley, who for twenty years or more was in the shrewd opinion of the showmen, the most attractive personality to preside over the steam-trumpets, the odious “kist o’ whustles,” the mirrors and the circulating wooden horses. The showmen know best, they are in touch with popular sentiment; and be sure that if you scraped off Lord Roberts, you would find the face of Lord Wolseley there. Indeed, the possibility of a real stratum of military heroes is only limited by the age of the machine itself; and if it were only old enough one might penetrate beyond Lord Wolseley to Lord Raglan, and even back to that ancient hero of the inn signs, the Marquis of Granby.
The fine church of Quinton looks across the road to the village inn, the “College Arms.” The arms are those of Magdalen College, Oxford, owner of the manor.
The church is a Decorated building, with fine spire, and contains some interesting monuments; chief among them an altar-tomb with a very fine brass to Joan Clopton, widow of Sir William Clopton, who died in 1419. An effigy, on another altar-tomb, seen in the church, is said by some to be that of her husband; others declare it to be that of one Thomas le Roos. She survived her husband several years, dying about 1430, in the habit of a religious recluse, or “vowess.” She lived probably in a cell or anchoress’s hold built on to the church and commanding a view of the altar, and must have had a singularly poor time of it in all those eleven years. No trace remains of her uncomfortable and singularly dull habitation. This misguided lady was by birth a Besford of Besford in Worcestershire, and her coat of arms, displayed separately and also impaled with that of her husband, has six golden pears on a red ground, by way of a painfully farfetched pun on “Besford.” Not even the most desolating punster of our own time could or would torture “Besford” into “Pearsford,” but our remote ancestors were capable of the greatest enormities in this way.
Some of the red enamel still remains in the heraldic shields on this fine brass, which, including its canopy, is six feet four inches long. The figure of Joan Clopton, and the brass in general, is in excellent condition, perhaps because the descendants of the family took care of it. One of them, a certain “T. Lingen,” whose name appears upon the tomb, repaired it in 1739. A Latin verse occupies the margin of the brass, with little figures of pears repeated at intervals. The verse has been translated as follows—
“Vowed to a holy life when ceased her knightly husband’s breath,Joan Clopton here, Anne’s grandchild dear, implores Thy grace in death;O! Christ, for Thee, O! Jesu blest, how largely hath she shedHer bounteous gifts on poor and sick—how hath she garnishedThy stately shrines with splendour meet—how hath she sent beforeHer earthly wealth to Thee above, to swell her heavenly store,For such blest fruits of faith, O grant, in Thine own house her home:Soft lies an earthly tomb on those to whom these heavenly blessings come.”
“Vowed to a holy life when ceased her knightly husband’s breath,Joan Clopton here, Anne’s grandchild dear, implores Thy grace in death;O! Christ, for Thee, O! Jesu blest, how largely hath she shedHer bounteous gifts on poor and sick—how hath she garnishedThy stately shrines with splendour meet—how hath she sent beforeHer earthly wealth to Thee above, to swell her heavenly store,For such blest fruits of faith, O grant, in Thine own house her home:Soft lies an earthly tomb on those to whom these heavenly blessings come.”
A scroll above her head is inscribed with the words—
“Complaceat tibi due eripias meDue ad adiuuand’ me respice”
“Complaceat tibi due eripias meDue ad adiuuand’ me respice”
an appeal that may be rendered, “Be good and loving to me, O Lord.”
A striking instance of the affection inspired by Queen Elizabeth is to be noticed in the Royal arms of her period over the chancel arch, bearing, in addition to “that glorious ‘Semper Eadem’” alluded to by Macaulay in his ballad on the Armada, the inscription “God love our noble Queen.”
Resuming the way to Chipping Campden, the road passes the spot marked on the maps “Lower Clopton.” This, or the other tiny hamlet away on the left, called “Upper Clopton,” was the home of that first Shakespeare recorded in history, who was hanged in 1248 for robbery. Through Mickleton, a more considerable village than its neighbours, and deriving its original name of “Mycclantune,” the “larger town,” from that fact, up climbs the highway to Campden.
It is in some ways difficult to imagine Campden the busy and prosperous place it once unquestionably was; but the quiet old streets, lined with houses almost every one of good architectural character; and the old market-house, and the fine church give full assurance of the commercial activity and the wealth that have departed.
Chipping Campden.
Campden’sposition as a market town dates back to Saxon times, when the verb “ceapan,” to buy, gave the prefix “Chipping” to it. The town rose to greater prosperity when the ancient wool-growing wealth of the Cotswolds was doubled by the manufacture in these same districts of the cloth from those wealth-bringing fleeces; and great fortunes were amassed by both wool-merchants and clothiers. The rise of England from an agricultural and a wool-growing country, such as Australia now is, to a manufacturing community directly concerned such towns as Stroud, Northleach, Burford and Chipping Campden, which, with the introduction of weaving, earned two profits instead of one. There are perhaps a dozen little Cotswold towns whose great churches were rebuilt in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in a magnificent style by the wealthy merchants of the time, whose monumental brasses still in many cases remain, representing them standing upon sheep, or woolsacks, or with the tailor’s shears between their legs; the origins of their wealth. When the cloth manufacture largely migrated to the Midlands and the north, such towns as Campden, Burford, and Northleach began to decay, and now that Australia is the chief source of the wool supply it is difficult to see how they are ever to recover. They are not on the great routes of traffic, and railways do not come near them.
Old Houses, Chipping Campden
The Market House, Chipping Campden
Campden is situated on a kind of shelf or narrow plateau upon the Cotswolds. You come steeply up to it, and, leaving it, rise as steeply as before. Like most of its neighbours on Cotswold, it is a stone-built town, grown grey with age and weathering. When some new mason-work is undertaken—which is not often—the stone is seen to be of a pale biscuit colour; but it soon loses that new tint and rapidly acquires the rather sad hue of the older work.
The traveller fresh from Stratford, where brick, and timber-framed and plastered houses abound, feels astonishment in the sudden transition to a place like Campden, in which I believe there is not a single example of timber-framing.
The old town of Campden is extraordinarily full of architectural interest; with domestic work ranging from the mid-fourteenth century house of the Grevels to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the town began to decline and building ceased. No modern suburbs are found on the outskirts of Campden. I do not know how the town manages to exist. There is a railway station, but it is a mile away and it is only incidental and placed on the line to Evesham and Worcester. No great genius was ever born at Campden, or if he was, he missed fire and perished unknown. Therefore it is not a place of pilgrimage, and only parties of architectural students, measuring up or sketching some of the charming bits with which it abounds; or artists, or contemplative ruminative folk who want to escape from the eternal hustle of this age and its devilish gospel of “get on or get out” ever go there. “Past” is traced over its every building. “There was a time” might be inscribed over the open-sided and quaintly-colonnaded market-house; and “Yesterday” should be the town motto. There are little courts off the main street where the leisured explorer in Campden willfind remains of the old wool warehouses, with here and there a traceried Gothic window. Many old sundials still exist on the walls; in particular a charming example near the market-house with the initials W. S. T. and date 1690; and dated house-tablets show with what pride the old inhabitants looked upon their homes.
But the pride of all the ancient houses of Campden is that house where William Grevel lived in the fourteenth century. It is not a very large house, one thinks, for so wealthy a man as he was, described as he is on the brass in the church as “the flower of the wool-merchants of all England,” but it presents a charming frontage to the street and has an oriel window of peculiar beauty, presided over by two huge and hideous gargoyles, the one representing a winged, bat-like monster with gaping mouth and a ferocious expression; the other a kind of demon dog with glaring eyes of intense malignity—the late Mr. William Grevel’s familiar spirits, perhaps.
Every one well-read in the history of his country knows that the ranks of its aristocracy and its peerage have constantly been reinforced from the trading classes. It is a matter of money. When a man has great possessions he finds the House of Lords waiting to receive him. It has been so for centuries, and not only so, but the ennobled have in their own later generations given younger sons to trade. The different processes are still seen working; and why not? Wealth will secure consideration, and younger sons who cannot always marry money must in their turn go into trade and make it.
Grevel’s House
The old wool-merchants and clothiers often rose to the peerage on their own account, or married their sons and daughters into its ranks. William Grevel, who was a descendant of other mercantile Grevels, never became more than a wealthy trader. As such he died in 1401, and it was not until just over two centuries had passed that his descendant, Fulke Greville, entered the lists of the coroneted as Baron Brooke; the eighth Baron Brooke not becoming Earl of Warwick until 1759. The Grevels—or “Grevilles,” as they afterwards spelt their name—therefore only belatedly won to that haven where they would be; but most others were more fortunate. Baptist Hicks, for example, is an extraordinary instance of swift accumulation of wealth. He, however, made it in London, as a mercer and perhaps a good deal more as a moneylender. He lent money to James the First among others, and became so warm a man that he returned in 1609 to his native Gloucestershire and purchased the manor of Campden, building a magnificent country seat next the church. The cost of this was £29,000: over £200,000 according to present value. He had so much money and so fine a house that he, being already a Knight, was in 1628 created a Viscount. He died the following year, not like Tennyson’s Countess of Burleigh, because of the weight of an honour to which he had not been born, but by reason of age and possibly chagrin that he had not been created an Earl.
He was a benefactor to Campden, and built the charming group of almshouses that stand on the left-hand on the way to the church.
Past these almshouses, the way goes directly to the church, a noble building of date somewhere about 1530. It owes its present stately proportions and Perpendicular style largely to the benefactions of Grevel and others. The tower is remarkable for a buttress which is in some ways a kind of highly-developed mullion running through the centre of the window of the lower stage. It is perhaps rather more curious than beautiful, and as it cannot be of any constructional value and adds little if anything to the stability of the tower, we can only regard it as one of those freaks of the last phase of Gothic architecture which tell us, if we have but the wit to understand, that, Reformation or no Reformation, with Henry the Eighth or without, the Gothic spirit was dying.
Interior of the Market House, Chipping Campden
The curious ogee-shaped roof of a building seen in the foreground of the accompanying view of the church is that of a garden-pavilion, or gazebo, of Campden House, the lordly mansion built in 1613 by Sir Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campden. I have seen curious old illustrations of this fine house, by which it would seem to have been a place of extraordinary grandeur. It is said to have been the largest house ever built in England, and stood upon eight acres of ground. This truly extensive mansion existed no longer than thirty-two years, for it was burnt by order of Prince Rupert in 1645. During that time of civil war Campden House had been a notable rallying-place for the Royalists, who under a rough soldier, Sir Henry Bard, had made themselves a pestilent nuisance, not only to their natural enemies, but even to sympathisers. If they needed anything in the way of food, forage, or apparel, they took it where it was to be found, whether from Roundhead or Royalist. They raped the very clothes off the country people’s backs. “A man,” says one of these lamenting rustics, “need keep a tight hold of his very breeches, or ’tis odds but what these Sabines will have them, and if he is let keep his shirt, it is thought a matter of grace.” So it was not altogether regretfully that they saw Bard and his brigands depart while there remained one of those indispensable articles, or a hat, or pair of shoes in the neighbourhood. When the garrison left, they fired the mansion. It was never rebuilt, and to this day its ruins stand to keep the tale in mind.
That the church was rebuilt in the very last years of the Late Perpendicular style is more and more evident as you approach and examine it. William Grevel in 1401 left a hundred marks towards the work, and you will be told locally that the present building is the result of that gift. But not very much could have been done with such a sum, and in any event, the fabric is distinctly and unmistakably over a hundred years later in date. The ogee pinnacles and mouldings, and especially the flattened arches of the nave-arcade tell their architectural tale in a way that cannot be gainsaid.
On the floor of the chancel is the fine brass to William Grevel, 1401, and Marion, his wife, 1386. It is, with its canopied work, eight feet nine inches high; the figure of Grevel himself being five feet four inches. We see him habited in the merchant’s dress of his period, and with the forked beard that was then the usual wear of the elderly among his class, as Chaucer says, in hisCanterbury Tales: “A marchant was there with a forked beard.”
Other brasses are to William Welley, merchant, 1450, and wife Alice; John Lethenard, merchant, 1467, and his wife Joan; and William Gybbys, 1484, with his three wives, Alice, Margaret and Marion, and seven sons and six daughters.
The stately monument of Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campden, and his wife occupies the south chancel chapel. It is one of the works of Nicholas Stone and his sons, whose extraordinarily fine craftsmanship as sculptors and designers of monuments in the seventeenth century redeemed to a great extent the rather vulgar ostentation which marked in general the neo-classic style of the age. The monument takes up nearly all the floor space and rises to a great height. Beneath a canopy formed by it rest the recumbent marble effigies of that ennobled wool-merchant and sometime Lord Mayor of London,and his wife, habited in the robes of their rank, and with coronets on their heads. They are impressive in a very high degree. A long Latin inscription narrates his good deeds and expatiates upon the good fortune of Campden which benefited by them.
It is not easy to excuse the deplorable taste which produced the large monument against the wall to Edward Noel, 2nd Viscount Campden, who died 1642, and his widow, Juliana, 1680. We would like to believe that the idea of it was none of Nicholas Stone’s, but was dictated by the mortuary grief of that thirty-eight years’ long widow, who no doubt found great satisfaction and consolation in coming every now and then to open its doors and look at the gruesome white marble figures, larger than life, of herself and her husband, representing them standing hand in hand, in their shrouds. They remind one very vividly of the lines inRuddigore—
“And then the ghost and his lady toastTo their churchyard beds take flight,With a kiss perhaps on her lantern chapsAnd a grisly, grim ‘Good-night!’”
“And then the ghost and his lady toastTo their churchyard beds take flight,With a kiss perhaps on her lantern chapsAnd a grisly, grim ‘Good-night!’”
The visitor to Campden church is told that the black marble doors disclosing these figures and now fixed permanently open, against the wall, were generally closed during the lifetime of the widow, and were opened at her decease. The long epitaphs tell us in detail about her, her husband, and her family. On the left-hand is that to the husband—
“This monument is erected to preserve the memory and pourtrait of the Right Honourable Sr. Edward Noel, Viscount Campden, Baron Noel of Ridlington and Hicks of Ilmington. He was Knight Banneret in the warrs of Ireland, being young, and then created Baronet anno 1611. He was afterwards made Baron of Ridlington. The other titles came unto him by right of Dame Juliana,his wife, who stands collaterall to him in this monument, a lady of extraordinary great endowments, both of vertue and fortune. This goodly lord died at Oxford at ye beginning of the late fatall civil warrs, whither he went to serve and assist his sovverain Prince Charles the First, and so was exalted to the Kingdom of Glory, 8° Martii 1642.”
The right hand door is inscribed with the lady’s own description, and of her children’s fortunes—
“The Lady Juliana, eldest daughter and co-heire (of that mirror of his time) Sr. Baptist Hicks, Viscount Campden. She was married to that noble Lord who is here engraven by her, by whom she had Baptist, Lord Viscount Campden, now living (who is blessed with a numerous and gallant issue). Henry, her second son, died a prisoner for his loyalty to his Prince. Her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was married to John Viscount Chaworth: Mary, her second daughter, to the very noble Knight, Sr Erasmus de la Fontaine. Penelope, her youngest daughter, died a mayd.“This excellent lady, for the pious and unparallel’d affections she retained to the memory of her deceased lord, caused this stately monument to be erected in her lifetime, in September Anno Dom. 1664.”
“The Lady Juliana, eldest daughter and co-heire (of that mirror of his time) Sr. Baptist Hicks, Viscount Campden. She was married to that noble Lord who is here engraven by her, by whom she had Baptist, Lord Viscount Campden, now living (who is blessed with a numerous and gallant issue). Henry, her second son, died a prisoner for his loyalty to his Prince. Her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was married to John Viscount Chaworth: Mary, her second daughter, to the very noble Knight, Sr Erasmus de la Fontaine. Penelope, her youngest daughter, died a mayd.
“This excellent lady, for the pious and unparallel’d affections she retained to the memory of her deceased lord, caused this stately monument to be erected in her lifetime, in September Anno Dom. 1664.”
A very charming mural monument to the Lady Penelope shows a delicately-sculptured bust. She is seen wearing a dress with deep Vandyck lace collar. As with the other monuments, it is clearly from the hands of the Stone family. The Lady Penelope, who died young in 1633, is traditionally said to have died from the effects of pricking her finger when working in coloured silks. The position of the hand is said to be in allusion to the accident. A companion figure is that to the Lady Anne Noel, wife of the Lady Penelope’s brother, Baptist. She died 1636.
Chipping Campden Church
The “Campden Wonder,” at which people in 1662 marvelled, is still an unsolved mystery, and ever likely to remain so. The story of it began in 1660, on August 16th, when William Harrison, a staid elderly man of about sixty years, who had been trusted for many years as the steward of the widowed Juliana, Viscountess Campden, went to Charingworth, three miles away, to collect some rents. When night had come and he had not returned, his wife sent a servant, John Perry, in search. By morning, when he too had not come back, Mrs. Harrison grew more alarmed and sent her son, Edward, who met Perry returning, without having seen anything of his master. Young Harrison persuaded the man to go to Ebrington with him and to raise further inquiries. There they heard that William Harrison had called the evening before and rested, and that he had then left. He had then about £23 on him.
On their way back to Campden, young Harrison and Perry met a woman who handed them a bloodstained comb and band which that morning she had found in the furze on the road between Ebrington and Charingworth. They were those of the missing man, but of him no trace could be found. It did not take long to come to the conclusion that Perry must have had a hand in his master’s disappearance, and he was arrested on suspicion of murder. He had told so many contradictory tales that he was rightly suspected, and after a week’s imprisonment he had yet another story. He now “confessed” that his mother, Joan Perry, and his brother Richard had long urged him to rob his master, and that at last they had on this occasion waylaid and robbed him, afterwards strangling him and throwing the body into the great mill-sink of the neighbouring Wallington’s Mill. The comb and band had been put on the road by himself.
John Perry’s mother and brother were accordinglyarrested and the three were tried at Gloucester and convicted, notwithstanding the fact that no body had been found, and in spite of the piteous protestations of innocence by Joan Perry and Richard, and in face of the avowal by John that he must have been mad when he “confessed.” He now declared he knew nothing of Harrison’s death; but in spite of all these doubts, the three were executed, on Broadway Hill. Joan was hanged first, and Robert next. John calmly saw them die and listened to their last appeals to him to confess and to exonerate them. He was hanged last, protesting that he had never known anything of his master’s death, or even if he were dead. But, he added, they might hereafter possibly hear.
The countryside congratulated itself upon being rid of three undesirables. The old woman had always been reputed a witch. And when the affair was becoming a stale and exhausted topic, one autumn evening at dusk, two years later, Mr. William Harrison, for whose murder three persons had been convicted and hanged, returned and walked into his own house.
He gave forth an ingenious but preposterous story to account for his two years’ absence. As he was returning home, he said, on the evening of his disappearance, he was intercepted by three horsemen who attacked, wounded and robbed him, and carrying him to a neighbouring cottage on the heath, nursed him there until it was possible to carry him across country to Dover, where they put him aboard a vessel and sold him to the captain, who had several others in like case with himself on his ship. They voyaged from Deal and after about six weeks’ sail they were seized by Turkish pirates and he and the others were put aboard the Turkish ship and sold as slaves in Turkey. His master lived near Smyrna. After serving him as a slave for nearly two years, the elderly Turk died and the slave escaped to the coast, where he persuaded some Hamburg sailors to take him as a stowaway to Lisbon. There he met an Englishman who took compassion upon him and found him a passage to England. Landing at Dover, he made his way directly home.
Brass to William Grevel and Wife, Chipping Campden
This cock-and-bull story was all that the country ever had in the way of satisfaction. Harrison went about his steward’s business as before, trusted and respected, and died ten years later. In after years some suspicion seems to have fallen upon the son, but for what reason does not appear. That industrious Oxford diarist, Anthony Wood, who took a keen interest in the affair, as did all the country, says, “After Harrison’s returne, John was taken down [from his gibbet] and Harrison’s wife soon after (being a snotty covetous presbyterian) hung herself in her owne house. Why, the reader is to judge.”
In leaving Campden and its memories, I must not let it be supposed that in speaking of the town as decayed and belonging to the past I either intend to slight it or forget the Guild of Handicraft established here in 1892. Removed from London in that year, it has sought to bring back in these more and more commercial and factory times the craftsman’s old traditions of artistic and individual work, no matter in what trade. In printing, bookbinding, enamel-work, jewellery and cabinet-making it has sought by precept and example to further the teachings of Ruskin and Morris, and has created a new feeling here and elsewhere which has effects in places little suspected.
A Deserted Railway—Villages of the Stour Valley—Ettington and Squire Shirley—Shipston-on-Stour—Brailes—Compton Wynyates.
Thereis not an uninteresting road among the eight that lead out of Stratford, and all are beautiful. But none has more beauty than that which runs southward to Shipston-on-Stour. This way, or by the route leading through Ettington and Sunrising Hill, you go to Compton Wynyates, that wonderfully picturesque old mansion of the Comptons, Marquises of Northampton, which has remained unaltered for centuries in its remoteness, and is still not easily accessible. The Shipston road then, for choice, to Compton Wynyates. It follows, more or less closely the valley of the Stour, and here and there touches the river; while companionably, all the way run the grass-grown cuttings and embankments of that long-abandoned Stratford and Shipston Tramway whose red brick bridge is a feature of the Avon at Stratford town.
The deserted earthworks and ivy-grown bridges of this forgotten undertaking, now this side of the road and then the other, excite the curiosity of the stranger, but he will rarely find anyone to tell him the meaning of them, and at the best only vaguely. Their story is one of unfulfilled hopes and money flung ruinously away; for they are the only traces of the Central Junction Railway projected in 1820, to run through to Oxford and London. It was a horsed tramway, and was opened through Shipston to Moreton-in-the-Marsh in 1826. Aremunerative traffic in general agricultural produce and goods was expected, but the enterprise seems to have been weighted from the beginning with the heavy expenses of construction. Estimated by Telford at £35,000 for the Stratford-on-Avon to Moreton section, they soon reached £80,000. But the doom of the project was sounded by the introduction of the locomotive engine, almost simultaneously with the opening. In 1845 it was leased to the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, a scandalously inefficient line whose initials, “O. W. W.” suggested to saturnine wags the appropriate name of “Old Worse and Worse.” This ill-managed affair was eventually absorbed into the Great Western Railway, which now owns these relics.
Little villages are thickly set along the course of the Stour, to the right of the road; ancient settlements, each but a slightly larger or smaller collection of farmhouses, barns and thatched cottages, with a church in their midst. Here the Saxon farmers came and early cultivated the rich meadow-lands, leaving the poorer uplands long unenclosed and untitled; and to every little community came the clergy and set up a church and tithed those farmers who earned their livelihood by the sweat of their brows. Such a village is Atherstone-upon-Stour, where a majestic red brick farmhouse, dating from the seventeenth century, neighbours a debased little church. There is little of interest in that church, and the loathly epitaph to William Thomas, a son of the rector, who died in 1710, aged nine, of smallpox, decently veils in the obscurity of eighteenth century pedagogic Latin the full particulars given of his disease.
A rather larger village is Preston-upon-Stour, reached from the highway after passing the lovely elm avenues ofAlscot Park. Thatched cottages looking upon an upland green, with village church presiding over it, are the note of Preston. Tall stone gate-piers of the eighteenth century, with fine wrought-iron gates, give entrance to the churchyard. The interior of the church is, however, a very shocking example of the eighteenth-century way with Gothic buildings.
Smaller than any of these places by the lovely little Stour is Whitchurch, just before the larger village of Alderminster. It lies off to the right, not often troubled by the stranger. The place-name is thought to derive from a supposed former dedication of the church to St. Candida, or Wita. “Alderminster” means probably “the alderman’s town,” the property in Saxon times of some wealthy landowner, and has no ecclesiastical associations or monastic history that would account for the “minster” in the place-name.
The road grows extremely beautiful at the crossing of the Stour by Ettington Park and the approach to Newbold. Here, where a by-road to Grimscote goes off on the right, an ornate pillar standing on the grass serves the purpose of a milestone and bears the sculptured arms—the gold and black pales (heraldically paly of six, or and sable)—of a former owner of Ettington Park, generally spoken of in the neighbourhood as “wold Squire Shirley, what lived yur tharty yur agoo.” It was in 1871 that he erected this elaborate stone which I think must be the only poetical milestone in England. It is not great poetry, and there is not much of it; but it shows the immense possibilities of wayside entertainment, if all its fellows were made to burst into song—
“6 milesTo Shakespeare’s Town, whose nameIs known throughout the earth;To Shipston 4, whose lesser fameBoasts no such poet’s birth.”
“6 milesTo Shakespeare’s Town, whose nameIs known throughout the earth;To Shipston 4, whose lesser fameBoasts no such poet’s birth.”
You will see here that my own notion, earlier in these chaste pages, of re-naming the town “Shakespeare-on-Avon” germinated, however unconsciously, in “wold Squire Shirley’s” brain, over forty years since.
But this is not all. Two Latin and English verses are added to the tale of it—
“Crux mea lux,After darkness light.From light hope flows.And peace in death,In Christ is sure repose.Spes 1871.Post obitum Salus.In obitu PaxIn hue SpesPost tenebras lux.”
“Crux mea lux,After darkness light.From light hope flows.And peace in death,In Christ is sure repose.Spes 1871.Post obitum Salus.In obitu PaxIn hue SpesPost tenebras lux.”
The shields of arms include the nine roundels of the see of Worcester, and a further shield of the Shirley arms, with a canton ermine.
This poetical squire was Mr. Evelyn Philip Shirley, kinsman of Earl Ferrers. He refronted his house at Ettington Park, and indulged himself fully in that elaborate mansion in the verse he loved so well and composed so ill. In the hall still remains the shield of arms he set up there, displaying these same alternate black and gold stripes which come down from the times of Sewallis, and beneath it another of his compositions—
“These be the pales of black and goldThe which Sewallis bore of old;And this the coat which his true heirsThe ancient house of Shirley bears.”
“These be the pales of black and goldThe which Sewallis bore of old;And this the coat which his true heirsThe ancient house of Shirley bears.”
Ettington Park is now without a tenant and is, I believe, to be sold. Thus passes the pride of this branch of the Shirleys.
It is a lovely park and a stately house, with the ivied ruins of the ancient church adjoining, including the tombs and effigies of older Shirleys and others who wouldmake excellent ancestors for any enterprising purchaser. “I don’t know whose ancestors they were,” says the Major-General in thePirates of Penzance, of the monuments in the ruined chapel on the estate he has bought, “but I know whose they are.”
The Squire, besides his activities in the way of bad rhymes, stumbling metres, and obvious moral sentiments, was an antiquary, and keen to alter the spelling of the place-name “Eatington” to “Ettington,” on the coming of the railway in 1873. He showed that it is “Etendone” in Domesday Book, and that Dugdale, the historian of Warwickshire, was the first to spell it Eatington in 1656. But Dugdale, who knew the name derived from the watery situation of the place, was right, and Domesday wrong, as it very often is in these matters, the Norman-French compilers of it not being at all well-equipped for rendering the, to them, alien names correctly.
Passing pretty scenes at Newbold-on-Stour, the road bears away from the river and touches it again at the equally pretty village of Tredington. The spire of Honington is then seen on the left, and Shipston-on-Stour is entered. There is a railway station at Shipston, the terminus of a little branch line from Moreton-in-the-Marsh. When the railway reached so far it exhausted all its energies and could do no more. It might be supposed, from the efforts to reach Shipston by rail, that it was an important place, whose traffic was well worth securing—perhaps even, from its name, a port; but it is long since this old market-town was a place of any commercial value, and no ships ever sailed the little Stour. They were sheep, not ships, that gave Shipston its name, and it first appears in history, nine hundred and fifty years ago, as “Scepewasce”; that is to say, the place where the sheep were washed in those Saxontimes. It was written “Scepwaesctun” in 1006, and is “Scepwestun” in Domesday;i.e.the Sheepwash Town.
To Brailes, over two miles from Shipston, the road rises, commanding views down upon the left over “the Feldon,” as the district between this and Stratford-on-Avon is known; that clearing in the ancient Forest of Arden which is by no means so bare of timber as might be supposed, and itself indeed looks from this height very like a forest. At Brailes is the parish church, proudly styled the “Cathedral of the Feldon.” It is large, its tower is lofty, rising to a hundred and twenty feet, and it stands in a prominent position. Its Perpendicular architecture is good, too, but there is nothing, internally, of a cathedral about it.
At the “George” inn, Brailes, the traveller to Compton Wynyates will do well to refresh himself before he proceeds further, for not only has he come far, but when he has threaded the steep and winding lanes beyond which that romantic manor-house of the Comptons lies in its deep, cup-like hollow, he will need something wherewith to fortify his energies, especially as it is extremely likely he will lose himself on the way, and as there is no likelihood of his being able to refresh himself when there. Romance, lovely scenery, and picturesque architectural grouping are not well seen when fasting.
“Wynyates” is a puzzling word, which may mean “Vineyards” or “Windgates”: the first for choice. The place, let it be impressed upon the stranger, is a house, not a village; although, looking sheerly down upon the hollow where its crowded gables and many clustered chimneys are seen, with its adjoining church, a village it might appear to be. There was once, indeed, such a place, but it disappeared so long ago that no one can tell us anything about it, and its church, which stood uponthe site of the present building, was battered to pieces and “totally reduced to rubbish,” as Dugdale tells us, during the siege of the mansion in 1644.
Thus the Comptons, Marquises of Northampton, have the place all to themselves. And it is very likely that the explorer also will have Compton Wynyates to himself, for this is but one of the residences of that noble family, whose chief seat is at Castle Ashby, away in Northamptonshire, and it is occupied for only a short interval in every year. By an admirable generosity and courtesy the stranger may generally be assured of permission to see the interior of the mansion, a privilege very well worth exercising.
Sir William Compton, the builder of Compton Wynyates, was the descendant of a long line of obscure squires who had been settled here for centuries. He owed his advancement in life to being brought up with Henry the Eighth, who cherished an affection for him and gave his friend the Castle of Fulbrook, which was situated between Stratford-on-Avon and Warwick. Sir William Compton did a singular thing with the gift. He pulled it down and transported the materials by packhorse or mule-train the dozen miles or so across country to this secluded hollow, and with them built the charming house we now see. Fulbrook Castle, it would thus appear, was less of a castle than a slightly embattled manor-house, built of red brick, with tall moulded chimney stacks, in the reign of Henry the Sixth. It had been in existence only some eighty years. Its chimneys, according to tradition, were taken whole, the mortar being so strong that the bricks could not be separated. Thus the singularity of a brick house in a stone district is explained.
Compton Wynyates
It is red brick such as that of Hampton Court: a lovely mellow red, further toned by more than four hundred and fifty years. The remains of a moat, and some beautiful gardens, form an exquisite setting. Little has ever been done to alter the mansion. It is built around a quadrangle, and is entered by the original brick porch with the Royal arms of the Tudor period above. Within is the Great Hall, panelled in oak, with timbered roof and minstrel-gallery. The adjoining dining-room, oak-panelled and with richly-decorated plaster ceiling, displaying the heraldic devices of the Comptons, is next the domestic chapel. On the door above are the withdrawing-rooms communicating with the chapel-gallery. Here is “Henry the Eighth’s Bedchamber,” afterwards used by Queen Elizabeth when she visited Henry Compton, grandson of Sir William, in 1572, shortly after creating him Baron Compton. His son William is the hero of that Compton romance which brought the family great wealth. He fell in love with the daughter and heiress of the enormously rich Sir John Spencer, alderman of London, but the father did not approve of it and refused to allow his daughter to hold any converse with her lover, who then had recourse to an ingenious stratagem. He enlisted the Spencer’s family baker upon his side, bribing him to be allowed to carry the domestic bread to the house, and duly disguised appeared one morning with his load. He was so early that the alderman gave him sixpence and a homily on the virtues of diligence and punctuality. But when the loaves had been delivered, the lady herself took her place in the basket and was carried away in it and promptly married. Her father, cheated of the better match he had looked for, disinherited her, and the Spencer wealth would have gone other ways but for Queen Elizabeth, who when the first child of these enterprising lovers was born asked Sir John Spencer to be sponsor with her at the baptism of a child she wasinterested in, and to adopt it. He unsuspectingly agreed and thus became godfather and guardian of his grandson, who inherited the riches so nearly lost. The resourceful lover and husband, father of this fortunate boy, Spencer Compton, was created Earl of Northampton by James the First. Spencer, the second Earl, fought for King Charles at Edge Hill, October 23rd, 1642, and was slain at Hopton Heath the following March. In June 1644, the Royalist garrison of Compton Wynyates was besieged, and the house was captured in two days, and held throughout the war by the Roundheads, in spite of the bold moonlight attack in December, when the two brothers, Sir Charles and Sir William Compton, at the head of a daring party from Banbury, surprised the outposts, rushed the drawbridge which then crossed the moat, and fought a long hand to hand fight in the stables, before they were driven back.
The long wooden gallery under the roof on one side of the house is known as “the Barracks.” Here the garrison lay during those times. A panelled room in the tower is known as the “Council Chamber.” Above it is the “Priest’s Room,” apparently at some time used as a secret chapel, for on the wooden window-shelf may be seen the five rudely-cut crosses for an altar.
The church destroyed in the troubles of the civil war was rebuilt in 1663 by the third Earl of Northampton, and contains the battered monuments of Sir William Compton, builder of the mansion, and his wife; and of Henry, first Baron Compton; retrieved from the moat, into which, after being broken up, they had been thrown.
Luddington—Welford—Weston-on-Avon—Cleeve Priors—Salford Priors.
Theway from Stratford to Evesham is a main road, the road through Bidford, that already described in the chapters on the “Eight Villages,” and hardly to be mentioned again except that by making some variations here and there, two or three villages not otherwise to be visited may be included. The first is Luddington, two and a half miles from the town, on a duly sign-posted road to the left, an excellent road, although not marked so on the maps. Luddington, besides being a village of one long row of old thatched cottages close to the Avon, is of some mild interest as being the place of which Thomas Hunt, one of Shakespeare’s schoolmasters, became curate-in-charge, and where, some say, Shakespeare was married. But the old church was burnt down many years ago and rebuilt in 1872, and the register, supposed to have been destroyed at the same time, was long kept in private hands, finally disappearing altogether. The late Mr. C. E. Flower, of Stratford-on-Avon, stated that, in his younger days, “no one dreamed of disputing the assertion that Shakespeare was married at Luddington old church”; and many others declared that they had seen the entry in the book.
The way through Luddington crosses over the railway and rejoins the main road half a mile short of Binton station. Welford lies away to the left.
Welford is a kind of show place in the Stratforddistrict. “Ah! if you want to see a pretty place, you should go to Welford.” The experienced traveller and amateur of rural beauty hears this with a certain amount of misgiving, for the popular suffrages might mean tea-gardens and all the materials towards making a happy day for those very many people who think nature unadorned to be a dull affair at the best. But Welford is quite as good as it is represented to be. One might almost style it the most picturesque village in the neighbourhood.
There is a good deal of Welford in the aggregate, but it is so scattered that it has the appearance of half a dozen hamlets. It is best reached by turning off the road to Bidford just short of Binton railway station. A few yards bring you to what are called “Binton bridges,” across the Avon, here running in overgrown channels, thick with “the vagabond flag,” and shaded by willows that recall the lines inHamlet—
“There is a willow grows askant the brookThat shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.”
“There is a willow grows askant the brookThat shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.”
You may notice, when the wind ruffles the leaves of the willow, that the description is exact; the underside of a willow-leaf being different from the upper, and of a hoary, grey-white tint.
“Binton bridges” are not, as might perhaps be assumed, bridges side by side, but are continuations, across the two channels of the river. Immediately across them the sign of the “Four Alls” inn attracts notice. It is a picture-sign showing the King, “I rule all”; a bishop, “I pray for all”; a guardsman, “I fight for all”; and a mournful-looking person, seated, wearing a suit of black clothes and a thoughtful expression of countenance: “I pay for all.” It is a sign to be matched in other parts of the country, and wasinvented long ago by some sardonic person who had pondered deeply upon the functions of the Monarchy, the Church, the Army, and the tax-payer. But he lacked the savage, saturnine humour of the person who thought of the “Five Alls,” another sign not unknown in the length and breadth of the land. The Fifth All being the Devil: “I take all!”
The first part of Welford soon appears, on the right. It might be styled the chief part, because here, among the scattered groups of cottages, the church is found. The church itself is only mildly interesting, but the old lych-gate is a quaint survival, as weather-worn and rustic and untouched as Welford itself; its rude timbers seamed and bleached with the weather of over four centuries. Past the church you come down Boat Lane to the river, where the weir can be heard roaring. There are some particularly sketchable cottages in this lane, as will be seen by the illustration over-leaf.
Returning, and proceeding southwards, other ancient thatched cottages are passed, and then we come to the maypole, doubtless regarded as the centre of the village. It is still dressed on May Day every year, and stands here all the year on its mound, a thing for the stranger to wonder at, gaily painted in bands of red, white and blue. It is not, of course, the only existing maypole in England. I myself,moi que vous parle, know about a dozen; but they are sufficiently unusual to attract attention.
The rest of Welford straggles along a broad street to the left, and presently ends obscurely in meadows leading to the river. Across field-paths one comes in this direction to the very out-of-the-world little village of Weston-on-Avon. The explorer who finds Weston feels like some member of the Geographical Society who has wandered in strange, outlandish parts and comesback to read a paper on the subject; but I dare say it is similarly discovered very frequently. Meanwhile, I have no travellers’ tales to tell of the manners and customs of the people, who are, as commonly elsewhere, of two sexes and walk upright on their hind legs, and some are old and some young, and others yet middle-aged. And there is the railway station of Milcote, only a mile away, situated in a field. No one seems ever to go to it, or come from it; “Milcote” being a species of dream place represented only by two remote houses. I believe the station must have been set down there by some railway manager suffering from strong delusions.
Boat Lane, Welford
Weston-on-Avon is really a very charming little place, with a small aisle-less Late Perpendicular church, remarkable for the continuous range of windows high up in the north wall, giving the interior an unusual brightness and grace. The tower is furnished at its angles with gargoyles of an unusual size and imaginative quality.
Returning to Welford, a by-road leads by the meadows called “Welford Pastures” to Barton, and across the Roman road, the Ryknield Street, to the hamlet of Marlcliff, below Bidford, where the Avon becomes broader and navigable and lined with beautifully wooded cliffs, densely covered with foliage to the water’s edge. A mile further is the village of Cleeve Priors, where the picturesque old “King’s Arms” inn, with its horseman’s upping-block in front, dates from 1691. Here, too, is a small seventeenth-century manor-house, with heavily-barred and grated door, breathing old-time distrust and suspicion.
Returning through the village to the waterside, the river may be crossed here, by the long plank footbridge, only one plank wide, at Cleeve Mill and lock; and Abbot’s Salford reached, on the Evesham main road, just missing Salford Priors, where, if we wish to see it, there is a fine old church. Salford Priors was anciently the property of the Priory of Kenilworth, and Salford Abbots that of Evesham Abbey. Here, enclosed within a jealous high wall, is the old Hall, generally called “the Nunnery,” because of a Roman Catholic sisterhood having been established here in modern times. It is a small Jacobean mansion, very tall in proportion to its size, and curiously huddled together. Quaint curved and re-curved gables of a bygone fashion, deeply set windows, and lofty stone chimney-stacks, give the place a reticent look; the look of a house with a history and secrets of its own. There are so many amateurs of the quaint and historic nowadays that the occupiers of Salford Hall have grown a little tired of showing strangers the genuine old hiding-hole in the garret; behind a quite innocent-looking cupboard. You open the cupboard and see a commonplace row of shelves. No one would suspect a secret there. But when a wooden peg is removed, the shelves,together with the back of the cupboard, push back on hinges, admitting to a hiding-hole for priest or cavalier, or any whose necessities led him to store himself uncomfortably away here. Once inside, the fugitive could fix the door with a peg, so that it could not be moved from without.
Harvington, which comes next on our way to Evesham, is a delightful cluster of old timbered houses, with a church whose Norman tower has been given a modern spire. The village is at least half a mile from the river, but it takes its name, originally “Herefordtun,” from an ancient paved ford still there, a most charming and interesting scene. The ford is practically a submerged paved road, such as those by which the Romans crossed rivers, and is broad enough for wagons to pass. The roads on either side are, however, only byways, leading to the Littleton villages and the Lenches.
Norton, whose full name is Abbot’s Norton, comes next. It was for some years, until the beginning of 1912, the property of the Orleans family, one of the exiled Royal houses of France; but the Duc d’Orléans has now sold his estates and his residence at Wood Norton, close by, to Mr. Justice Swinfen Eady. Norton has yet more, and very fine timbered houses, and in its church lie a number of the Rigg family, in effigy on altar-tombs emblazoned to wonderment with their heraldic honours and those of their wives. The marble lectern is a relic from Evesham Abbey.
From Norton the road enters Evesham along Greenhill, where the battle was fought in 1265, and where the suburbs now chiefly extend.
Evesham.
Thelegendary story of Evesham’s origin takes us back to the year 701, when one of the Bishop of Worcester’s swineherds, seeking a strayed sow, penetrated the forest that then covered this site, and here found his sow and also a ruined chapel, relic of an ancient and forgotten church. A modern discoverer of ruins would find shattered walls and nothing else, but Eof, the swineherd, beheld a vision of the Virgin and attendant saints singing there. Instead of worshipping, he ran, almost scared out his life, and only ventured back under the protection of Bishop Ecgwin himself, who saw the same wonderful sight and heard the singing. There could be but one outcome of this: the founding of a religious house upon the spot; and thus arose the great Benedictine monastery of Eof’s-hamme. Even in those times there would seem to have been people who could not digest this story, as the Bishop soon found, and he seems to have been so stricken by the tales told of him that he considered nothing less than a pilgrimage to Rome would avail him much. His preparations for departing were peculiar. He chained his legs together and having locked the chain, threw the key into the river. Arrived at Rome in spite of this amazing difficulty (we are not told how he got there!), a salmon bought for him proved to contain, when cut open, the key to unlock his fetters. The salmon had swallowed it in the Avon and had swum across seas! This cumulative outrage uponcommon sense then proceeds to tell us how the bells of Rome rang of themselves, and how impressed was the Pope. Nothing afterwards ever astonished him: his capacity for wonder was filled to the brim. These unparalleled occurrences seemed to this credulous and doddering old pontiff so strong a proof of Ecgwin’s honesty that he forthwith conferred upon his monastery not only many valuable privileges, but freed it from the authority of Worcester. And Ecgwin, third Bishop of Worcester, resigned the greater post for the lesser, and became first Abbot of Evesham. There appears to have been an early doubt as to what the name was to be, for it is once referred to as “Ecguineshamme”; but the legendary herdsman Eof easily won the honour, and although Ecgwin was created a saint after his death, the place never acquired his name and thus we have “Evesham” instead of “Exham,” as the place would probably otherwise have been called.
On this foundation of incredible story the future wealth and power of the great Abbey of Evesham was laid. Its Abbots never grew ashamed of the stupid lies, and to the last sealed their deeds and documents with seals bearing representations of Ecgwin’s unlocked fetters and other incidents of his fantastic invention. In spite of fire, invasion and even early confiscation of some of its property, Evesham Abbey grew wealthier and more influential. Its Abbots were of those great mitred Abbots who sat in Parliament, prone to anger and violence on occasion; and not infrequently they were of the type of Abbot Roger, who in the thirteenth century expended the substance of the monastery on riotous living and kept his seventy monks and sixty servants so ill-clothed and fed that they went in rags and even starved. No bite nor sup for them; and when they crawled into the Abbey, the leaky roof poured wateron them. Some died of starvation. It would take long to tell in full the story of the many years in which this strange Abbot ruled.
But the monastery and its great Abbey church easily survived this miserable time, and fresh architectural glories were added. Even at the last, when the suppression of the great religious houses under Henry the Eighth was impending, more building was in progress. Abbot Lichfield, the last of the long line, then ruled, and was building the Bell Tower, which almost alone remains of the Abbey church. That church, 350 feet in length, and its many chapels and chantries, filled with the tombs of generations of benefactors who had hoped by their gifts to be prayed for “for ever,” was destroyed in almost the completest manner. Even Thomas Cromwell, the most zealous of Henry the Eighth’s coadjutors, was impressed with the beauty of this great mass of buildings; but all efforts to avert the destruction, and to put them to some collegiate use, failed. Not even the great Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds disappeared quite so completely as this of Evesham. Leland, writing in 1540, six years later, remarked, with astonishment: “Gone, a mere heap of ruins.”
The position of the town upon the meadow-lands by the Avon is enshrined in the second half of the place-name, which in this case is not the more common “ham,” indicating a “home,” or settlement, but “hamme,” a waterside meadow. You do not see the justness of this until the river has been crossed by the fine modern bridge, and the town viewed from Bengeworth, on the other side of Avon. Thence those meadows are seen, with the Abbey Bell Tower, and the towers and spires of the churches of St. Lawrence and All Saints, making an unusual grouping, with a certain grandeur in their contrasting dispositions. We may readily admit thatthe famous Bell Tower is the finest architectural work in Evesham, because the admission will make it the easier to criticise its great defect, its comparative dwarfness. Built in 1533 by Abbot Lichfield, it was the last work of the Gothic era at Evesham, and is perhaps one of the most striking examples of the Perpendicular period:
Bell Tower, Evesham
embodying the features of the style in the highest degree, in the long lateral panellings wholly covering its surface. It is the more noticeable because of its solitary position. But to lavish upon it the unqualified praise that is commonly given is alike uncritical of its own defect of insufficient height, and shows an ignorance or forgetfulness of the grander proportions of the central tower of Gloucester Cathedral, very closely resembling it in style, or of the unmatchedtowers of the Somersetshire churches, many of which are not only loftier, and with far better and varied details, but have also that sense of height which is rather painfully lacking here.
The entrance from the Market Place to what were once the Abbey precincts, where the churches of St. Lawrence and All Saints stand closely neighbouring one another, in one churchyard, is by the so-called Norman Gateway. There is not much left of the Norman work, the upper part being a half-timber building, apparently of the fifteenth century. The view into this corner from the Market Place is very picturesque, but it was better before the adjoining public library was built, a few years ago. Not only were some charmingly old-world houses destroyed to make way for it, but it is itself a building lamentably out of character with its surroundings. The church of St. Lawrence, very late in style and remarkable for the originality of its tower and spire, has some delicate and elaborate work; and in that of All Saints is the richly-panelled and fan-vaulted chantry built by Clement Lichfield, the last Abbot of Evesham, who lies here.
A relic of the Abbey of a more domestic character is seen in the lovely little building on Abbey Green called the Almonry. It was formerly the place where the almoners distributed their doles, and is of all periods from Early English to Perpendicular, its materials ranging from stone to timber, brick and plaster. Many generations have had something to say in the building of it, and the present has at the moment of writing these lines said yet another word, stripping off the plaster with which the front had been covered for some two centuries. The sturdy oak timbering is now uncovered, and is a revelation to many of unsuspected beauty. An ancient stone lantern is inside the building, whichis now occupied as the “Rudge Estate Office.” Perhaps, now that these new and better ways with old buildings are revealing long-forgotten craftsmanship, attention will be turned to the ancient Booth Hall, or market-house, still standing in the Market Place, covered in like manner with plaster.
The Almonry, Evesham
It would not be well to leave Evesham without referring to the greatest event in its history, the fierce battle fought here August 4th, 1265, at Greenhill, on the road to Worcester. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, in arms against Henry the Third, and with the King himself a prisoner in his hands, lay at Evesham the night before with his army. De Montfort and his men were at mass early the next morning and then marched out to meet an enemy who outnumbered them and had cut off every avenue of escape. They were fighting for the popular cause, and De Montfort, Frenchman though he might be, was the chosen champion of English liberties. Privilege and the reactionaries hadtheir way that day, for Prince Edward and his numerically superior and encircling army cut down De Montfort and his men in swathes. None asked or gave quarter on that fatal day. A large number hewed their way through and fled to the Castle of Kenilworth, but the old Simon and his son Henry were slain. The King himself was almost slain by mistake. The sculptured base of an obelisk on the site of the battle at Abbey Manor, Greenhill, portrays this incident, with the King’s words, “I am Henry of Winchester, your King. Do not kill me.”