INDEX TO ILLUSTRATIONS

HARVINGTON WEIR

A strange and horrible darkness lay over the land on that fatal Tuesday morning, shrouding the sun, and hiding their books from the monks of Evesham as they sang in the choir. The soldiers at their breakfast could scarcely

WILLOW POLLARDING

see the meats on the board before them. They were ready to start again; but before the march began, banners and lances and moving troops were spied on the crest of the Green Hill, coming towards the town.

“It is my son,” cried Simon; “fear not. But nevertheless look out, lest we be deceived.”

Nicholas, the earl’s barber, being expert in the cognizance of arms, ascended the bell-tower of the abbey, and soon detected among the friendly banners, that were, in fact, but trophies of the raid at Kenilworth, the “three lions” of Prince Edward and the royalists. The alarm was given, but it was quickly seen that Simon’s army would be utterly outnumbered.

NEAR OFFENHAM

“By the arm of St. James,” cried the old warrior, “they come on well! But it was from me,” he added, with a touch of soldierly pride—“it was from me they learned it.” A glance showed the hopelessness of resisting this array with a handful of horse and a mob of wild Welshmen. “Let us commend our souls to God,” he said to his followers, “for our bodies are the foe’s.”

And so he went forth; and while the Welsh fled like sheep at the first onset, cut down in standing corn andflowery garden, the old warrior of sixty-five hewed his way “like an impregnable tower” to the top of the Green Hill, until one by one his friends had dropped beside him; then at the summit his horse fell too, and disdaining surrender, hemmed in by twelve knights, he was struck down by a lance wound. “It is God’s will,” he said, and died. And whilst the butchery went on, and the Welshmen fled homeward through Pershore to Tewkesbury, where the citizens cut them down in the streets, and whilst the darkness broke in drenching rain and blinding lightning, Simon’s head was lopped off, and carried on a pole in triumph to Wigmore.

“Such was the murder of Evesham, for battle none it was,” sings Robert of Gloucester. And as the sun breaks through and turns the gray day to silver, we pass on either hand memorials of that massacre. By Harvington mill and weir, where the sand-pipers flit before us, and by the spot where now stand the Fish and Anchor Inn and a row of anglers, Edward’s soldiery marched down through the night.

EVESHAM, FROM THE RIVER

At Offenham, where now is a Bridge Inn, and where tradition says a bridge once stood, they crossed the river again. On the opposite bank the slaughter was heaviest, and Dead Man Eyot, a small willowy island here, won its

From Offenham to Tewkesbury

name on that day. The sheep are feeding now in that “odd angle of the isle” that then was piled high with corpses. And so we come to a high railway embankment, and thence to a bridge, and the beautiful bell-tower leaps into view, soaring above the mills and roofs of Evesham.

THE AVON FROM EVESHAM TO TEWKESBURY

TO remember Evesham is to call up a broad and smiling vale; a river looped about a green hill and returning almost on itself, on the lower slope of the hill, beside the river, a little town; and above its mills and roofs, two spires and one pre-eminent tower, all set in the same church-yard.

The vale itself, as we dropped down towards Evesham, was insensibly changing. Unawares we left the pastures behind, and drifted into a land of orchards and marketgardens—no Devonshire orchards, with carpets of vivid grass, but stiff regiments of plum-trees, and between theirfiles asparagus growing, and sage and winter lettuce under hand-glasses, and cabbages splashed with mauve and crimson. We had crossed, in fact, the frontier of a fruit-growing country that in England has no rival but Kent. The beginnings of this prosperous gardening are sometimes ascribed to one Signor Bernardi, a Genoese gentleman who settled at Evesham in the middle of the seventeenth century. But more probably these orchards grow for the same reason that the meadows above are fat and a bell-tower stands in Evesham. There is a legend to that effect which is worth telling.

A MARKET-GARDEN NEAR EVESHAM

Egwin, Bishop of Worcester in the year 700 or thereabouts, was a saint of shining piety, but unpopular in his diocese, which had not long been converted from paganism, and retained many “ethnic and uncomely customs.” Against these the bishop thundered, till the people seized and haled him before Ethelred, then King of Mercia, charging him with tyranny and many bitter things. The matter was referred to the Holy Father at Rome, who commanded Egwin to appear before him and answer the charges. So to Rome he went; but before starting, to show how lowly he accounted himself, he ordered a pair of iron horse-fetters, and having put his feet into them, caused them to be locked and the key tossed into the Avon. Thus shackled, he went forward to Dover, took ship, and came to the Holy City; when, lo, a miracle! His attendants had gone down to the Tiber to catch a fish for supper. Scarcely was the line cast when a fine salmon took it and leaped ashore, without a struggle to escape. They hurried home with their prize, opened him, and found inside the key of the bishop’s fetters.

It is needless to say that the pope, after this, made short work of the charges against Egwin. The accused was loaded with honors, and sent home with particular recommendations to King Ethelred, who lost no time in restoring the bishop to his see and appointing him tutor to his own sons. Among other marks of friendship the king gave Egwin a large tract of land. It was savage, inhospitable, horrid with thickets and forest trees. Yet Egwin liked it; for he kept pigs, which found abundance of food there. So, dividing the wilderness into four quarters, he appointed a swine-herd over each, whose names were Eoves and Ympa, two brothers; and Trottuc and Carnuc, brothers also. Eoves (with whom alone we are concerned) had charge over the eastern portion, and it happened to him one day that a favorite sow strayed off into the thickest of the woods. Eoves spent weeks in searching after her, and at length wandered so far that he too lost his way. He shouted for succor, but none came. Growing appalled, he began to run headlong through the undergrowth, when suddenly he stumbled on the lost sow, having three young ones with her. She came gladly to his call, grunting and muzzling at his legs; then turned, and began to hurry into the deeper forest, the young pigstrotting beside her. Eoves followed, and soon, to his wonder, reached a glade, open and somewhat steep, where was a virgin standing, lovelier than the noonday, and two others beside her, celestially robed, having psalteries in their hands and singing holy songs. The swine-herd understood nothing of the vision; but hurrying back, was lucky enough to find an egress from the woods, and returned to his home.

REED-CUTTERS

This matter was reported to Egwin; and he, being eager to see the place with his own eyes, was led thither by Eoves. There it was vouchsafed to him to see the same vision, and, as it faded, to hear a voice from the chief virgin saying, “This place have I chosen.” Whereupon he understood that he, like Æneas, had been guided by a sow to the spot where he must build; and soon the Abbey of Evesham, or Eovesham, began to rise where the virgins had stood. This was in 703, and the building was finished in six years.

Such is the legend. A town sprang up around the monastery; the thickets were cleared and became pasture-lands and orchards; the country smiled, and the abbey waxed rich. It housed sixty-seven monks, five matrons, three poor brothers, three clerks, and sixty-five servants to work in brew-house, bake-house, kitchen, cellar, infirmary; to make clothes and boots; to open the great gate; to till the gardens, vineyards, and orchards; and to fish for eels in the Avon below. When William de Beauchamp, whose castle stood at Bengeworth, on the opposite bank, broke into the abbey church and plundered it, about 1150A.D., the abbot excommunicated him and his retainers, razed his castle, and made a burial-ground of the site. In 1530, under the rule of Clement Lichfield, the abbey possessed fifteen manors in the county of Worcester alone, in Gloucestershire six, in Warwickshire three, in Northamptonshire two, with lands, rents, and advowsons far and wide. Out of Oxford and Cambridge there was no such assemblage of religious buildings in England. Then Clement Lichfield reared “a right sumptuous and high square tower of stone;” and almost at once King Henry VIII. made his swoop on the monasteries.

EVESHAM BELL-TOWER AND OLD ABBEY GATEWAY

The country still smiles; but to-day of all the conventual buildings there survive but a few stones—a sculptured arch leading to a kitchen-garden, and this “high square tower” of Lichfield’s building. This last was designed to be atonce the abbey’s gateway, horologe, and belfry; but before the day of its completion all these uses were nullified. Its service since has been monumental merely—to stand over the razed foundations and obliterated fish-ponds of Egwin’s house, and speak to the vale of famous men and the hands that made it fertile.

HAMPTON FERRY

There are many old houses in Evesham, and especially in Bridge Street; but the bridge at the foot of this street is modern, and ascribed “to the public spirit and perseverance of Henry Workman, Esq.” To him also are due the “Workman Gardens,” a strip of pleasure-ground on the river’s left bank, facing the abbey grounds; but local sapience has imposed the usual restrictions on their use, and nine times out of ten you will find them deserted.

The day was almost spent as we took to the canoe once more, and paddled around the long bend that girdles the town. We thought to have left the bell-tower far behind, when, a little past Hampton Ferry, its pinnacles reappeared, and the twin spires of St. Lawrence and All-Saints, peeringabove a plum orchard almost ahead of us. On our left the sun sank in a broad yellow haze; the hill where Simon fell, and where stands the Abbey Manor-house, was soaked in it; and soon, as the channel brought our faces westward again, and we drew near Chadbury mill and Chadbury lock and weir, the vale was filled with this yellow light, pale and pervasive.

CHADBURY MILL

“Great Evesham’s fertile glebe what tongue hath not extolled?As though to her alone belonged the garb of gold,”

sings Drayton; and certainly she wore the garb that evening. As she donned it, the chorus of the birds ceased, and with the sudden hush we became aware that their voices had been following in our ears all the day through. Above and below Evesham every furlong of the river-bank is populous, with larks especially, whose song you may hear shivering from every point of the sky. In early winter the number of nests that the falling leaves disclose is astonishing. Some, no doubt, have lasted, and will last, for years, such as the mud-plastered houses of the blackbird and thrush, and the fagot pile which the magpie constructs in the top of a tree. But the flimsy nests of the warblers and

CHADBURY WEIR

other late-breeding birds, built of a few dried grasses and bound together with cobwebs and horse-hair, date from last spring, and will disappear before the next. They were not made until the leaves were out, and upon the leaves their builders relied for concealment, so that in winter they hang betrayed. Yet even in winter the banks teem with life and color and interest. P., who rowed down here one bright December morning when the scarlet hips were out, and dark-red haws, and the silver-gray seed of “old man’s beard,” tells of a big meadow from which the flood had just subsided, and of birds innumerable feeding there—rooks, starlings, pewits in flocks, little white-rumped sandpipers darting to and fro and uttering their sharp note, a dozen herons solemnly but suspiciously observant of the passing boat, and watching for its effect on a cluster of wild-duck out on the ruffled stream. You cannot, indeed, pass down Avon without receiving the wide-eyed attention of its fauna; and politeness calls on you to return it.

Chadbury is twenty miles below Stratford, and here we meet the first lock that is kept in repair; so that for twenty miles Mr. William Sandys’s work of making Avon navigable has gone for nothing. He lived at Fladbury, just below, and the money he threw away on his hobby “cannot be reckoned at less than twenty thousand pounds.” “As soon,” writes Dr. Nash, in his “Worcestershire,” “as he had finished his work to Stratford (and, as I have heard, spent all his fortune), he immediately delivered up all to Parliament, to do what they thought fit therein.” And this was precisely nothing.

Consequently there is to-day but little human stir beside the Avon. The “freighted barge from distant shores” travels this way no longer, or but rarely. Unless by the towns—Emscote, Stratford, Evesham, and Tewkesbury—a pleasure-boat is hardly to be met, and all the villages seem

FLADBURY MILL

to turn their backs on the stream. At the mills we see a few men, whitened with flour; in summer the mowers and haymakers appear for a few days upon the meadows, and are soon gone; in winter a few may return to poll the willows, tying their twigs into fagots, and leaving the stems standing, with white scarred heads; occasionally a man and a boy will come in one of the native high-prowed punts to cut and bind the dark rushes that, when dried, are used for matting, chair seats, and calking beer barrels; or the tops of a withy bed will sway erratically as we pass, and tell of somebody at work there; or in autumn flood-time a professional fisherman, with his eel nets, is busy at the weirs. These represent the industries of Avon. Other human forms there are, which angle with rod and line—strange, infinitely patient men, fishing for eels and other succulent fish, catching (it may be) one dace between sunrise and sundown. Their ancestors must have had better sport, for Dugdale

THE GIG SEAT

constantly speaks of valuable fishing rights on the river, and many a farmer paid his rent to the Church in eels. To this day every cottage has its punt, and sometimes a seat rigged up in some likely spot over the stream. One such we marked with particular interest. It was, in fact, the body of an old gig; and therein sat an angler, and a glutton of his kind, for he had no less than seven lines baited, and the rods radiated from him like the spokes of a wheel. Perhaps it was his one holiday for the week, and he had hit on this device for cramming the seven days’ sport into one.

Much might be written of Chadbury mill and weir as we saw them in

“the twilight of such dayAs after sunset fadeth in the west.”

But, again, it is hard to improve upon Ireland, who calls it “so rich a landscape that nature seems not to require the assistance of art, in the language of modern refinement, either to correct her coarse expression by removing a hill or docking a tree, or to supply her careless and tasteless omissions for the purpose of rendering her more completely picturesque.”

In gathering darkness we dropped down beneath a hill-side partly wooded, partly set out in young plum orchards, partly turfed, and dotted with old thorns. Here is Cracombe House, and beyond it lie two villages—Fladbury on the right and Cropthorne on the left, each with its own mill. A ford used to join them, but this was superseded by a bridge to commemorate the Queen’s Jubilee. We did not come to it that night, for at Fladbury there stands a parsonage, with a lawn sloping between trees to the river, and on this lawn we heard the voices and laughter of friends in the dusk. Turning our canoe shore-ward, we hailed them.

If Kenilworth Castle and Evesham Abbey, structures so

CROPTHORNE MILL

massive, take but a century or so to fall into complete ruin, how soon will mere man revert to savagery? Our host at Fladbury parsonage was a painter, one in whom Americans take a just pride, and the talk at his table that evening was brisk enough, had we but possessed ears for it. Instead, we who had journeyed for ten days from inn to inn, reading no newspapers, receiving no letters, conversing with few fellows, regarding only the quiet panorama of meadow, wood, and stream, sat in a mental haze. We were stupefied with long draughts of open air. The dazzle of the river, the rhythmical stroke of the paddle, had set our wits to sleep. Once or twice we strove to rally them, and listen to the talkers; but always the ripple of Avon rose and ran in our ears, confusing the words, and we sank back into agreeable hebetude. The same held us, too, next morning, as we ported our canoe over Fladbury weir, and started for Tewkesbury in the teeth of a west wind that blew “through the sharp hawthorn” and curled the water. The year had aged noticeably in the past night, and the country-side wore a forlorn look. None the less, the reaches below Cropthorne struck us as singularly beautiful. From a fringe of fantastic pollard willows, out of whose decayed trunks grew the wild rose and bramble,

WILLOWS BY CROPTHORNE

orchards and pastures swelled up to a line of cottages and a square-towered church standing against the sky. Cropthorne church is to be visited as well for its beauty as for the monuments it contains of the Dingley family, to which the manor formerly belonged. There is one to the memory of Francis Dingley, Esq., who happily matched with Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Brigge, Esq., and Mary Hoby, his wife, had issue eleven sons and eight daughters, and died in peace, anno 1624. The last of the Dingleys, a girl, married Edward Goodyeare, of Burghope, and bore him two sons, whose history is tragic. The elder, Sir John, was a childless man; and his brother, Samuel, who followed the sea, and had become captain of the Ruby man-of-war, expected in time to have the estates. But the two men hated each other, and at last a threat of disinheritance so angered the captain that he took the desperate resolution of murdering the baronet, and carried it out on the 17th of January, 1741. Dr. Nash tells the story: “A friend at Bristol, who knew their mortal antipathy, had invited them both to dinner, in hopes of reconciling them, and they parted in seeming friendship. But the captain placed some of his crew in the street near College Green, with orders to seize his brother,and assisted in hurrying him by violence to his ship, under pretence that he was disordered in his senses, where, when they arrived, he caused him to be strangled in the cabin by White and Mahony, two ruffians of his crew, himself standing sentinel at the door while the horrid deed was perpetrating.” The captain, with his two accomplices, was soon taken and hanged. He was a brave sailor, and had distinguished himself at St. Sebastian, Ferrol, and San Antonio, at which last place he burned three men-of-war, the magazine, and stores.

AT WYRE

Four miles below Fladbury lies Wyre lock, with Wyre village on the right bank, its cottage gardens planted with cabbages and winter lettuce, or hung with nets drying in the wind. Across the river, a few fields back, Wick straggles, a long street of timbered cottages, with a little church, and

OLD PEAR-TREES AT PERSHORE

before the church a cross. And ahead of us, over its acres of plum and pear orchards, the fine tower of Pershore rises.

NETS DRYING AT WYRE

WYRE LOCK

Of all the abbeys that once graced the Avon, Tewkesbury alone retains some of its former splendor. Sulby is a farm-house; of Stoneleigh but a gateway is left; of Evesham an arch and a tower; while Pershore keeps only its tower and choir. Oswald, nephew of our old friend Ethelred, King of Mercia, founded a house of secular canons hereA.D.689, who by a charter of King Edgar, two centuries later, were superseded by Benedictine monks. Being built of wood, both church and convent were thrice destroyed by fire, first about the year 1000, then in 1223, and again in 1288; on this last occasion by the sin of a brother, who went a-courting with a lantern within the sacred walls(“muliebri consilio infatuatus, in loco illo sacrato ignem obtulit alienum”). This fire consumed not only the abbey, but the greater part of the town, and the wicked cause of it led to a suspension of all religious services until 1299, when the Bishop of Llandaff came and “reconciled” the Church. All that remains to-day is used as the parish church of the Holy Cross, and is a beautiful piece of Early-English work. Pershore itself bears all the markings of a quietly prosperous market town. Its wide street is lined with respectable red-brick houses, faced with stone, having pediments over their front doors, and square windows, some of them blocked ever since the days of the window-tax. Its plums are known throughout England; its pears yield excellent perry; and on pears and plums together it relies for a blameless competence.

THE SUMMER-HOUSE ON BREDON HILL

PERSHORE BRIDGE

GREAT COMBERTON

We passed Pershore bridge, which the Royalists broke down in their retreat from Worcester field; and Pershore water-gate. There was a water-gate at Fladbury also, one post of which we were assured was the same that Mr. Sandys planted in 1637. For long the chine of Bredon Hill had lain ahead of us, closing the view. We had first spied yesterday, from the hill-side below Cleeve, and ever since it had been with us; but below Pershore the river so winds that whether you row down stream or up, Bredon Hill will be found the dominant feature in the landscape. But whether a passing cloud paints it purple, or the sun shines on it, lighting the grassy slopes, and showing every bush and quarry on the sides, it is always a beautiful background for the villages that cluster round its foot—Great and Little Comberton, Bricklehampton, Elmley Castle, and Norton-by-Bredon. As we passed them the day relented for a while, and in the pale sunshine their gray church towers stood out, bright spots against the hill-side.

NAFFORD MILL

ECKINGTON BRIDGE

We floated under the steep bank that separates Comberton and its poplars from the stream, along to the dusty mill beside Nafford Lock, and drew close under this hill-side until the old beacon at its top (called the Summer-house) stood right above our heads. At Nafford Lock there is a drop of six or eight feet before the river runs on by yet more villages—Eckington, Birlingham, and Defford. Here in the sombre west ahead of us the Malverns come into view; and here, between Eckington and Defford, a bridge crosses, over

PERSHORE WATER-GATE

which we leaned for a quiet half-hour before going on our way.

BREDON

It was a time, I think, that will pleasantly come back to us in days when we shall fear to trust our decrepit limbs in a canoe. The bridge, six-arched, with deep buttresses, seemed as old as Avon itself. It is built of the red sandstone so common in the neighborhood; but time has long since mellowed and subdued its color to reflect the landscape’s mood, which just now was sober and even mournful. Rain hung over the Malverns; down on the flat plain, where the river crept into the evening, the poplars were swaying gently; a pair of jays hustled by with a warning squawk. Throughout this, the last day of our voyage, we had travelled dully, scarce exchanging a word, possessed with the stupor before alluded to. A small discovery awoke us. As we rested our elbows on the parapet, we noticed that many deep grooves or notches ran across it. They were marks worn in the stone by the tow-ropes of departed barges.

Those notches spoke to us, as nothing had spoken yet, of the true secret of Avon. Kings and their armies have trampled its banks from Naseby to Tewkesbury, performing great feats of war; castles and monasteries have risen over its waters; yet none of them has left a record so durable as are these grooves where the bargemen shifted their

TITHE BARN, BREDON

ropes in passing the bridge. The fighting reddened the river for a day; the building was reflected there for a century or two; but the slow toil of man has outlasted them both. And, looking westward over the homely landscape, we realized the truth that Nature, too, is most in earnest when least dramatic; that her most terrible power is seen neither in the whirlwind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the catkins budding on the hazel—the still, small voice that proves she is not dead, but sleeping lightly, and already dreaming of the spring.

“Sed neque Medorum silvæ, ditissima terra—”

the note of Virgil’s praise of Italy was ours for a while, and

NEAR ECKINGTON

his pride to inherit a land of immemorial towns—a land made fertile by tillage and watered by “rivers stealing under hoary walls.”

STRENSHAM CHURCH

A little below the bridge Avon is joined by the Defford (or, as it was once called, Depeford) Brook, its last considerable tributary, which rises on the west of the Lickey Hills; and a little farther on we turn a sharp bend where, above the old willows on our right, a field of rank grass rises steeply to Strensham church and vicarage. Behind the stumpy tower lies Strensham village, not to be seen from the river. Here, in 1612, Samuel Butler was born, the author of “Hudibras,” and a monument stands to his memory within the church, beside other fine ones belonging to the Russell family. He was born in obscurity, and died a pauper—a poet (to use the words which Dennis wrote for his other monument in Westminster Abbey) who “was a wholespecies of poets in one; admirable in a manner in which no one else has been tolerable—a manner in which he knew no guide, and has found no follower.” Very few can read that epitaph without recalling the more famous epigram upon it:

“The poet’s fate is here in emblem shown;He asked for bread, and he received a stone.”

STRENSHAM MILL

Below Strensham we pass a lock—the last before reaching Tewkesbury—and two mills, the first and larger and more modern one deserted. Mr. Sandys’s task was here not difficult, for the Avon Valley is so level that only two locks are required in the fifteen miles from Pershore. We have scarcely left the lock when the sharp steeple of Bredon,

ARROW-HEADS, NEAR TEWKESBURY

at the western extremity of Bredon Hill, points out the direction of the river. To this village, during the civil war, Bishop Prideaux, of Worcester, retired on a stipend of four shillings and sixpence a week. “This reverse of fortune,” says Ireland, “he bore with much cheerfulness, although obliged to sell his books and furniture to procure subsistence. One day, being asked by a neighbor, as he passed through the village with something under his gown, what had he got there?—he replied he was become an ostrich, and forced to live upon iron—showing some old iron which he was going to sell at the blacksmith’s to enable him to purchase a dinner.” The living of Bredon was, in more peaceful times, one of the fattest in the bishop’s diocese, as is hinted by a huge tithe-barn on the slope above us, with a chamber over its doorway, doubtless for the accountant.

From Bredon we came to Twining Ferry, three miles below Strensham, and the flat meadows beyond it, over which the tower of Tewkesbury Abbey and the tall chimneys of its mills now began to loom through a rainy sky upon which night was fast closing. It is just before the town is reached that the Avon parts to join the Severn in four streams—one over a weir, another through a lock, the remaining two after working mills. Being by this both wet and hungry, we disembarked at the boat-yard beside Mythe Bridge, and walked up to our inn beneath the dark, irregular gables of High Street, resolved to explore the town next day.

Tewkesbury lies along the southern bank of Mill Avon, the longest branch of our divided river, which, flowing under Mythe Bridge, washes on its left the slums and back gardens of the town before it passes down to work the Abbey Mill. One of these gardens—that of the Bell and Bowling-Green Inn—will be recognized by all readers of “John Halifax, Gentleman,” and the view from the yew-hedged bowling-green itself shall be painted in Mrs. Craik’s own words:

MYTHE BRIDGE, TEWKESBURY

“At the end of the arbor the wall which enclosed us on the riverward side was cut down—my father had done it at my asking—so as to make a seat, something after the fashion of Queen Mary’s seat at Stirling, of which I had read. Thence one could see a goodly sweep of country. First, close below, flowed the Avon—Shakespeare’s Avon—here a narrow, sluggish stream, but capable, as we sometimes knew to our cost, of being roused into fierceness and foam. Now it slipped on quietly enough, contenting itself with turning a flour-mill hard by, the lazy whir of which made a sleepy, incessant monotone which I was fond of hearing. From the opposite bank stretched a wide green level called the Ham, dotted with pasturing cattle of all sorts. Beyond it

TWINING FERRY

was a second river, forming an arc of a circle round the verdant flat. But the stream itself lay so low as to be invisible from where we sat; you could only trace the line of its course by the small white sails that glided in and out, oddly enough, from behind clumps of trees and across meadow-lands.”

THE BOWLING-GREEN, TEWKESBURY

This second stream is, of course, the Severn, sweeping broadly by the base of Mythe Hill. An advertisement that we saw posted in Tewkesbury streets gave us the size of the intervening meadow; it announced that the after or latter math of the Severn Ham was to be sold by order of the trustees—172 acres, 2 roods, 28 perches of grass in all. The Ham is let by auction, and the money divided among the inhabitants of certain streets.

We lingered to observe the yew hedge, “fifteen feet high and as many thick,” and talk to a waiter who now appeared at the back door of the inn. He seemed to feel his black suitand white shirt-front incongruous with their surroundings, and explained the cause of their presence. The Tewkesbury Bowling Club had held its annual dinner there the night before. He showed us the empty bottles.

“Evidently a very large club,” we said.

“No, sirs; thirsty.”

The Abbey Mill, which droned so pleasantly in Phineas Fletcher’s ears, stands close by, under the shadow of the Abbey Church, its hours of work and rest marked by the clock and peal of eight sweet-toned bells in the Abbey Tower.

TEWKESBURY, FROM THE SEVERN

It is well that this tower should stand where it does. If to one who follows the windings of Avon the recurrent suggestion of its scenery be that of permanence, here fitly, at his journey’s end, he finds that permanence embodied monumentally in stone. No building that I know in England—not Westminster Abbey, with all its sleeping generations—conveys the impression of durability in the same degree as does this Norman tower, which, for eight centuries, has stood foursquare to the storms of heaven and the frenzy of men. Though it rises one hundred and thirty-two feet from the ground to the coping of its battlements, and though its upper stages contain much exquisite carving, there is no

MILL STREET, TEWKESBURY

lightness on its scarred, indomitable face, but only strength. The same strength is repeated within the church by the fourteen huge cylindrical columns from which the arches spring to bear the heavy roof of the nave. In spite of the groining and elaborate traceries above, the rich eastern windows, the luxuriant decoration of the chantry chapels and their monuments, these fourteen columns give the note of the edifice. To them we return, and, standing beside them, are able to ignore the mutilations of years, and see the old church as it was on a certain spring day in 1471, when its painted windows colored the white faces, and its ceilings echoed the cries, of the beaten Lancastrians that clung to its altar for sanctuary.

OLD HOUSE, TEWKESBURY

For “in the field by Tewkesbury,” a little to the south, beside the highway that runs to Gloucester and Cheltenham, the crown of England has been won and lost. There, on the 4th of May, 1471, the troops of Queen Margaret and the young Prince Edward, led by the Duke of Somerset from Exeter to join another army that the Earl of Pembrokewas raising in Wales, were overtaken by Edward IV., who had hurried out from Windsor to intercept them. Footsore and bedraggled, they had reached Tewkesbury on the 3d, and “pight their field in a close euen hard at the towne’s end, hauing the towne and abbeie at their backes; and directlie before them, and upon each side of them, they were defended with cumbersome lanes, deepe ditches, and manie hedges, besides hils and dales, so as the place seemed as noisome as might be to approach unto.” From this secure position they were drawn by a ruse of the Crookback’s, and slaughtered like sheep. Many, we know, fled to the abbey, were seized there and executed by dozens at Tewkesbury Cross, where High Street and Burton Street divide. Others were chased into the river by the Abbey Mill and drowned. A house in Church Street is pointed out as the place where Edward, Prince of Wales, was slain, and some stains in the floor boards of one of the upper rooms are still held to be his blood-marks. Tradition has marked his burial-place in the Abbey Church, and written above it, “Eheu, hominum furor: matris tu sola lux es, et gregis ultima spes.” The dust of his enemy Clarence—“false, fleeting, perjured Clarence”—lies but a little way off, behind the altar-screen.

There is a narrow field, one of the last that Avon washes, down the centre of which runs a narrow, withy-bordered watercourse. It is called the “Bloody Meadow,” after the carnage of that day, when, as the story goes, blood enough lay at its foot to float a boat; and just beyond our river is gathered to the greater Severn.

A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,L,M,N,O,P,R,S,T,U,W,Y.

Ann Hathaway’s Cottage,73.Arrow-heads, near Tewkesbury,131.Ashow,41.Avon from Nasebyfield to Wolston, The, facing10.Avon Inn, Rugby,22.Barford Bridge,54.Bidford Bridge,84.Blakedown Mill,44.Bowling-green, Tewkesbury, The,137.Bredon,125.Bretford,29.Bubbenhall,37.Cæsar’s Tower, Warwick Castle,50.Catthorpe Church,19.Chadbury Mill,104.Chadbury Weir,105.Charlcote,63.Chesford Bridge,43.Church Lawford,27.Cleeve Mill—An Autumn Flood,87.Clopton Bridge, Stratford-upon-Avon,69.Cropthorne Mill,112.Dove-cote, Wasperton,60.Dow Bridge on Watling Street,20.Eckington Bridge,122.Eckington, Near,127.Elms by Bidford Grange,81.Evesham Bell-tower and Old Abbey Gateway,102.Evesham, from the River,96.Fladbury Mill,108.Gig Seat, The,109.Gleaners,33.Great Comberton,121.Guy’s Cliffe,47.Guy’s Cliffe Mill,45.Hampton Ferry,103.Hampton Lucy, from the Meadows,61.Hampton Lucy to Harvington, From, facing60.Harvington Weir,92.Hillborough,83.Holbrook Court,24.Hospital of Robert Earl of Leycester in Warwick,51.Lawford Mill,25.Lock and Church, The,75.Market-garden near Evesham, A,99.Meadows by the Avon,89.Meadowsweet,65.Mill Street, Tewkesbury,139.Mouth of the Stour, The,74.Mythe Bridge, Tewkesbury,134.Nafford Mill,122.Naseby Monument,10.Nets Drying at Wyre,117.Newbold-upon-Avon,24.Offenham, Near,95.Offenham to Tewkesbury, From, facing96.Old Bridge, Warwick,49.Old House, Tewkesbury,141.Old Pear-Trees at Pershore,115.Old Thorns, Marcleeve Hill,85.Pershore Bridge,119.Pershore Water-gate,123.Reed-cutters,101.Roman Camp, Lilburne,15.Rugby, from Brownsover Mill,21.Ruins of Newnham Regis Church,28.Ryton-on-Dunsmore,32.Sherborne,58.Site of Brandon Castle,31.Standford Church,17.Standford Hall,14.Stoneleigh Abbey, Oct.15, 1884,40.Stoneleigh Deer Park, In,36.Stratford Church,71.Strensham Church,129.Strensham Mill,130.Sulby Abbey,11.Summer-house on Bredon Hill, The,118.Swing-Bridge near Welford,13.Tewkesbury, from the Severn,138.Tithe Barn, Bredon,126.Twining Ferry,135.Under the Willows,67.Warwick Castle, from the Park,55.Wasperton, At,59.Weir Brake,77.Welford Canal House,12.Welford Weir and Church,80.Weston-upon-Avon,78.Willows by Cropthorne,113.Willow Pollarding,93.Wolston Priory,32.Wolston to Wasperton, From, facing28.Wyre, At,114.Wyre Lock,117.Yew Hedge, The—Cleeve Prior Manor-house,83.

THE END

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