YATTON—CONGRESBURY—WICK ST. LAWRENCE
THE main road from Clevedon to Kingston Seymour trends sharply inland,
passing the little village of Kenn. Seaward the flat and featureless
lands spread to an oozy shore; Kenn itself, an insignificant village,
standing beside a sluggish runnel of the same name. From this place
sprang the Ken family, which numbered among its members the celebrated
Bishop of Bath and Wells, who owed his preferment from a subordinate
position at Winchester to his having, while there, refused to give up
his house for the accommodation of Nell Gwynne. Charles the Second was a
true sportsman. He respected those who were true to themselves, whether
it were an unrepentant highwayman, whom he could pardon and fit out with
a telling nickname; or a Church dignitary whose conscience forbade him
to curry favour by housing a King’s mistress. So, in 1684, when a choice
was to be made of a new Bishop of Bath and Wells, the King declared that
no one should have it but “the little black fellow that refused his
lodging to poor Nelly.”
The Ken family finally died out in the seventeenth century, after having
been settled here over four hundred years. A small mural monument to
Christopher Ken and his family, 1593, remains in the little church,
rebuilt in 1861 and uninteresting; but with a pretty feature in the
unusual design of the pyramidal stone roof of its small tower.
Beyond Kenn, in a lonely situation midway between Yatton and the coast
at the point where the waters of the Yeo estuary glide and creep, rather
than fall, into the sea, stands the village of Kingston Seymour. The
country all round about is more remarkable for the rich feeding its flat
pastures afford the cows than for its scenic beauties. If it were not
for the luxuriant hedgerows and the fine hedgerow trees, it would be
possible to say, with the utmost sincerity, that this corner of Somerset
was tame and dull. But the dairy-farmers who occupy it so largely draw
great prosperity from these flat meadows.
[Illustration: KINGSTON SEYMOUR.]
Within the beautiful and delicately graceful old church of Kingston
Seymour are tablets recording the floods once possible here, and the
destruction wrought by two such visitations, in 1606 and 1703. An
epitaph records the odd bequest of a certain “J. H.,” in bequeathing
“his remains” to his acquaintance, and their still more singular joy at
the legacy:
He was universally beloved in the circle of
His acquaintance; but united
In his death the esteem of all,
Namely, by bequeathing his remains.
The centre of this district is Yatton, which now draws all surrounding
traffic by reason of its junction station on the Great Western Railway.
Here the traveller changes for Clevedon, or for Cheddar and Wells, or
for Wrington Vale. Yatton takes its name from the river Yeo, which oozes
near by, and itself hides in that form of spelling the Celtic word _ea_,
for water, akin to the modern French _eau_. Thus Yatton is really,
derivatively, the same as Eton, near Windsor, the water-town beside the
river Thames; Eaton by Chester, on the river Dee, and many other places
throughout the country with the affix of “ea” or “ay.” An alternative
derivation, as arguable as the first, makes Yatton derive from the
“gate,” or gap, in the neighbouring hills, through which the Yeo drains
on its way from Wrington. The village itself stands somewhat high, but
overlooks a very considerable tract of low-lying country, formerly in
the nature of a creek, as proved by modern discoveries of a Roman
boat-house and similar waterside relics near by.
The business brought by the junction-station of the Great Western
Railway at Yatton has effectually abolished the village-like rustic
character of the place. It is more by way of a townlet of one long
street, remarkable for the unpleasing prominence of blank walls
enclosing the grounds of residents whose desire for privacy appears to
be excessive.
The great feature of Yatton is, however, its fine church. No traveller
can have journeyed much on the Great Western Railway without having
noticed, as his train approached Yatton, the singular effect produced by
the tall tower of this fine building, surmounted by a spire that has
lost the last third part of its original height, and has been finished
off with small pinnacles. The effect is almost uncanny, but by no means
unpleasant, and the proposals that have from time to time been made to
complete the spire are altogether to be deprecated. No records remain by
which it can with certainty be said that the spire was ever completed
when the church was at last finished, after building operations that
extended from 1486 to 1500; but the evidence afforded by the Late
Perpendicular cresting and pinnacles that finish off the incomplete
structure, and are contemporary with it, seems to point to one or other
of two hypotheses: that funds finally proved insufficient, almost on the
eve of the works being brought to a conclusion; or that the builders
were alarmed by signs of their having already placed as much weight upon
the tower as it could possibly bear.
[Illustration: YATTON CHURCH.]
It is a noble church, designed in the last phase of pure Gothic
architecture, with some few remains of Early English and Decorated from
a former building, demolished to make way for this larger and more
splendid place of worship. Here in the De Wyke chantry is the altar-tomb
of Evelina de Wyke and her husband, _c._ 1337; and near by is that of
Sir Richard Cradock Newton, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1448, and
his wife, Emma, or Emmota, Perrott. The recumbent effigies of the Judge
and his lady are very fine. He wears the robes of his office and a
collar with links of “S.S.,”—mystic letters generally considered to
signify “Souveraigne,” and to be a badge of Lancastrian loyalty. This
example is considered to be the earliest known. The “garbs,” or
wheatsheaves of the Judge’s coat-of-arms, may still be traced, as also
the arms of his wife—three pendant golden pears on a red field, in
punning allusion to “Perrott.”
Here also is the tomb of the Judge’s eldest son, Sir John Newton, and
his wife, Isabel Chedder. All these had, in their time, greatly to do
with the rebuilding and beautifying of Yatton church.
A curious epitaph in the churchyard, to the memory of a gipsy who died
in 1827, reads:
Here lies Merrily Joules,
a beauty bright,
Who left Isac Joules, her
heart’s delight.
Prominent, close by, is the boldly stepped base of a churchyard cross,
of which the shaft has long disappeared. Surviving accounts prove it to
have been erected at a cost of £18, in 1499.
Yatton church, as we have seen, has a spire, an unusual feature with
Somerset churches. Here, however, a small group of spires or spirelets
occurs, including also those of Congresbury, Kingston Seymour, Kenn, and
Worle. Congresbury spire is the most prominent of all, both from its own
height and from the position it occupies in the vale below Yatton.
“Coomsbury”—for that is the local shibboleth—is a considerable village,
taking its name traditionally from “St. Congar,” son of some uncertain
“Emperor of Constantinople.” This really very autocratic personage
endeavoured to marry his son to a person whom the young man could not
love, and he fled his father’s Court; wandering in wild and inclement
lands, until he came at last to this then particularly wild and
unwholesome region. We cannot avoid the suspicion that the lady must
have been a terror of the first water; or, alternatively, that Congar
was not altogether weather-proof in the upper storey. He is said to have
founded a hermitage here, A.D. 711, and a baptistry at which the heathen
were admitted to the Church; and King Ina, we are told, became his most
powerful patron. At last he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and died
there; but his body was conveyed back to Congresbury.
Thus the legend, which has no historical foundation whatever, and
appears to be an ancient, but entirely idle tale: the name of
Congresbury being really, in its first form, an Anglo-Saxon Königsburg;
or, in modern English, Kingston. But “St. Congar,” although he finds no
place in learned hagiologies, is still a belief at “Coomsbury,” and the
villagers point to the stump of an ancient yew-tree as “St. Congar’s
walking-stick.”
The church itself is large and fine, but not so fine as that of Yatton.
In the churchyard is the base of an ancient cross, and in the village
itself a tall shaft of the fifteenth century, with the cross replaced by
a ball.
[Illustration: THE RECTORY. CONGRESBURY.]
The rectory was until towards the end of the eighteenth century wholly a
fifteenth-century building; but the clergy of that time, little disposed
towards archæology, and with marked leanings towards a certain standard
of stately comfort and display, procured the building of the present
large but ugly parsonage, and degraded the old building into a kitchen
and outhouse. The expansive (and expensive) ideas of that time have for
some generations past proved expensive indeed to the incumbents of
Congresbury, for the large house and great lofty rooms cost much to keep
in repair, and the ideas of the present-day clergy are not so nearly as
they were like those of the old-fashioned free-handed country squires.
In Congresbury churchyard a lengthy epitaph upon a former inhabitant
incidentally tells us that belated highwaymen still troubled these parts
in 1830, a period when most other regions had long seen the last of
those unknightly “Knights of the Road”:
_In Memory of_
CHARLES CAPELL HARDWICKE
of this Parish
died
July 2nd 1849
aged
50 years
And was buried at Hutton
His Friends
Erected this Monument
To Record
their admiration of his
Character
and
their regret at his
Loss
A.D. 1871
He was of such courage that being attacked by a highwayman on
the heath in this parish, Oct. 21st, 1830, and fearfully wounded
by him, he pursued his assailant and having overtaken him in the
centre of this village, he delivered him up to Justice.
The old rectory, happily still standing, was built about 1446. Its chief
interest lies in the projecting porch; the doorway surmounted with a
sculptured panel enclosing the figure of an odd-looking angel with a
cross growing out of his head, holding in his hands a scroll inscribed
“_Laus Deo_.” The archway is pointed in the manner of an Early English
arch, and sculptured with an imitation of the “dog-tooth” moulding of
that period. Stone shields bear the arms of Bishop Beckington, and of
the Pulteney family.
From Congresbury it is possible to again approach the coast, coming by
level roads that run through flat alluvial lands to Wick St. Lawrence, a
small and solitary village standing near the banks of the Yeo estuary.
The writer grows tired of writing, and the reader doubtless as weary of
reading, of the richness of the land in these parts; but the occasion
for and the necessity of this continued allusion are at least proofs of
the fertility of Somerset and of the abundance of the good gifts
bestowed upon this fortunate county, whose soil even oozes plentifully
out at its river-mouths and in the way of muddy deposits conspicuously
advertises this form of wealth. There can be no possible doubt of the
great importance the dairying business has assumed in these parts. It
has already been noted at Yatton, and here again the traveller by road,
who thus sees the country intimately, is impressed, not only with the
rich pastures, but with the beautiful stock he sees in them or driven
along the road; and also with the numbers of carts he observes, with
from one to half a dozen milk-churns, driven smartly across country to
the nearest railway-station, to catch the up trains for Bristol or
London.
The road to Wick St. Lawrence—_i.e._ St. Lawrence’s Creek—after crossing
the Great Western Railway midway between Yatton and Puxton, winds
extravagantly between high hedges, passing only an occasional farmhouse.
Rarely the stranger in these parts meets any other wayfarers than
farming folk, and the children of Wick St. Lawrence at sight of him
stand stock-still, with fingers in mouths, quaint figures of combined
curiosity and shyness, clad in the old rustic way in homely clothes and
clean “pinners.”
The remains of a many-stepped fifteenth-century village cross stand
opposite the church: all steps and not much cross, ever since some
village Hampdens in the long ago showed their hatred of superstition by
leaving only about a foot and a half of the shaft. The church itself,
with tall and rather gaunt tower, is a Late Perpendicular building, with
elaborate stone pulpit. Here is an epitaph which would seem to have its
warnings for those who might feel disposed to extend their explorations
to the mud-flats of the Yeo estuary at low tide:
To the memory of James Morss, of this parish, yeoman, who dy’d
November ye 25th 1730, aged 38 years.
Save me, O God, the mighty waters role
With near Approaches, even to my soul:
Far from dry ground, mistaken in my course,
I stick in mire, brought hither by my horse.
Thus vain I cry’d to God, who only saves:
In death’s cold pit I lay ore whelm’d with waves.
Beyond the village, the road winds again in fantastic loops, and is
crossed, without the formality of gates by the W. C. and P.L.R. This
weird concatenation of initials sounds like a mass-meeting of household
sanitary appliances, but those readers who have diligently persevered
through the earlier pages of this book will understand that the Weston,
Clevedon and Portishead Light Railway is meant. Thenceforward, after
more windings through a thinly peopled district, the road wriggles on to
Worle; sending off a branch to the left hand for Woodspring, Swallow
Cliff, and Sand Bay.
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