Against the opposite wall is the altar-tomb of that “noble Impe, Robert of Dudley,” infant son of the last, who died in his fourth year, 1584. A circlet round the brow of the little figure bears the Leicester badge, the cinquefoil. Last of the Dudley monuments, is the altar-tomb of Ambrose, styled the “good Earl,” in tacit contradistinction from his brother Robert, the wicked one. The good Ambrose was not given length of days, for he died the year after his brother. He also is shown in armour and wears a coronet and the Garter. How he was given the post of “Mayster of the Ordinaunce,” made Chief Butler of England, and was altogether a personage of many offices, his epitaph tells. With him and the “noble Impe,” his brother’s infant son, the legitimate race of the Dudleys died.
Warwick Castle.
Thegreat Castle of Warwick, now the seat of the Earl and Countess of Warwick, who formed themselves into a Limited Liability Company some fifteen years ago, under the title of the “Warwick Estates Co., Ltd.,” has been the seat of the Grevilles since 1605.
The origin of Warwick Castle goes back to Ethelfleda, daughter of Alfred the Great and wife of the then Earl of Mercia, a strenuous and warlike lady, to whom are attributed many ancient works. She is credited with building the first fortress inA.D.915, on that knoll still known as “Ethelfleda’s Mount,” on which a Norman keep was subsequently erected, perhaps by that famous personage Turchil. In the family of Turchil the cognisance of the yet more famous Bear and Ragged Staff originated, which in all succeeding generations has descended from house to house of the distinguished families who have come into possession of Warwick Castle: the Houses of Beauchamp, Neville, Dudley, Rich, and Greville: not as their personal badge, but as that of the castellan for the time being of Warwick. A fantastic theory has been set afoot that, as Siward, son of Turchil, assumed the name “de Arden,” thus founding the numerous knightly family of Ardens, Shakespeare, as the son of a Mary Arden, was probably the rightful owner of Warwick Castle! We may safely say that this never occurred to Shakespeare himself, and may add him to one of that numerous class slyly alluded toby Ingoldsby; people “kept out of their property by the rightful owners.”
The great Guy of Warwick, a giant in stature and doughty in deeds, is a myth, but that does not prevent his armour being shown in the Great Hall of the Castle. His period seems to be placed between that of Ethelfleda and Turchil, for the date of his death is put atA.D.929. Mythical though he is, the later and very real flesh-and-blood Beauchamps, who came into possession of Warwick in the thirteenth century, were often named “Guy” in allusion to him. His armour, like his legendary self, is a weird accretion of time, and is no longer displayed with the touching belief of less exacting times. The Age of Belief is dead, they say. Of belief in some things incredible, no doubt. He wore, according to the articles seen here, not only armour of tremendous size and weight, but of periods ranging from three hundred, to six hundred and ninety years after his death. A bascinet of the time of Edward the Third covered his head, his breastplate, weighing fifty pounds, is of the latter part of the fifteenth century, and the backplate belongs to the Stuart period. His shield weighs thirty pounds; his great ponderous sword, five feet six inches long, is of the time of Henry the Eighth. “Guy’s breakfast cup, or porridge-pot” is equally wonderful, for it has a capacity of a hundred and twenty gallons. It is really an ancient iron cauldron, once used for cooking the rations of the garrison.
The first historical Earl of Warwick was Henry de Newburgh, who died 1123; and by a succession of changes and failures of heirs the title and estates came to William de Beauchamp, husband of the daughter of William Mauduit.
In the time of Guy, Earl of Warwick, son of this William, the Castle witnessed some stirring scenes.The discontented nobles, troubled at the preference given by Edward the Second to his foreign favourite, Piers Gaveston, and at the apparent impossibility of permanently ridding the kingdom of him, seized that pestilent foreigner and confined him for a short time in a dungeon here.
The favourite was by no means an acceptable person to the English barons, who although all directly descended from William the Conqueror’s Frenchmen, had already been assimilated by this wonderful country of ours, and were as English as—well, let us say as English as any German Jew Goldstein or Schlesinger of modern times who, coming to these happy shores, suffers a sea-change into something rich and rare, and becomes a new and strange “Gordon,” or “Sinclair.” They regarded this flippant Gascon from the south of France as an undesirable of the worst type, and could not and would not appreciate his jokes; a natural enough disability when you come to consider them, for they were all at their expense. If you study the monumental effigies of those mediæval barons and knights which are so plentifully dispersed throughout our country churches, you will readily perceive that although they were frequently very magnificent personages, their countenances do not often show any trace of intellectual qualities. Edward the Second was as flippant a person as his favourite, and when these stupid and indignant barons saw them laughing together, they knew very well, or keenly suspected, that they themselves were being laughed at. Did not this Gaveston fellow call the Earl of Lancaster “the play-actor,” or “the fiddler,” and the Earl of Lincoln “burst belly.” Every one knew he called his father-in-law “fils à puteyne,” or “whoreson.” Guy, Earl of Warwick, was “the black hound of Arden.”
“Let him call me hound: one day the hound will bite him,” said the Earl. Meanwhile, Gaveston went on finding nicknames for every one, and made himself bitterly hated by those dull-minded barons who could not joke back at him. The worst of it was, his lance was as keen, and went as straight to the point, as his gibes. It was little use meeting him in single combat, for he unhorsed and vanquished the best.
Hence this seizure of the hateful person. The story of it is told by Adam Murimuth—
“The King wished Peter de Gavestone to be conveyed to him by Lord Adamar de Valense, Earl of Pembroke, for safety; and, when they were at Danyntone next Bannebury, the same Earl sent him away in the night; and he went near to one place for this reason. And on the morrow in the morning came Guy, Earl of Warwyk, with a low-born and shouting band, and awakened Peter and brought him to his Castle of Warwyk and, after deliberation with certain elders of the kingdom, and chiefly with Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, finally released him from prison to go where he would. And when he had set out from the town of Warwyk even to the place called, somewhat prophetically, Gaveressich, he came there with many men making a clamor against him with their voices and horns, as against an enemy of the King and a lawful outlaw of the Kingdom, or an exile; and finally beheaded him as such xix day of the month of June.”
“The King wished Peter de Gavestone to be conveyed to him by Lord Adamar de Valense, Earl of Pembroke, for safety; and, when they were at Danyntone next Bannebury, the same Earl sent him away in the night; and he went near to one place for this reason. And on the morrow in the morning came Guy, Earl of Warwyk, with a low-born and shouting band, and awakened Peter and brought him to his Castle of Warwyk and, after deliberation with certain elders of the kingdom, and chiefly with Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, finally released him from prison to go where he would. And when he had set out from the town of Warwyk even to the place called, somewhat prophetically, Gaveressich, he came there with many men making a clamor against him with their voices and horns, as against an enemy of the King and a lawful outlaw of the Kingdom, or an exile; and finally beheaded him as such xix day of the month of June.”
So the “Black Dog” did indeed bite him to some effect. This tragic spot is a place called Blacklow Hill, one mile north of the town. A monument to this misguided humorist, following his natural propensities in a land where humour is not appreciated, was erected on the spot by a Mr. Greathead, of Guy’s Cliff House, in 1821. The inscription itself has a complete lack of humour—
“In the hollow of this rock was beheaded, on the first day of July, 1312, by barons as lawless as himself, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, the minion of a hateful king, in life and death a memorable instance of misrule.”
“In the hollow of this rock was beheaded, on the first day of July, 1312, by barons as lawless as himself, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, the minion of a hateful king, in life and death a memorable instance of misrule.”
With this fierce “Black Dog of Arden,” whose teeth were so sharp, the architectural history of the Castle becomes clear. He repaired and strengthened it, after the rough handling it had received in the Barons’ War, in the reign of Henry the Third; but to Thomas de Beauchamp, his grandson, is due Cæsar’s Tower, about 1360, and it was his son Thomas, who built Guy’s Tower, named after the mythical giant, about 1394.
It costs two shillings to see Warwick Castle. I believe if you happen to be a resident of Warwick or Leamington, there is a reduction of fifty per cent. The entrance is not so old as it looks, and was cut through the rock in 1800. It leads to the gloomy Barbican, whose overhanging walls give a truly mediæval approach and form the completest contrast with the scene that opens beyond.
The visitor enters a huge courtyard, now one vast lawn, nearly two acres in area; with the residential portion of the Castle and its state-rooms on the left. Ahead is Ethelfleda’s Mount, and on the right, guarding the curtain-wall at intervals, are Guy’s Tower; the incomplete Bear Tower, with its mysterious tunnel, the work of Richard the Third; and the companion Clarence Tower, built by George, Duke of Clarence, his ill-fated brother, murdered in the Tower of London. Beside Ethelfleda’s Mount is the Hill Tower.
Immediately to the left of the entrance are the brew-house, laundry and then Cæsar’s Tower, with its gloomy dungeon, a most undesirable place of residence with vaulted stone roof and mouldy smells, meet for repentance and vain regrets. Here the “Black Dog”imprisoned the flippant Gaveston, and many later generations of prisoners passed weary times, scratching their not very legible records upon the walls for lack of employment. Among them is the record of one “Master John Smyth, gunner to the King,” who appears to have been a prisoner here for the worse part of four years, in the hands of the Cromwellian partisan, Lord Brooke. We learn nothing further of the unfortunate gunner, nor why he was meted such hard measure.
MafTER: IohN: SMyTH: GVNER:TO HIS:MAIESTyE.HIghNES:WAS:APRISNER IN THISPlACE:ANDlAyHERE.frOM1642TELLthWILLIAMSIdIATE ROT ThisSAMEANdifMyPENHAdBinBETERfoRHIS SAKE I WovldHAVE MENdEdEVERRi leTTER.Mafter 1642 345Iohn : SMyTHGVNERtoH .MAIEfTys: HighNES WASAPRIfNER IN ThisPlACEIN:ThE .yEAREofOVRLord1642 : 345miserereihs maryihs mio
MafTER: IohN: SMyTH: GVNER:TO HIS:MAIESTyE.HIghNES:WAS:APRISNER IN THISPlACE:ANDlAyHERE.frOM1642TELLth
WILLIAMSIdIATE ROT ThisSAMEANdifMyPENHAdBinBETERfoRHIS SAKE I WovldHAVE MENdEdEVERRi leTTER.
Mafter 1642 345Iohn : SMyTHGVNERtoH .MAIEfTys: HighNES WASAPRIfNER IN ThisPlACEIN:ThE .yEAREofOVRLord1642 : 345miserereihs maryihs mio
Mr. William Sidiate (or possibly it is “Lidiate”) who thus, in the quaintest of lettering inscribed the sorrows of his friend the imprisoned gunner, appears to have been fully conscious of the eccentricity of his handiwork, but the inferiority of his “pen”—which was probably a rusty nail—can have had nothing to do with his weird admixture of “large caps,” “upper case,” “lower case” and italic type which I confidently expect will make the compositor of this page smile and sigh by turns.
The Great Hall, with its armour and pictures and relics of Guy, is of course the chief feature of the longround of sight-seeing that makes Warwick Castle second to none as a show-place. It was greatly injured in the fire of December 1871, when many priceless relics were destroyed. Facsimile replicas of some have been made, and of the ancient armour which survived it has been said that there is no finer in the Kingdom, except that in the Tower of London. It is remarkable that although the Castle has passed from family to family, and sometimes to families not related to their predecessors, the continuity of things has been maintained. Here is the mace of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, “the Kingmaker,” who was slain in 1471 at the Battle of Barnet; here are portions of the armour which belonged to Prince Edward, murdered at Tewkesbury, after the battle; together with relics of the Dudleys, such as the miniature suit of armour made for the “noble Impe”; together with a helmet of the great Oliver Cromwell, and the suit worn by Lord Brooke, shot at the siege of Lichfield. His buff leathern jerkin was burnt in 1871, and that we now see is a facsimile of it. Here, too, are those preposterous relics of Guy, already mentioned, together with a rib of that Dun Cow of terrific story which he slew upon Dunsmore. The visitor will see that rib with surprise, and note that the cows of a thousand years ago were larger than ever he suspected. It is the rib of a whale.
He would be a courtly, and perhaps also a tedious, writer who should essay to fully describe Warwick Castle, with its many suites of state-rooms, its gothic stone-vaulted servants’-hall, and its terraces, ponds, and gardens, together with the conservatories and that famous Roman antiquity, the so-called “Warwick Vase,” found at Hadrian’s Villa, near Rome in 1770, and purchased by the dilettante George, second Earl, from Sir William Hamilton. Great improvements have beenmade here in the last few years at the cost of “a little damming and blasting,” as was remarked at the time.
Past the melancholy flymen who linger in the broad roadway opposite the entrance to the Castle, and wear jaundiced looks as though it were years ago since they had had a fare and expect it to be years yet before they will get another, you turn to the right into Mill Lane, narrow street of ancient houses, leading down to the river and to the site of that ancient mill where the feudal lords had their corn ground.
The magnificence of state-rooms, the lengthy parade of family portraits, the beauty of the gardens, and the trimness of well-kept lawns do not serve the really cultivated visitor’s turn in Warwick Castle. He pays his two shillings and is herded through with many others, a little browbeaten by the stale declamation of the gorgeous lackeys and by a very indigestion of sightseeing. It is not a medieval fortress he has seen, but a private residence. In Mill Lane, however, you come into nearer touch with realities. Here, in this by far the most picturesque and unspoiled part of Warwick, where the bowed and time-worn brick or timber-framed houses are living out their life naturally, something of the ancient contrast between subservient town and feudal fortress may be gathered, softened down, it is true, by the hand of time. Cæsar’s Tower is viewed at its best from the lower end of the lane, and looks from this point of view the noblest and the sternest tower the forceful military architects of the Middle Ages have given us, and well worthy of the great name of Cæsar long ago conferred upon it by some unknown admirer of its dignity and massive beauty. It was somewhere about 1360 when Cæsar’s Tower first arose upon the rocky bluff in which its foundations go deeply down. It was then called thePoictiers Tower. The purpose of this extremely strong and cunningly-planned work just here is lost to the modern casual observer, but if a keen glance is directed to the Avon flowing so closely by, it will be observed that although Mill Lane is now a lane butting up against the river bank and leading nowhere, the ruins of a very substantial stone bridge that once crossed the broad stream at this point are seen. This formerly carried the high road from Warwick to Banbury, and when still in use brought the possibility of attack upon the Castle at this angle very near, and therefore to be provided against by the strongest possible defence. Hence those boldest of machicolations overhead, those arrow-slits in the skilfully-planned battlements above them, and that extraordinary double base with the bold slopes, seen in the accompanying illustration; a base whose purpose was to fling off with a tremendous rebound into the midst of an enemy the stones, the molten lead and pitch, and the more nasty, but not so lethal missiles with which a besieged garrison defended themselves. This base is quite solid rock, faced with masonry. In the upper part of it is seen the small barred window that admits a feeble light into the dungeon already described. To-day the elms have grown up to great heights beside Cæsar’s Tower and assuage the grimness of it, and the only sounds are the cawings and gobbling noises of the rooks in their branches, or the unlovely cries of the Castle peacocks which strut across the lane in all their glory of colour.
The tower rises 106 feet above its rocky basement. Those old military architects who designed and built it had not the least idea they were installing a picturesque feature. They had no knowledge at all of the picturesque; but they assured themselves, as well as they could, that the safety of the Castle should be provided for. And they did it so well that history will be studied in vain for a successful siege.
Cæsar’s Tower, Warwick Castle
This must have been a noble and imposing entrance to Warwick town in days of old. Then the road from London to Banbury crossed the ancient bridge and came up under this frowning tower and through the south gate of the town, along Mill Lane.
The bridge, originally a narrow packhorse bridge of thirteen arches and of great antiquity, was widened in 1375 and the number of arches reduced to seven; and, thus remodelled, carried the traffic until 1790. This way came of necessity every traveller from London to Warwick, and in this manner Queen Elizabeth entered the town and Castle in 1572.
Warwick Castle was in those times less secluded from the streets than it now is. The feudal owners of it were not at all concerned to hide themselves away, but when the age of sight-seeing dawned and amateurs of the picturesque began to tour the country, they began to consider how they could ensure a complete privacy. It was effected by diverting the public highway. This was done at the instigation of George, second of the Greville Earls of Warwick, in or about 1790, when the new road and bridge were made, crossing the Avon considerably to the eastward. From that modern bridge, which cost £4000, only in part contributed by the Earl, who benefited most by the diversion, is obtained that view of the Castle so extravagantly praised by Sir Walter Scott. It is the only possible view, and not a good one: one by no means to be compared with that formerly obtained from the old bridge. Sir Walter Scott therefore either did not know what he was talking about, or was too much of a courtier to reveal his own convictions.
At this same time when the road was made to take its new course, the meadows on the other side of theAvon were enclosed and thrown into the park. To complete and fully round off this story of obliterating ancient landmarks, the old bridge was wrecked in the same year by a flood. Three only of its arches remain.
The Grevilles, the present Earls of Warwick, have a motto to their coat of arms which is a complete change from the usual swashbuckling braggart sentiments. He was surely a singularly modest man who first adopted it. I wish I could identify him. He must have read well the history of Warwick Castle and have pondered on the successive families of cuckoos who have nested in the old home of the original owners. He selected a quotation from theMetamorphosesof that amorous dove, P. Ovidius Naso—O! quite a proper one, I assure you—Vix ea nostra voco, “I can scarce call these things our own.” Whether he meant the heirlooms, the mace that belonged to the great Richard Neville “the Kingmaker,” the Plantagenet and the Dudley relics, or if he were a contemplative philosopher ruminating on the Law of Entail, by which he was not owner, to do with as he would, but only tenant-for-life, who shall say?
Guy’s Cliff—The legend of Guy—Kenilworth and its watersplash—Kenilworth Castle.
Leamingtonwill scarcely interest the holiday-maker in Shakespeare land. From Warwick to Kenilworth is the more natural transition, and it is one of much interest. A mile and a half out of the town is that famous place of popular legend, Guy’s Cliff, where the great mansion, standing beside the river and built in 1822, looks so ancient, and where, on the opposite shore of Avon, stands that mill whose highly picturesque features are a standing dish in railway carriage picture-galleries. The impossible armour of the mythical Guy of Warwick we have already seen in Warwick Castle, and the improbable legend of his hermit life in the riverside cave remains now to be told.
Guy, returning from the Holy Land and successfully engaging as the champion of England against Colbrond, the giant Dane, in combat at Winchester, retraced his steps towards Warwick. There, unknown by any, he three days appeared among the poor at the Castle gate, as one of the thirteen people to whom his wife daily gave alms; and “having rendred thanks to her, he repaired to an Heremite that resided among the shady woods hard by.” The legend forgets to tell us why he did this, and does not explain how it was that this giant fellow, who apparently was eight feet high, was not recognised by his wife and others. Were they all eight feet tall, or thereabouts, at Warwick in those times?
But it would be wasting time to apply the test of intelligent criticism to this mass of accumulated legends, to which many generations have added something. Guy is a mythical hero, built upon the exploits of some early British champion, whose name and real history are as past recall as the facts about King Arthur. But the great fourteenth-century Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who founded the chapel here, seems to have believed in him and in the size of him, for Guy’s mutilated effigy placed here by that great earl, whose faith must have been as robust as his body, is the full eight feet long.
At any rate, here is the cave of the hermit he consulted with, and with whom he resided, unknown still to his friends, until that holy and rheumatic man died. Here he himself died, two years later,A.D.929, aged seventy. Thus the story seeks to bolster up the wild character of its details by the specious exactness of its dates. “He sent to his Lady their Wedding Ring by a trusty servant, wishing her to take care of his burial; adding also that when she came, she should find him lying dead in the Chapel, before the altar, and moreover, that within xv dayes after, she herself should depart this life.”
Guy’s Cave, excavated in the rock, appears really to have been a hermit’s abode in Saxon times. His name seems, from the early twelfth-century Saxon inscription found here over a hundred years ago, to have been “Guhthi.” It runs “Yd Crist-tu icniecti this i-wihtth, Guhthi”; which has been rendered, “Cast out, thou Christ, from Thy servant this burden, Guhthi.” So romance is not altogether unjustified, and although this misguided anchorite did not appreciate scenery, we at any rate can thus find some historical excuse as well as a scenic one for visiting the spot, with the crowd.
It is a pleasant road, on through Leek Wootton,where the church, after being rebuilt in an odious style in 1792, has been brought more into keeping with later ecclesiastical sentiment. And so the road runs on, to Kenilworth, through the approach called Castle End. Presently, after threading the long street, there in its meadows rises the ruined Castle.
There is no ideal way into Kenilworth nowadays, because the place has become more or less of a town, and numerous Coventry business men make it their suburban home. Thus does Romance disappear, in the daily goings forth and the returnings on their lawful occasions of the residents, and in the spreading of fresh streets and always more cheaply built houses for newer colonies of them. The first jerry-builder at Kenilworth was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose badly bonded additions to the Castle still ruinously show how slightly and hastily he set about the work. But of that anon.
Castle End is one of those scattered portions of the town that surprise the stranger. He thinks, time and again, that he has seen all Kenilworth, but there is always some more of it. You bear to the left and descend to a broad watersplash that crosses the road beneath densely overarching trees. The people of Kenilworth cling tightly to the preservation of their watersplash, and for several reasons: it is highly picturesque and keeps them in touch with the last elfin echoes of that Romance I have spoken of; the building of a bridge would cost them considerably; and finally they would lose the amusement and speculative interest which has latterly been added to it in these automobile times, when a motor-car may or may not succeed in getting through. For the watersplash is rather a sudden apparition to the motorist strange to the place, and it is a very variable thing. Sometimes it will be a shallow trickle across the road, and at others, when rain has fallen, it will be broad anddeep. This is when the people of Kenilworth love to gather on the narrow footbridge at the side and smoke a quiet cigarette, waiting for the coming of the motorist who will presently be in difficulties. It is something of a problem how to pass at such times. If you rush it, as most are tempted to do, you get through at the cost of being swamped with the tremendous spray thrown up; and if you go gently you are probably brought to an inglorious standstill in mid-stream, with the ignominious necessity of wading out and procuring assistance. In any event, an engrossing spectacle is provided.
Once through this ford, you come up to the Castle entrance, on the left. It is a pleasant old part that looks on to the scene of so much feudal state and bygone warlike doings. A group of old red brick and timber cottages, their red brick of the loveliest geranium redness, looks upon a kind of village green. They lean at all kinds of angles, their roofs have skylines like the waves of a troubled sea, in front of each one is a little forecourt garden, and they all supply teas and sell picture-postcards. I do not know what the inhabitants of them do in the winter. Perhaps they come up to London and spend their gains in mad revelry.
It is a hungry and a thirsty business, “doing” Kenilworth Castle conscientiously, and the people of Castle Green and elsewhere in this village-town find their account therein. Even those visitors who do not conscientiously “do” it—and they are by far the larger number, both because most have not the intellectual equipment necessary, and because in the rest the weakness of the flesh prevails over the willingness of the spirit—find copious refreshment necessary. There is in fact, a great deal to be seen, and the interest is sustained throughout. Viewed in a commercial way, it is a very good sixpennyworth. Personally, I considerLudlow Castle to be somewhat the superior of Kenilworth, and to hold the premier position for a ruined castle; but Kenilworth is first in the estimation of many. It does not make the effective picture that Ludlow forms, crowning its rocky bluff above the river Teme; for Kenilworth stands in perhaps the weakest situation that ever was selected for an ancient fortress, its ruined walls rising from low-lying meadows, and at a distance having the appearance rather of some huge dismantled mansion than a castle.
It is quite easy to deduce the existence of some Saxon lord, Chenil or Kenelm, whoseweorththis was, but he is not an historical personage. The first important historic fact that remains to us is the gift of the manor by Henry the First to Geoffrey de Clinton in 1122, but what he found here in the nature of a castle, or what he may have built is alike unknown. From the grandson of this Geoffrey, King John appears to have taken a lease and to have added many outworks to the then existing castle keep, which still remains. That evil figure in English history, travelling almost incessantly about his kingdom, watchful and tyrannical, seems to have been much at Kenilworth, enlarging the bounds of the Castle beyond the original Saxon mound on which the keep and the inner ward are placed, inventing strong dungeons for his victims, and constructing those outer walls which still look out, beyond the original moat. Thus the Castle grew to four times the area it had at first occupied, and as it could not be strengthened by steep approaches, it was safeguarded by artificially constructed water defences. The fortification of Kenilworth Castle was indeed a wonderful triumph of mediæval military engineering over the disabilities of an unsatisfactory site, and it enabled the disaffected nobles and others in the next reign to sustain a six months’ siege ending only intheir surrender through a plague which had broken out among the garrison.
We can still see the nature of these defences, for although the water has been drained away, the circuit of the outer walls, from the Swan Tower on Clinton Green, round to Mortimer’s Tower, the Water Tower, and Lunn’s Tower remains perfect, and marks where the defences on two sides of the Castle enclosure skirted a great lake formed by damming back two small confluent brooks in the hollow meadows in which the Castle stands. The outer walls, now looking upon pastures where cattle graze, then descended sheer into the water; a flight of steps leading down from a postern gate still remaining to show where a boat could then have been launched. This lake was half a mile long, from 90 to 100 yards broad, and from 10 to 12 feet deep.
The siege of 1266 tried the strength of this strong place. The great Simon de Montfort, who fell at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, had been granted the Castle in 1254. He died in the popular cause, fighting against Henry the Third, and his defeated army hurried to Kenilworth. They found no immediate opposition, and garrisoned the place at leisure, being joined there by many powerful adherents and heaping up enormous stores for a lengthy resistance. Both sides knew it would be a stubborn and difficult affair. The King tried at first to come to terms with the garrison, but he does not appear to have gone about it in the most tactful way. It is true that he was prepared to allow the rebels to compound for pardon with a fine, supposing they did so within forty days, but to “pardon” those who think they are in the right and who are still in arms to assert their rights and redress their grievances, seems an unlikely way to end a dispute. The Church was opposed to the popular side, as may alwaysconfidently be expected, and helped the King’s cause by damning the insurgents and preparing the tremendous document known to history as the “Dictum de Kenilworth,” otherwise “the Ban.” This was read and published in the church of St. Mary, Warwick. It proclaimed the supreme will of the King, and,inter alia, forbade the people to regard the dead hero and popular idol, de Montfort, as the saint and martyr they were already declaring him to be. The garrison received this with contempt, and the long siege began. Robert of Gloucester, who records it in eloquent but rugged lines, is too quaint and amusing not to be quoted—
“The king anon at midsummer, with strength and with ginTo Kenilworth y-went, the castle to win;He swore he would not thence until he were within.So long they sped badly that they might as well bliue[272a]None of their gates those within ever close would.Open they stood, night and day, come in whoso would.Out they smite well oft, when men too nigh came,And slew fast on either half and prisoners name;[272b]And then bought they them back with ransom. Such life long did last:With mangonels and engines each upon the other cast.The Legate and the Archbishop with them also nome;[272c]Two other bishops, and to Kenilworth come,To make accord between the King and the disinherited also,And them of the Castle, if it might be y-do[272d]But the disinherited would not do all after the King[272e]Nor they of the Castle any the more, nor stand to their liking,[272f]The Legate with his red cope amansed tho[272g]Them that in the castle were, and full many mo[272i]All that helped them, or were of their rede,[272j]Or to them consented, in will or in deed.They of the Castle held it in great despite.Copes and other cloathes they let make them of whiteAnd Master Philip Porpoise, that was a quaint man,Clerk, and hardy in his deeds, and their chirurgian,They made a mock Legate, in this cope of white,Against the others’ rede, to do the Legate a despite,And he stood as Legate upon the Castle wall,And amansed King and Legate and their men allSuch game lasted long among them in such strife,But much good was it not, to soul or to life.”
“The king anon at midsummer, with strength and with ginTo Kenilworth y-went, the castle to win;He swore he would not thence until he were within.So long they sped badly that they might as well bliue[272a]None of their gates those within ever close would.Open they stood, night and day, come in whoso would.Out they smite well oft, when men too nigh came,And slew fast on either half and prisoners name;[272b]And then bought they them back with ransom. Such life long did last:With mangonels and engines each upon the other cast.The Legate and the Archbishop with them also nome;[272c]Two other bishops, and to Kenilworth come,To make accord between the King and the disinherited also,And them of the Castle, if it might be y-do[272d]But the disinherited would not do all after the King[272e]Nor they of the Castle any the more, nor stand to their liking,[272f]The Legate with his red cope amansed tho[272g]Them that in the castle were, and full many mo[272i]All that helped them, or were of their rede,[272j]Or to them consented, in will or in deed.They of the Castle held it in great despite.Copes and other cloathes they let make them of whiteAnd Master Philip Porpoise, that was a quaint man,Clerk, and hardy in his deeds, and their chirurgian,They made a mock Legate, in this cope of white,Against the others’ rede, to do the Legate a despite,And he stood as Legate upon the Castle wall,And amansed King and Legate and their men allSuch game lasted long among them in such strife,But much good was it not, to soul or to life.”
There was never another siege of Kenilworth. It passed through many hands, and among others to John o’ Gaunt, whose manors are found numerously, all over the country. In his time the great Banqueting Hall, the most beautiful feature of the Castle, was added, and it became not only a fortress, but a stately palace as well. But the most stately and gorgeous times were yet to be. Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, who aspired to become King-Consort, received a grant of it in 1563, and was created Earl of Leicester the following year. The monopolies and rich offices of State showered upon him by the Queen had already made him an enormously wealthy man, and he determined to entertain his Sovereign here with unparalleled splendour. To this end he established an army of workmen here, who treated the place very much in the way adopted by any suddenly enriched millionaire of modern times towards the out-of-date mansion he has purchased. The narrow openings in the massive walls of the Norman keep were enlarged and great mullioned windows inserted; the vast Gatehouse still standing and now used as a private residence was built; and the lofty block of buildings added that still bears his name. Many other works, but of less spectacular nature, were undertaken at this time.
Dudley had known many changes of fortune, and had been a prisoner in the Tower only ten years earlier,with his father and four brothers, on a charge of high treason; narrowly escaping execution. Now an astonishing freak of chance had made him perhaps the most powerful, as well as the wealthiest, man in the country. Sir Walter Scott’s novel,Kenilworth, details Leicester’s magnificence and the unparalleled grandeur of the entertainments given here to Queen Elizabeth in 1575, and introduces his wife Amy Robsart, Lady Robert Dudley, as Countess of Leicester into the scenes of his story. But in 1560, four years before he had received his earldom, his wife had perished mysteriously at Cumnor Place in Berkshire, murdered, it has been supposed, at his instigation, to clear the way for that projected marriage with Queen Elizabeth which never took place. Leicester, when he entertained the Queen here so royally, had no “encumbrances,” to limit his ambitions.
How the Queen was received here and entertained for seventeen days is fully, and on the whole tediously, narrated by a remembrancer then present, but a short extract will tell us something of the quality of these revels. On her Majesty’s approach she was met by a girl in character as “one of the ten sibills, cumly clad in a pall of white sylk,” who recited a “proper poezie in English rime and meeter, the which her Majestie benignly accepted and passed foorth unto the next gate of the Brayz, which for the length, largenes, and use, they call now the Tylt-Yard; whear a porter, tall of person, and wrapt also in sylke, with a club and keiz of quantitee according, had a rough speech full of passions, in meeter aptly made to the purpose.” Presently when the Queen came to the inner gate “a person representing the Lady of the Lake, famous in King Arthurz Book, with two Nymphes waiting uppon her, arrayed all in sylks, attended her highness comming,” the Lady of the Lake then coming ashore from themoat, and reciting a “well-penned meeter.” After this, coming to the Castle gate, a Latin poem was read to her by a poet clad in a “long ceruleous Garment, with a Bay Garland on his head, and a skrol in his hand. So, passing into the inner court, her Majesty, (that never rides but alone) thear set doun from her palfrey, was conveied up to her chamber, when after did follo a great peal of Gunz and lightning by Fyr work.”
£1000 a day was spent in the feasting and revelling. Everything was done without stint. The great clock on the keep was stopped. “The Clok Bell sang not a Note all the while her Highness waz thear: the Clok also stood still withall, the handz of both the tablz stood firm and fast, allweys pointing at two a Clok.” The hospitable and symbolical meaning of this was that two o’clock was the banqueting hour.
Every time when the Queen went hunting in the park, classic deities, and heroes and heroines of mythology would appear from woodland glades and recite complimentary poems—greatly to the disadvantage of the sport, it may be supposed. Bear-baiting further enlivened the time, and “nyne persons were cured of the peynful and daungerous deseaz called the King’s Evil.”
Kenilworth passed on the death of Leicester in 1588, to his brother, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and on his decease, two years later, to Robert’s illegitimate son, Sir Robert Dudley, who was long an exile, and died in 1649. It was let to Prince Henry, son of James the First, and on his death to his brother, Prince Charles, who purchased it from Sir Robert’s deserted wife, whom he, when Charles the First, created Duchess Dudley, 1645. After the King’s execution the property was granted by Cromwell to some of his supporters, to whom is due its ruinous condition, for they made the best market they could of its building-stone. On theRestoration in 1660, Charles the Second granted it to the Earl of Clarendon, in whose descendants’ hands it still remains.
The visitor to the Castle almost always makes at once for the keep and the imposing ruins of John o’ Gaunt’s great Banqueting Hall, rising boldly from the mound, partly natural and partly artificial, in the centre of the Castle precincts. He thus follows the natural instincts of sightseers, but the better way, for the full understanding of the scale and ancient strength of the works, is unquestionably to first make the inner circuit of the walls. Standing on Clinton Green before entering the Castle, and facing it from the only side not in ancient times defended by lakes or marshy ground, we are on the bank whence Henry the Third’s soldiers chiefly conducted the siege of 1266. It was the weakest part of the works, because the high natural plateau entirely precluded the possibility of continuing the water defences on this side. All that could be done here by the military engineers of Kenilworth was to excavate the deep chasm which still remains; and across this the besiegers vainly tried to pass, with the aid of bundles of faggots thrown into the hollow, while “Master Philip Porpoise,” who, as the chronicler truly says, “was a quaint man,” stood on the walls, dressed up like the Pope’s Legate, and cursed the King and the real Legate and all the King’s men.
Leicester’s great Gatehouse no longer forms the entrance to the Castle, and is in private occupation. It did not even figure in the great reception of Queen Elizabeth in 1575, for she came the other way, through the Tilt Yard and by Mortimer’s Tower, and across the great Outer Ward: a method of approach especially calculated to enhance the stateliness of the pageant. All Warwickshire, I think, must have witnessed thosedoings, from the further bank of the widespreading lake, among them Mr. John Shakespeare and his eleven-year-old son, William, whose imagination would have been excited by the fantastic creatures that sported on the water, and by the fireworks and the heathen gods and goddesses: very real to him, because he was not old enough to know how it was all done.
You render your entrance-fee at a narrow gate and are at once free to wander at will. In front is the grassy Outer Ward, and on the right, the keep and the state buildings, with Leicester’s Building, lofty, seamed with fissures and shored up against its falling. The eyeless windows preach a homily on the transient nature of things.
But, leaving these for a while, we skirt along to the left, coming to the ruins of Mortimer’s Tower, which stood on the wall and formed the entrance to the Castle in this direction. It looked out upon the Tilt Yard and the massive dam that penned up the waters of the Great Lake. Just before this tower is reached the Water Tower on the wall will be seen, and may be examined. Near at hand are the Stables and Lunn’s Tower, divided off by a light iron fence and not accessible; being included within the grounds belonging to the occupier of the Gatehouse. But the Stables are seen, clearly enough, and form the most charming colour-scheme within the Castle. They are of fifteenth-century red brick, timber-framed, and of an almost unimaginably delicate and yet vivid red.
Next after Mortimer’s Tower comes a small postern gateway, with its steps formerly leading to the water. Continuing from it and following the wall, we come under the tottering walls of Leicester’s building, on the right, with the massive walls of the state Buildings beyond it. They stand high, upon a mound that formed the limitsof the Castle of Saxon and early Norman days, and the grassy walk between them and the outer wall was in those distant times the moat, long before the magnificent scheme of the lake was thought out. Remains of fireplaces and windows in this outer wall show where the wooden buildings that formed barracks for the garrison stood. The walk ends up against an archway leading into the garden, or Plaisance, assigned to Henry the Eighth, through which the outer wall continues past a water-gate called the “King’s Gate,” and so to the Swan Tower, where the circuit is completed, at Clinton Green.
Kenilworth Castle: Ruins of the Banqueting Hall
But the Plaisance is not open to the public. The way into the central block of State buildings is through a postern doorway on the right, under the BanquetingHall. The savage treatment of these noble buildings by Cromwell’s friends has at first sight obscured the nature of this scene; but it is soon perceived that the Hall stood high, upon a basement or undercroft, whose vaulted roof has entirely disappeared, together with that of the Hall itself. This postern doorway therefore led through the basement. The Hall was the work of John o’ Gaunt, about 1350, and was a grand building in the Perpendicular style, ninety feet long and forty-five feet wide. Lofty and deeply-recessed windows, with rich tracery lighted it, and at one end was an exceptionally beautiful oriel window. A portion of this survives, together with two of the others. The entrance from the Inner Court was by a fine flight of stone stairs and through a wide archway still remaining in greatly weather-worn condition, but showing traces of delicately carved work. Inside is the groined porch, with a recess for a porter.
Sir Walter Scott, who here adopts the close account given by Laneham, one of the Queen’s retinue during her reception at Kenilworth, and merely edits him, describes the appearance of the Hall, “hung with the richest tapestry, misty with perfumes, and sounding to strains of soft and delicious music. From the highly carved oaken roof hung a superb chandelier of gilt bronze, formed like a spread eagle, whose outstretched wings supported three male and three female figures, grasping a pair of branches in each hand. The Hall was thus illuminated by twenty-four torches of wax. At the upper end of this splendid apartment was a State canopy, overshadowing a royal throne, and beside it was a door which opened to a long suite of apartments, decorated with the utmost magnificence for the Queen and her ladies, when it should be her pleasure to be private.”
This magnificence curiously contrasts with the primitive nature of the sanitary arrangements seen in the adjoining towers and in the keep. The Strong Tower and the Kitchen Tower fill up the space between the Banqueting Hall and the keep; the first named, appropriately enough, from having been a prison. The walls of its not unpleasant, though small rooms, still bear some rudely-scratched coats of arms of those who were detained here. Their imprisonment cannot have been so hopeless as that of King John’s victims, in the dungeons of the keep.
The keep is called “Cæsar’s Tower,” but the Romans had never any association with Kenilworth. It would better be styled “Clinton’s.” Like all the buildings, it is of a dull, brownish red stone. An angle-turret shows where the clock was placed: that clock whose hands always stood hospitably at the banqueting hour in those seventeen days of Elizabethan revel.
Leaving Kenilworth for Coventry, the church is on the right. Its west doorway is a fine but much-decayed work of the Norman period, from the ruins of the Augustinian Priory close by. It is a much-restored church, and does not come up to the expectations raised by a sight of its octagonal tower and spire. The only object of interest within is a pig of lead built into the tower wall, bearing the mark of one of Henry the Eighth’s travelling Commissioners inquiring into the suppression of the religious houses. It would seem to be one of a number cast from the lead off the Priory roofs.
Kenilworth at last left behind, a gradual rise brings the traveller to the turning to Stoneleigh village. It is “Gibbet Hill.” The ill-omened name comes from an example of the law’s ancient practice of hanging up murderers to the public view, very much in the manner of those gamekeepers who nail up the bodies of thejays, the rats, the weasels and other “vermin.” The criminals whose carcases swung and rattled here in their chains were three in number; Moses Baker, a weaver of Coventry, and Edward Drury and Robert Leslie, two dragoons of Lord Pembroke’s regiment, quartered in that city. They had on March 18th, 1765, murdered a farmer, one Thomas Edwards, at a place called Whoberley, just outside Coventry. Their bodies hung until their clothes rotted; and then, one by one, their bones fell from their chains and enclosing cages. But the gibbet and the terror of it remained until 1820, when the weathered timber, scored with thousands of the rusty nails which had been driven into it, so that no one should climb the post, was removed to do service in the cow byre of a neighbouring farm.
This melancholy history apart, the road is a pleasant one; broad, and lined with wide grassy edges and magnificent elms. It was even more pleasant before the motor manufacturing firms of Coventry began the practice of testing their new cars along it, and was then the pride of the district. It leads across Stivichall Common into the city of Coventry, over that railway bridge referred to by Tennyson in his poem,Godiva—
“I waited for the train at Coventry;I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,To watch the three tall spires.”
“I waited for the train at Coventry;I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,To watch the three tall spires.”
I remember a first reading of that poem, and the difficulty of really believing Tennyson meant a railway train. It seemed incredible that he could in such a nineteenth-century fashion introduce an eleventh-century subject. The “train” one imagined at first to be a train in the middle-ages sense, a procession or pageant, and the person who waited for it to be, not Tennyson himself, but some imaginary person indulgingin historical speculation. But no, he was modern, like his own King Arthur.
Here the “three tall spires” first come into view, and the city of Coventry is entered, past the Green and up Hertford Street.
Coventry.
Coventryoriginated, according to tradition, in a convent established here as early as the sixth century. Canute is said to have been the founder of another. Whatever may be the truth of the matter, it is certain that the great Saxon Earl Leofric and his wife Godifu in 1043 founded that Benedictine Monastery whose Priory church afterwards became the Cathedral, whose scanty ruins alone remain. These real and legendary religious houses, together with the Monastery of the Carmelites, or White Friars, and numerous others originated a curious notion that the name “Coventry” was really a corruption of “Conventry,” the place of convents. It was an excusable mistake, when we consider that the somewhat similar name of “Covent Garden” in London does in point of fact derive from the old garden of the Abbots of Westminster, but it was a complete mistake, all the same. The place-name comes from a little stream called by the British the Couen, not easily to be found in the city itself, but rising to the north and passing through the village of Coundon. (There is a stream of similar name, the “Cound,” at Church Stretton, in Shropshire.) It was thus the “place on the Couen.” The Saxons, who called that stream by a name of their own, the “Scir-burn,” that is to say, the “clear stream”—which in course of time became the “Sherborne”—did notsucceed in changing the name of the place, as they did at Sherborne in Dorset; and “Coventry” it remained.
The most famous incident in the ancient “history” of Coventry is entirely legendary; but although proved to be inherently improbable, if not impossible, the story of Godiva and her ride through the streets clad only in her own modesty, is one that will never be destroyed by criticism. It is too ancient a myth for that.
About the year 1130 the monkish writer, Roger of Wendover, started it. Whence he derived the story no one knows, but he probably heard it as a folk-legend unconnected with place or person, and took it upon himself to fix the tale on Leofric and his Countess Godifu. He had courage in doing so, for it was only about a hundred years after the time of Leofric and his wife that he wrote.
“The Countess Godiva,” he says, “who was a great lover of God’s mother, longing to free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy toll, often with urgent prayers besought her husband, that from regard to Jesus Christ and His mother, he would free the town from that service, and from all other heavy burdens; and when the Earl sharply rebuked her for foolishly asking what was so much to his damage, and always forbade her for evermore to speak to him on the subject; and while she, on the other hand, with a woman’s pertinacity, never ceased to exasperate her husband on that matter, he at last made her this answer: ‘Mount your horse, and ride naked before all the people, through the market of the town from one end to the other, and on your return you shall have your request,’ on which Godiva replied, ‘But will you give me permission, if I am willing to do it?’ ‘I will,’ said he. Whereupon, the Countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair, and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body,like a veil, and then mounting her horse and attended by two knights, she rode through the market-place without being seen, except her fair legs; and having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband and obtained of him what she had asked, for Earl Leofric freed the town of Coventry and its inhabitants from the aforesaid service, and confirmed what he had done by a charter.”
The incident of Peeping Tom was never thought of by Roger of Wendover, and does not become a part of the story until the seventeenth century. Who was the genius who invented him is not known; but from that time onwards the peeping tailor who alone of all the people of Coventry spied upon Godiva as she rode through the empty streets becomes an essential part of the legend. His fate takes so mediæval a turn that he seems really older than he is. Tennyson adopts him, in his poem, as a
“low churl, compact of thankless earth,The fatal byword of all years to come,Boring a little auger-hole in fear,Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will,Were shrivell’d into darkness in his head,And dropt before him. So the powers who waitOn noble deeds, cancell’d a sense misus’d.”
“low churl, compact of thankless earth,The fatal byword of all years to come,Boring a little auger-hole in fear,Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will,Were shrivell’d into darkness in his head,And dropt before him. So the powers who waitOn noble deeds, cancell’d a sense misus’d.”
A half-length effigy purporting to be Peeping Tom occupies a niche in the wall of the “King’s Head” in Smithford Street. He is really a portion of a figure of St. George from one of the old Coventry civic pageants; but he looks so peculiarly unsaintly and has so lecherous a grin that no one can for a moment dispute his entire suitability for the present part.
Coventry became so important a place in the early part of the fourteenth century that it was granted a charter of incorporation, and afterwards fortified with walls and gates. Parliaments were held there, in thestately buildings of the Priory; Coventry Cross became one of the most famous City Crosses in the kingdom; and the trade guilds were among the richest and most powerful. The mayors, too, were important and fearless magistrates, as we may judge from the example of John Horneby, who in 1411 caused the riotous Prince Hal, afterwards Henry the Fifth, to be arrested for creating a disturbance, and thus ranks with Judge Gascoyne, who on another occasion committed the Prince to prison.
Shakespeare rightly made Falstaff more ashamed to march through this rich and populous town with his ragged company of a hundred and fifty soldiers, and only a shirt and a half among the lot, than Godiva had been to ride through the primitive place of three hundred years before, with nothing—
“If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet . . . you would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I’ll not march through Coventry with them that’s flat; nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves on; for indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There’s but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half shirt is two napkins tied together, and thrown over the shoulders, like a herald’s coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host at Saint Albans, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daintry.”
“If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet . . . you would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I’ll not march through Coventry with them that’s flat; nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves on; for indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There’s but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half shirt is two napkins tied together, and thrown over the shoulders, like a herald’s coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host at Saint Albans, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daintry.”
Coventry, in right of this importance, became a city in 1451, and went on from good to better, until the suppression of the religious houses. At that time its population numbered 15,000, but within a few yearsit had declined to 3000. Yet in another thirty years the city is found receiving Queen Elizabeth not only with enthusiasm and splendid pageants, but with the present of a purse of £100; although the depression was still acute.
“It is a good gift, an hundred pounds in gold; I have but few such gifts,” said her Majesty, who was great but greedy.
“If it please your Grace,” answered that courtly Mayor, “there is a great deal more in it.”
“What is that?” she asked.
“The hearts,” he rejoined, “of all your loving subjects.”
“We thank you, Mr. Mayor,” said the Queen, “it is a great deal more, indeed.”
But she did not confer the honour of knighthood upon him.
James the First, visiting Coventry in 1617, was given £100 and a silver cup; probably in the hope of getting a renewal of the charter; but in the next reign we find a very different spirit. “Ye damnable puritans of Coventry,” says a letter-writer of the time, “have thrown up earthworkes and rampires against his Maiestie’s forces, and have put themselves in a posture of defence.” It was at this time that the expression arose of “sending to Coventry” any objectionable person. Those thus consigned to Coventry were prisoners of war, Royalists captured by the people of Birmingham, for whom no prison could be found except in this walled and fortified city.
Those walls were promptly destroyed at the Restoration, by order of Charles the Second, the citizens of Coventry offering no objection. They had grown weary of the Commonwealth, and when the King came to his own again the city was given over to festivity. Thefountains spouted claret (not good claret, nor very much of it, we may suppose); bonfires blazed; and a deputation waited upon the King in London and gave him £50 and a basin and ewer of gold.
Coventry Cross, already mentioned, was built between the years 1541–44, at the time of the city’s decay, after the suppression of the monasteries, and was the gift of Sir William Holles, Lord Mayor of London, who bequeathed £200 for the purpose. It was described by Dugdale as “one of the chief things wherein this city most glories, which for workmanship and beauty is inferior to none in England.” But soon after Dugdale wrote this the Cross wherein Coventry so gloried was destroyed, and the chief outstanding architectural feature is now formed by the spires of St. Michael’s, Holy Trinity, and Christ Church: Coventry indeed being known far and wide as the “City of the Three Spires.” It is rather unfortunate that the fine grouping of these three spires, seen best from the approach to the city by the Kenilworth road, is spoiled by the most distressingly commonplace houses in the foreground; and that from no other point of view do they group at all.
St. Michael’s spire, incomparably the finer, rises with the tower to a height of 303 feet; that of Holy Trinity to 237 feet; and Christ Church to 201 feet. St. Michael’s church has the reputation of being the largest parish church in England, a distinction claimed also by St. Nicholas, Great Yarmouth, and St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. The honour appears to belong to St. Michael’s, which in other ways is a notable building. It is generally said to have a nave and four aisles, the two additional “aisles” being really chapels of similar length and appearance: the work of the Smiths’ and Girdlers’ Companies and the Fellowship of Woollen Cardmakers; two among the great trading guilds of the city. TheCappers, the Dyers, the Mercers, the Drapers and the Smiths had also their part in these outer aisles. The greater part of the church is of the Perpendicular period and is due to the local family of Botoner, who expended their substance lavishly upon it—
“William and Adam built the Tower,Anne and Mary built the Spire;William and Adam built the NaveAnd Mary built the Quire.”
“William and Adam built the Tower,Anne and Mary built the Spire;William and Adam built the NaveAnd Mary built the Quire.”
So ran the old rhyme. The works were in progress between 1373 and 1436.
A narrow road separates St. Michael’s from Holy Trinity, which, although in itself a fine Perpendicular building, suffers by comparison with its greater neighbour. Here also the guilds—the Tanners, Marlers, Butchers and others—exhibited their wealth and piety in the building of chapels; and here was a noble stained-glass fourteenth-century window containing the figures of Leofric and Godiva, with the inscription—
Stained-Glass Window Inscription
Christ Church retains only its ancient spire, the ruined body being replaced in 1829 by a work in the most lamentable style.
Besides its churches, Coventry is famed for its ancient “St. Mary’s Hall,” originally the hall of St. Mary’s Guild, but afterwards serving as that of the Holy Trinity, a religious society which amalgamated and swallowed up St. Mary’s and many others. It became the headquarters of the old municipal life of Coventry, and so it still remains; a noble centre for the city’s business and hospitalities.
Coventry nowadays is remarkable for its modern manufactures. In the thirteenth century it was soap that supported the city. Later it was prosperous inthe making of woollen fabrics, needles and pins, and famed for a dye known as “Coventry Blue.” As time went on, silk-weaving and ribbon-making took prominence, and doubtless it was from Coventry that the promised “fairing” was to have come that is mentioned in the old ballad of that faithless Johnny who was so long at the fair—
“He promised to buy me a fairing to please me,A bunch of blue ribbons he promised to buy me,To tie up my bonny brown hair.”
“He promised to buy me a fairing to please me,A bunch of blue ribbons he promised to buy me,To tie up my bonny brown hair.”
But by 1869, when the duty on foreign-made silks had been removed, the silk and ribbon trade began to decline, and the enterprising citizens turned to the manufacture of sewing-machines. Then came the velocipede, the bicycle, and the motor-car. In the making of those two last-named articles and in that of ordnance, Coventry has found its fortune. They are not Shakespearean manifestations, and so need not be enlarged upon in this place.
In spite of its modern growth, Coventry remains a very picturesque city. In Butcher Row, and in narrow old alleys little touched by modern developments, something of the mediæval place may yet be traced; and in those two charming old almshouses, Bablake’s Hospital, founded in 1506, and “Ford’s Hospital,” built in 1529, half-timbered work is seen very nearly at its best.