Chapter 2

BLAKEDOWN MILL

Just below, on the north bank, rises Blacklow Hill, whither, on the 19th of June, 1312, Piers Gaveston, the favorite of King Edward II., was marched out from Warwick Castle by the barons to meet his doom. His head was struck off, and, rolling down into a thicket, was picked up by a “friar preacher” and carried off in his hood. On the rock beside the scene of that grim revenge this inscription was rudely cut: “P. Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, beheaded here+ 1312;” and to-day a simple cross also marks the spot.

Hence, by the only rocks of which Avon can boast—and these are of softest sandstone, their asperities worn all away by the weather—we wind beneath Milverton village, with its odd church tower of wood, to the weir and mill of Guy’s Cliffe.

The beauties of this spot have been bepraised for centuries. Leland speaks of them; Drayton sings them.

GUY’S CLIFFE MILL

“There,” says Camden, “have yee a shady little wood, cleere and cristal springs, mossie bottoms and caves, medowes alwaies fresh and greene, the river rumbling heere and there among the stones with his streame making a milde noise and gentle whispering, and, besides all this, solitary and still quietness, things most grateful to the Muses.” Fuller, who knew it well, calls it “a most delicious place, so that a man in many miles’ riding cannot meet so much variety as there one furlong doth afford.” The water-mill is mentioned in Domesday-book, and has been sketched constantly ever since—a low, quaint pile, fronted by a recessed open gallery, under which the water is forever sparkling and frothing, fresh from its spin over the mill-wheels, or tumble down the ledges of the weir.

GUY’S CLIFFE

And below this mill rises the famous cliff, hollowed with many caves, in one of which lived Guy of Warwick, slayer of the Dun Cow, of lions, dragons, giants, paynims, and all such cattle; who married the fair Phyllis of Warwick Castle; who afterwards repented of his much bloodshed, and trudgedon foot to Palestine by way of expiation; who anon returned again on foot to Warwick, where was his home and his dear Phyllis. And coming to his own house door, where his wife was used to feed every day thirteen poor men with her own hand, he stood with the rest, and received bread from her for three days, and she knew him not. So he learned that God’s wrath was not sated, and betook him to a fair rocky place beside the river, a mile and more from his town; where, as his words go in the old ballad,

“with my hands I hewed a houseOut of a craggy rock of stone;And livèd like a Palmer pooreWithin that Cave myself alone;“And daily came to beg my breadOf Phyllis at my Castle gate;Not known unto my loving wife,Who daily mournèd for her mate.“Till at the last I fell sore sicke,Yea, sicke so sore that I must die;I sent to her a ring of golde,By which she knew me presentlye.“So she, repairing to the Cave,Before that I gave up the Ghost,Herself closed up my dying Eyes—My Phyllis fair whom I loved most.”

“with my hands I hewed a houseOut of a craggy rock of stone;And livèd like a Palmer pooreWithin that Cave myself alone;

“And daily came to beg my breadOf Phyllis at my Castle gate;Not known unto my loving wife,Who daily mournèd for her mate.

“Till at the last I fell sore sicke,Yea, sicke so sore that I must die;I sent to her a ring of golde,By which she knew me presentlye.

“So she, repairing to the Cave,Before that I gave up the Ghost,Herself closed up my dying Eyes—My Phyllis fair whom I loved most.”

His statue stands in the little shrine above the cliff; his arms lie in Warwick Castle; and in the cave over our head is carved a Saxon inscription, which the learned interpret into this: “Cast out, thou Christ, from thy servant this burden.”

We pass on by Rock Mill, haunted of many kingfishers; by Emscote Bridge, where the Avon is joined by the Leam, and where Warwick and Leamington have reached out theirarms to each other till they now join hands; by little gardens, each with its punt or home-made boat beside the river steps; by a flat meadow, where the citizens and redcoats from Warwick garrison sit all day and wait for the fish that never bites; and suddenly, by the famous one-span bridge, see Warwick Castle full ahead, its massy foundations growing, as it seems, from the living rock, and Cæsar’s glorious tower soaring above the elms where Mill Street ends at the water’s brink. Here once crossed a Gothic bridge, carrying the traffic from Banbury. Its central arches are down now; but the bastions yet stand, and form islets for the brier and ivy, and between them the stream swirls fast for the weir and the ancient mill, by which it rushes down into the park. We turn our canoe, and with many a backward look paddle back to the boat-house at Emscote.

OLD BRIDGE, WARWICK

Evening has drawn in, and still we are pacing Warwick streets. We have seen the castle; have gazed from the armory windows upon the racing waters, steep terraces, and gentle park below; have climbed Guy’s Tower and seen far beneath us, on the one side, broad cedars and green lawns where the peacocks strut; on the other, the spires,

CÆSAR’S TOWER, WARWICK CASTLE

towers, sagged roofs, and clustering chimneys of the town; have sauntered down Mill Street; have marvelled in the Beauchamp Chapel as we conned its gorgeous tombs and canopies and traceries; have loitered by Lord Leycester’s Hospital and under the archway of St. James’s Chapel. Clearly we are but two grains of sand in the hour-glass of

The Hospital of Robert Earl of Leycester Warwick

this slow mediæval town. Our feet, that will to-morrow be hurrying on, tread with curious impertinence these everlasting flints that have rung with the tramp of the Kingmaker’s armies, of Royalist and Parliamentarian, horse and foot, drum and standard, the stir of royal and episcopal visits, of mail-coach, market, and assize. But meanwhile our joints are full of pleasant aches and stiffness, our souls of lofty imaginings. As our tobacco smoke floats out on the moonlight we can dwell, we find, with a quite kingly serenity on the transience of man’s generations; nay, as we sit down to dinner at our inn we touch the high contemplative, yet careless, mood of the gods themselves.

BARFORD BRIDGE

IT was a golden morning as we left Warwick, and with slow feet followed Avon down through the park towards Barford Bridge, where our canoe lay ready for us. The light, too generously spread to dazzle, bathed the castle towers, lay on the terraces, where the peacocks sunned themselves, and on the living rock below them, where the river washes. Only on the weir it fell in splashes, scattered through the elms’ thick foliage. At the water’s brim, below Mill Street, stood a man with a pitcher—a stranger to us—who took our farewells with equable astonishment. The stream slackened its hurry, and, keeping pace with our regrets, loitered by the garden slopes, by the great cedars that the Crusaders brought from Lebanon, among reeds and alder-bushes and under tall trees, to the lake, where a small tributary comes tumbling from Chesterton.

The land, as we went on, was full of morning sounds—the ring of a wood-feller’s axe, the groaning of a timber-wagon through leafy roads, the rustle of partridges, the note of a stray blackbird in the hedge, and in valleys unseen the tune of hounds cub-hunting—

“matched in mouth like bells,Each unto each.”

WARWICK CASTLE, FROM THE PARK

At Barford we met the pack returning, and the sight of them and the huntsman’s red coat in the village street was pleasant as a remembered song.

Barford village has produced a well-known man of our time, Mr. Joseph Arch, who here began his efforts to better the condition of the agricultural laborer. If without honor, he is not without influence in his own country, to judge by the neat cottages and trim gardens beside the road. Roses love the rich clay, and roses of all kinds thrive here, from the Austrian brier to the Gloire de Dijon. It was late in the season when we passed, but many clusters lingered under the cottager’s thatch, and field and hedge also spoke of past plenty.

By Barford Bridge, where a dumpy, water-logged punt just lifted her stern and her pathetic name (the Dolly Dobs) above the surface, we launched our canoe again. The stream here is shallow and the current fast, with a knack of swinging you round a gravelly corner and tilting you at the high scooped-out bank on the other side. So many and abrupt are these bends that the slim spire of Sherborne across the meadows appeared now to right, now to left; now dodged behind us, now stood up straight ahead. Out of the water-plants at one corner rose a brace of wild-duck, and sailed away with the sun gleaming on their iridescent necks. We followed them with our eyes, and grew aware that the country was altered. Sometimes, near Warwick, we had longed to exchange tall hedge-rows and heavy elms for “an acre of barren ground, ling, heath, brown furze, anything,” as Gonzalo says. Now we had full air and a horizon. We had the flowers, too—the forget-me-not, the willow-herb, and meadowsweet (though long past their prime), the bright yellow tansy, and the loosestrife, with a stalk growing blood-red as its purple bloom dropped away. Just above Wasperton we came on a young woman in a boat. She had beengathering these flowers by the armful, and, having piled the bows with them, made a taking sight; and, being ourselves not without a certain savage beauty, we did not hesitate to believe our pleasure reciprocated.

SHERBORNE

A steep grassy bank runs beside the stream at Wasperton, concealing the village. Many nut-trees grow upon it, and upon it also were ranged six anglers, who caught no fish as we passed. No high-road goes through the village above; but, climbing the bank, we found a few old timbered cottages, and alone, in the middle of a field, a curious dove-cote, that must be seen to be believed. It was empty, for the pigeons were all down by the river among the gray willows on the farther shore, and our canoe stole by too softly to disturb their cooing.

A short way below, Hampton Wood rises on a bold eminence to the right, where once Fulbroke Castle stood. The “steep uphill” is now dotted with elders, and tenanted only by “earth-delving conies;” for the castle was destroyed and its land disparked in Henry VIII.’s time, the materialsbeing carried up to build Compton-Winyates, that beautiful and quiet mansion in a hollow of the Edge Hills where Charles I. slept on the night before Kineton (Edgehill) battle. The park passed in time to a Lucy of Charlcote, and the name reminds us that we are in Shakespeare’s country. In fact, we have reached the very place where Shakespeare didnotsteal the deer.

AT WASPERTON

To shed a tear in passing this hallowed spot was but a natural impulse; nor, on reading the emotions which Mr. Samuel Ireland squandered here, did we grudge the tribute. “If,” he writes, “the story of this youthful frolic isfounded on truth, as well as that Sir Thomas Lucy’s rigorous conduct subsequent to this supposed outrage really proved the cause of our Shakespeare’s quitting this his native retirement to visit the capital, it will afford us the means of contemplating, at least in one instance, with some degree of complacency even the imperious dominion of our feudal superiors, the tyranny of magistracy, and the harshest enforcement of the remnant of our forest laws; since in their consequences they unquestionably called into action the energies of that sublime genius, and of those rare and matchless endowments which had otherwise perhaps been lost in the shade of retirement, and have ‘wasted their sweetness on the desert air.’”

DOVE-COTE, WASPERTON

The river spread out as it swept round the base of Hampton Wood, and took us to Hampton Lucy. Here is a beautiful modern church, in the worst sense of the words, and beside it a village green, where, as we passed, the villagers were keeping harvest-home. Lo! many countrymen in wheelbarrows, and others, with loins girded, trundling them madly towards a goal, where a couple of brand-new spades

From Hampton Lucy to Harrington

were to reward the first-comers. Lo! also, Chloe, Lalage, and Amaryllis, emulous for their swains, lifted exhorting voices; and the oldest inhabitants “a-sunning sat” in the pick of the seats, and discussed the competitors on their merits. It was with regret that we tore ourselves away from these Arcadian games. The sounds of merrymaking followed us through the trees as we dropped down to Charlcote, just below,

“Where Avon’s Stream, with many a sportive Turn,Exhilarates the Meads, and to his BedHele’s gentle current wooes, by Lucy’s handIn every graceful Ornament attired,And worthier, such, to share his liquid Realms.”

So writes the Rev. Richard Jago, M.A., a local poet of the last century, in “Edgehill; or, The Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralized. A Poem in Four Books, printed for J. Dodsley in Pall Mall, 1767;” and though the bard’s language is more flowery than Avon’s banks, it shall stand. We had amused ourselves on the voyage by choosing and rechoosing the spot whither we should some day return and pass our declining years. P. (who has high thoughts now and then) had been all for Warwick Castle, Q. for Ashow, and the merits of each had been hotly wrangled over. But we shook hands over Charlcote.

HAMPTON LUCY, FROM THE MEADOWS

Less stately than Stoneleigh, less picturesque than Guy’s Cliffe, less imposing than Warwick Castle, Charlcote is lovelier and more human than any. The red-brick Elizabethan house stands on the river’s brink. From the geranium beds on its terrace a flight of steps leads down to the water, and over its graceful balustrade, beside the little leaden statuettes, you may lean and feed the swans just below. Across the stream, over the fern-beds and swelling green turf, are dotted the antlers of the Charlcote deer, red and fallow; yonder “Hele’s gentle current” winds down from the Edge Hills; to your right, the trees part and give a glimpse only of Hampton Lucy church; behind you rise the peaked gables, turrets, and tall chimneys of the house, projecting and receding, so that from whatever quarter the sun may strike there is always a bold play of light and shade on the soft-colored bricks.

The house was built by Sir Thomas Lucy in the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign; and in compliment to his queen, who paid Charlcote a visit not long after, the knight built on the side which turns from the river an entrance porch which, abutting between two wings, gives the form of an E. This porch leads to the queer gate-house, whence, between an avenue of limes, you reach Charlcote church—a sober little pile beside the high-road, and just outside the rough-split oak palings of the park. It holds the monuments of Sir Thomas Lucy and his wife, and in praise of the latter an epitaph worth remembering for the tender simplicity of its close:

“Set down by him that best did knowWhat hath been written to be true.—Thomas Lucy.”

In the graveyard outside is a plain stone to a lesser pair—John Gibbs, aged 81, and his wife, aged 55—who are made to say, somewhat cynically:

CHARLCOTE

“Farewell, proud, vain, false, treacherous world, we have seen enough of thee;We value not what thou canst say of we.”

One marvels how in this sheltered corner John Gibbs found the world’s breath so rude.

MEADOWSWEET

On the other hand, upon Sir Thomas Lucy the world has been hard indeed, identifying him with Justice Shallow. His portrait hangs in the hall where Shakespeare was not tried for deer-stealing. Isaac Oliver painted it; and though men have forgotten Isaac Oliver, yet will we never, for he was a master. The knight’s embroidered robe is right Holbein; but the knight’s subtle, beautiful face is more.It teaches with convincing sincerity what manner of being a gentleman was in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth;” and the lesson is the more humiliating because men have during three centuries accepted the coarse mask of Justice Shallow for the truth.

The house holds many fine paintings; notably a Titian, “Samson and the Lion,” that rests against the yellow silk hangings of the drawing-room, and is worth a far pilgrimage to see; and a Velasquez, set (immoderately high) above the library book-shelves. So that too soon we were out in the sunlight again and paddling down to Alveston.

We floated by flat meadows, islands of sedge, long lines of willows; by “the high bank called Old Town, where, perhaps, men and women, with their joys and sorrows, once abided;” but now the rabbits only colonize it, under the quiet alders; by Alveston, where we found boats, and a boat-house covered with “snowball” berries; by the mill and its weeping-willows; and below, by devious loops, to Hatton Rock, that the picnickers from Stratford know—a steep bank of marl covered with hawthorn, hazel, elder, and trailing knots of brambles. In June this is a very flowery spot. The slope is clothed with creamy elder blossoms, and on the river’s bank opposite are wild rose-bushes dropping their petals, pink and white, on forget-me-nots, wild blue geranium, and meadow-rue. Over its stony bed the current, in omne volubilis ævum, keeps for our dull ears the music that it made for Shakespeare, if we could but hear. For somewhere along these banks the Stratford boy spied the Muse’s naked feet moving.

“O mistress mine, where are you roaming?O stay and hear; your true love’s coming,That can sing both high and low.”

And somewhere he came on her, and coaxed the secret of

UNDER THE WILLOWS

her woodland music. But when that meeting was, and how that secret was given, like a true lover, he will never tell.

“Others abide our questions; thou art free:We ask and ask; thou smilest and art still.”

As we paddled down past Tiddington the willows grew closer. Between their stems we could see, far away on our left, the blue Edge Hills; and to the right, above the Warwick road, a hill surmounted by an obelisk. This is Welcome, and behind it lies Clopton House, a former owner of which, Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London, built in the reign of Henry VII. the long stone bridge of fourteen Gothic arches just above Stratford. In a minute or two we had passed under this bridge and were floating down beside the Memorial Theatre, the new Gardens, and the brink of Shakespeare’s town.

THE CLOPTON BRIDGE, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON

A man may take pen and ink and write of a place as hewill, and the page will, likely enough, be a pretty honest index to his own temperament. But never will it do for another man’s reliance. So let it be confessed that for a day we searched Stratford streets, and found nothing of the Shakespeare that we sought. Neither in the famous birthplace in Henley Street—restored “out of all whooping,” crammed with worthless mementos, and pencilled over with inconsiderable names; nor in the fussy, inept Memorial Theatre; nor in the New Place, where certain holes, protected with wire gratings, mark what may have been the foundations of Shakespeare’s house: in none of these could we find him. His name echoed in the market-place, on the lips of guide and sightseer, and shone on monuments, shops, inns, and banking-houses. His effigies were everywhere—in photographs, in statuettes; now doing duty as a tobacco-box (with the bald scalp removable), now as a trade-mark for beer. And even while we despised these things the fault was ours. All the while the colossus stood high above, while we “walked under his huge legs and peep’d about,” too near to see.

Nor until we strolled over the meadows to Ann Hathaway’s cottage at Shottery did understanding come with the quiet falling of the day. Rarely enough, and never, perhaps, but in the while between sunset and twilight, may a man hear the sky and earth breathing together, and, drawing his own small breath ambitiously in tune with them, “feel that he is greater than he knows.” But here and at this hour it happened to us that, our hearts being uplifted, we could measure Shakespeare for a moment; could know him for the puissant intelligence that held communion with all earth and sky, and all mortal aspirations that rise between them; and knew him also for the Stratford youth treading this very foot-path beside this sweet-smelling hedge towards those elms a mile away, where the red light lingers,

STRATFORD CHURCH

and the cottage below them, where already in the window Ann Hathaway trims her lamp. You are to believe that our feet trod airily across those meadows. And at the cottage, old Mrs. Baker, last living descendant of the Hathaways, was pleased with our reverent behavior, and picked for each of us at parting a sprig of rosemary from her garden for remembrance. May her memory be as green and as fragrant!

ANN HATHAWAY’S COTTAGE

It was easy now to forgive all that before had seemed unworthy in Stratford—easy next morning, standing before Shakespeare’s monument, while the sunshine, colored by the eastern window, fell on one particular slab within the chancel rails, to live back for a moment to that April morning when a Shakespeare had passed from the earth, and earth “must mourn therefor;” to follow his coffin on its short journeyfrom the New Place, between the blossoming limes of the Church Walk, out of the sunlight into the lasting shadow, up the dim nave to this spot; and easy to divine, in the rugged epitaph so often quoted, the man’s passionate dread lest his bones might be flung in time to the common charnel-house, the passionate longing to lie here always in this dusky corner, close to his friends and kin and the familiar voices that meant home—the talk of birds in the near elms, the chant of Holy Trinity choir, and, night and day, but a stone’s-throw from his resting-place, the whisper of Avon running perpetually.

THE MOUTH OF THE STOUR

For even the wayfarer finds Stratford a hard place to part from. And looking back as we left her, so kindly, so full of memories, giving her haunted streets, her elms, and river-side to the sunshine, but guarding always as a mother the shrine of her great son, I know she will pardon my light words.

The river runs beneath the elms of the church-yard to Lucy’s Mill and the first locks. On the mill wall are marked the heights of various great floods. The highest is dated at the beginning of this century: just below is the high-water mark of October 25, 1882. Take the level of this with your eye, and you will wonder that any of Stratford

THE LOCK AND CHURCH

is left standing; and lower down the river the floods are very serious matters to all who live within their reach. If you disbelieve me, read “John Halifax.” “We don’t mind them,” an old lady told us at Barton, “till the water turns red. Then we know the Stour water is coming down, and begin to shift our furniture.” The Arrow, too, that joins the Avon below Bidford, is a great helper of the floods, but rushes down its valley more rapidly than the Stour, and so its flooding is sooner over.

WEIR BRAKE

The lock at Stratford is now choked with grass and weed, and the town no longer (to quote the Rev. Richard Jago)

“Hails the freighted Barge from Western Shores,Rich with the Tribute of a thousand Climes.”

The Avon, from Tewkesbury to Stratford, was made navigable in 1637 by Mr. William Sandys, of Fladbury, “at his own proper cost.” But the railways have ruined the waterways for a time, and Mr. Sandys’s handiwork lies in sore decay. Till Evesham be passed we shall meet with no barges, but with shallows, dismantled locks, broken-downweirs to be shot, and sound ones to be pulled over that will give us excitement enough, and toil too.

Below the lock we drifted under a hanging copse, the Weir Brake, where a pretty foot-path runs for Stratford lovers. Below it, by a cluster of willows, the Stour comes down; and a little farther yet stands Luddington, where Shakespeare is said to have been married; but the church and its records have been destroyed by fire. From Luddington you spy Weston-upon-Avon, in Gloucestershire, across the river, the tower of its sturdy perpendicular church peering above the elms that hide it from the river-side throughout the summer.

WESTON-UPON-AVON

By Weston our remembrance keeps a picture—a broken lock and weir, an islet or two heavy with purple loosestrife, a swan bathing in the channel between. These were of the foreground. Beyond them, a line of willows hid the flat fields on our right; but on the left rose a steep green slope, topped with poplars and dotted with red cattle; and ahead the red roof of Binton church showed out prettily from the hill-side. As we saw the picture we broke into it, shooting the weir, scaring the swan, and driving her before us to Binton Bridges. By Binton Bridges stands an inn, the Four Alls. On its sign-board, in gay colors, are depicted four figures—the King, the Priest, the Soldier, and the Yeoman; and around them runs this chiming legend:

“Rule all,Pray all,Fight all,Pay all.”

We could not remember a place so utterly God-forsaken as this inn beside the bridge, nor a woman so weary of face as its once handsome landlady. She spoke of the inn and its custom in a low, musical voice that caused Q. to rush out into the yard to hide his pity; and there he found a gig, and, sitting down before it, wondered.

Change and decay fill our literature; but we have not explained either. For instance, here was a gig—a soundly built, gayly painted gig. A glance told that it had not been driven a dozen times, that nothing was broken, and that it had been backed into this heap of nettles years ago to rot. It had been rotting ever since. The paint on its sides had blistered, the nettles climbed above its wheels and flourished over its back seat. Still it was a good gig, and the most inexplicable sight that met us on our voyage. Only less desolate than Binton Bridges is Black Cliff, below—a bank covered with crab-trees and thorns and hummocks of sombre grass. It was here that one Palmer, a wife-murderer, drowned his good woman in Avon at the beginning of the century; and the oldest man in Bidford, not far below, remembers seeing a gibbet on the hill-side, with chains and a few bones and rags dangling—all that was left of him. A gate post at the top of the hill on the Evesham road is made of this gibbet, and still groans at night, to the horror of the passing native.

Soon we reach Welford, the second and more beautiful Welford on the river. It stands behind a stiff slope, where now the chestnuts are turning yellow, and the village street is worth following. It winds by queer old cottages set down in plum and apple orchards; by a modern Maypole; by a little church of stained buff sandstone, with oaken lych-gate and church-yard wall scarcely containing the dead, who already are piled level with its coping; by more queer crazy cottages—and then suddenly melts, ends, disappears in grass. It is as if the end of the world were reached. Of course we wanted to settle down and spend our lives here, but were growing used to the desire by this time, and dragged each other away without serious resistance down to the old mill, where our canoe lay waiting.

WELFORD WEIR AND CHURCH

Passing the weir and mill, the river runs under a grassy hill-side, where the trimmed elms give a French look to the landscape. Within sight, in winter, lie the roofs and dove-cotes of Hillborough—“haunted Hillbro’,” as Shakespeare called it, but nothing definite is known of the ghost. The local tale says that the poet and some boon companions walked over once to a Whitsun ale at the Falcon Inn, Bidford (just below us), to try their prowess in drinking against the Bidford men. They drank so deeply that night that

ELMS BY BIDFORD GRANGE

sleep overtook them before they had staggered a mile on their homeward way, and, lying down under a crab-tree beside the road, they slept till morning, when they were awakened by some laborers trudging to their work. His companions were for returning and renewing the carouse, but Shakespeare declined.

HILLBOROUGH

“No,” said he; “I have had enough; I have drinked with

“Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,Haunted Hillbro’, hungry Grafton,Dudging Exhall, papist Wixford,Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.”

“Of the truth of this story,” says Mr. Samuel Ireland, “I have little doubt.”

“Of its entire falsehood,” says Mr. James Thorne, “I have less. A more absurd tale to father upon Shakespeare was never invented, even by Mr. Ireland or his son.”

The reader may decide.

Close by is Bidford Grange, once an important manorhouse; and on the left bank of Avon—you may know it by the gray stone dove-cotes—stands Barton, where once dwelt another famous drinker, “Christophero Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton heath: by birth a peddler, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker. Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen-pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom.” And from Barton hamlet a foot-path leads across the meadows over the old bridge into Bidford.

BIDFORD BRIDGE

You are to notice this bridge, not only because the monks of Alcester built it in 1482, to supersede the ford on the old Roman road which crosses the river here, but for a certain stone in its parapet, near the inn window. This stone is worn hollow by thousands of pocket knives that generations of Bidford men have sharpened upon it. For four centuries it has supplied in these parts the small excuse that men

OLD THORNS, MARCLEEVE HILL

need to club and lounge together; and of an evening you may see a score, perhaps, hanging by this end of the bridge and waiting their turn, while the clink, clink of the sharpening knife fills the pauses of talk. When at last the stone shall wear all away there will be restlessness and possibly social convulsions in Bidford, unless its place be quickly supplied.

CLEEVE MILL—AN AUTUMN FLOOD

We lingered only to look at the building that in Shakespeare’s time was the old Falcon Inn, and soon were paddling due south from Bidford Bridge. The Avon now runs straight through big flat meadows towards a steep hill-side, with the hamlet of Marcleeve (or Marlcliff) at its foot. This line of hill borders the river on the south for some miles, and is the edge of a plateau which begins the ascent towards the Cotswold Hills. Seen from the river below, this escarpment is full of varying beauty, here showing a bare scar of green and red marl, here covered with long

THE YEW HEDGE—CLEEVE PRIOR MANOR-HOUSE

gray grass and dotted with old thorn and crab trees, here clothed with hanging woods of maple, ash, and other trees, straggled over and smothered with ivy, wild rose, and clematis. By Cleeve Mill, where clouds of sweet-smelling flour issued from the doorway, we disembarked and climbed up between the thorn-trees until upon the ridge we could look back upon the green vale of Evesham, and southward across ploughed fields, and cottages among orchards and elms, to the gray line of the Cotswolds, over which a patch of silver hung, as the day fought hard to regain its morning sunshine. The narrow footway took us on to Cleeve Priors and through its street—a village all sober, gray, and beautiful. The garden walls, coated with lichen and topped with yellow quinces or a flaming branch of barberry; the tall church tower; the

MEADOWS BY THE AVON

quaintly elaborate grave-stones below it, their scrolls and cherubim overgrown with moss; the clipped yew-trees that abounded in all fantastic shapes; the pigeons wheeling round their dove-cote, and the tall poplar by the manor farm—all these were good; but best of all was the manor farm itself, and the arched yew hedge leading to its Jacobean porch, a marvel to behold. We hung long about the entrance and stared at it. But no living man or woman approached us. The village was given up to peace or sleep or death.

Returning, we paused on the brow of the slope above Avon for a longer look. At our feet was spread the vale of Evesham; the river, bordered with meadows as green and flat as billiard-tables; the stream of Arrow to northward, which rises in the Lickey Hills, and comes down through Alcester to join the Avon here; the villages of Salford Priors and Salford Abbots; farther to the west, among its apple-trees, the roofs and gables of Salford Nunnery, the village of Harvington. And all down the stream, and round the meadows, and in and out of these

“low farms,Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,”

are willows innumerable—some polled last year, and looking like green mops, others with long curved branches ready to be lopped and turned into fence poles next winter, until they are lost in the hills round Evesham, where the dim towers stand up and the bold outline of Bredon Hill shuts out the view of the Severn Valley.

The mound on which we are standing is surmounted by the stone socket of an old cross, and beneath the cross are said to lie many of those who fell on Evesham battle-field; for the vale below was on August 4th, 1265, the scene of one of the bloodiest and most decisive conflicts in English history. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, victor ofLewes, and champion of the people’s rights, was hastening back by forced marches from Wales, having King Henry III. in his train, a virtual hostage. He was hurrying to meet his son, the young Simon, with reinforcements from the southeast; but young Simon’s troops had been surprised by Prince Edward at Kenilworth in the early morning and massacred in their beds, their leader himself escaping with difficulty, almost naked, in a boat across the lake of Kenilworth Castle. Unconscious of their fate, the old earl reached Evesham on Monday, August 3d, and, crossing the bridge into the town, sealed his own doom. For Evesham is a trap. The Avon forms a loop around it, shutting off escape on three sides, while the fourth is blocked by an eminence called the Green Hill. And while yet Simon and his king were feasting and making merry in Evesham Abbey, Edward’s troops were crossing the river here at Cleeve Ford in the darkness, and moving on their sure prey.

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