WYTHAM—THE OLD ROAD—BINSEY AND THE ORATORY OF ST.
FRIDESWIDE—THE VANISHED VILLAGE OF SEACOURT—GODSTOW AND “FAIR
ROSAMOND”—MEDLEY—FOLLY BRIDGE.
The river makes a great semicircular bend, as between New Bridge and
Oxford, so that although but six miles between the two, measured in a
straight line on the map, it is fifteen miles by water. Cumnor stands
roughly in the middle of the projecting part of Berkshire enclosed within
this bend, and Wytham almost at the farthest northward fling of it, just
below where Eynsham Bridge (otherwise styled Swinford Bridge) carries
the great highway from Oxford across the Thames towards Witney and
Gloucester. Eynsham, a quaint old village, is one mile distant.
[Illustration: EYNSHAM.]
Wytham, amid the deep woodlands, on its bold hill-top in the bight
of the river, is a sequestered place, the site of the mansion called
Wytham Abbey, seat of the Earls of Abingdon. “Abbey” is a fanciful
term, as applied here, for no religious house ever stood upon the
site, and the existing buildings arose in the sixteenth century, at
the bidding of one of the Harcourts, who then owned the property. How
it eventually came through several hands and at last by marriage into
the Bertie family, Earls of Abingdon, is not, I imagine, a matter of
general interest. Wytham village, lying beneath that lordly seat, is
one of the most charming villages in Berkshire, which is saying a good
deal in the commendatory sort. It is, and has long been, famed for its
strawberry-growing, and was once even recommended by the faculty to
invalids for a “strawberry cure.” I cannot imagine the ailment for which
the eating of strawberries is a likely remedy, but a pleasanter “cure”
could hardly be invented.
Wytham woods crest Beacon Hill, and in them the pheasants are plentiful.
This is the equivalent of saying that there is no right of way. But
anciently the road from Oxford to Eynsham, and on to Witney and
Gloucester, ran across this hill: a plaguey bad road, a very beast of a
road. The track of it may still be followed (by permission sought and
obtained from Lord Abingdon, let me hasten to add) steeply and roughly
up through these sylvan surroundings, and as roughly and as steeply down
again, to Eynsham Bridge, which was built in 1799 by a former Earl, to
replace the ford by which all wayfarers up to that time were obliged to
cross the river. It is still a toll-bridge for vehicles, levying the
modest sum of one halfpenny for cycles, and sixpence for motor-cars. The
arduous road from Oxford across the hill was abandoned about the same
time, when the existing so-called “Seven Bridges Road,” leading along the
levels to Eynsham Bridge, was reconstructed.
There is a great deal of interest wrapped up in that old road. It
left Oxford on much the same line as now, but was neither drained nor
embanked, and proceeded for some distance from the city along swampy
ground, so that travellers upon it from Oxford to Eynsham were made to
feed full of varied discomforts. Proceeding through Botley, often at the
peril of their lives from floods, they then bore away to the right, for
Wytham, passing through the village of Seacourt on the way. From Wytham,
mounting and descending the hazardous track over Beacon Hill, at the
imminent danger of their necks, they then came to the peril of the ford;
and having haply passed over this in safety, felt that risks from natural
causes were over. There remained only the bandits of an early period, and
the highwaymen of a later to give them pause. As for Binsey, it is merely
an insignificant hamlet situated at a very dead-end of traffic. You shall
find it readily enough by proceeding from the “Perch” inn, beside the
river, just above Medley Weir; but it is quite other guesswork seeking it
from Wytham, for no way exists where formerly an ancient path ran, and a
channel cut from the Thames winds a prohibitive course through the flat
meadows.
Binsey, indeed, stands on an island in olden times called Thorney, where
St. Frideswide, that celebrated Oxford saint, first built her oratory,
the name of the isle being then, we are told, changed to “Binsey”:
absurdly said to signify the “isle of prayer.” Here she also founded
the well of St. Margaret, miraculously springing forth in answer to her
prayer, as springs were wont to do in the eighth century. They have
long since refused to do the like. It is perhaps not remarkable that
Binsey and this famous well in after-years became, and long remained,
the objects of pilgrimage. The halt and the lame, the epileptic and the
otherwise afflicted, flocked to Binsey and were cured, hanging up their
crutches in the oratory and festooning it with their discarded bandages:
and incidentally leaving solid gifts of money behind, greatly to the gain
of the monastery of St. Frideswide, in Oxford, to which Binsey belonged
from 1132 until the end of such things, four hundred years later.
The crowds of pilgrims who came out of Oxford, making for the oratory and
well of St. Frideswide, turned off at the vanished village of Seacourt.
Few places have perished so utterly as this long-lost habitation of men,
styled at various times “Sekecourt,” “Seuecurde,” and “Sechworth”; for
all we shall now discover of it is a farm so named. But Seacourt was for
many centuries a considerable place. Not only did it lie directly upon
the then highway to the west, but it was the pilgrims’ lodging-place, and
for the accommodation of such it is recorded to have possessed no fewer
than twenty-four inns. With the successive blows of the dissolution of
the monasteries, when pilgrimages ceased out of the land, and then when
the road itself was diverted, Seacourt’s doom befel. It subsided into
ruin, and became the abode of foxes and wild-fowl; and presently the very
stones of it were carted away.
The self-satisfied attitude of Binsey folk in summer, and the woe-begone,
dreary, flooded-out experiences of the same people in winter are
amusingly contrasted in traditional sayings, current in these parts.
Thus, in summer, a villager, asked where he lives, is supposed to say,
“Binsey; where d’ye think?” but in winter he will reply, disconsolately,
“Binsey, Lord help us!” And it needs only a week or so of rain in one of
our tearful summers for the low-lying meadows to be flooded, completely
islanding the place in the midst of something resembling an inland sea.
[Illustration: BINSEY CHURCH.]
In modern times the holy well has been found at the west end of Binsey
church and restored, as the inscription records: “St. Margaret’s spring,
granted, as it is told us, to the prayers of St. Frideswide, long
polluted and choked up, was restored to use by T. J. Prout, student of
Christ Church, the vicar, in the year of redemption, 1874.” The well may
be holy, but the water again in these days looks provocative of typhoid.
Between Wytham and Binsey, and directly upon the river, is a very
much better known place than either; to wit, Godstow. “Fair Rosamond”
and Godstow have employed the morbidly-sentimental pens of uncounted
scribblers. It is easy to be either sentimental or morbid, and of the
easiest to be morbidly-sentimental over unworthy subjects: hence the
exploitation in this wise of “Fair Rosamond.”
Godstow Nunnery, it seems, was founded by Edith, an ex-_chère amie_ of
Henry the First, and wife of the second Robert D’Oilgi, or D’Oyley, lord
of Oxford. The buildings were consecrated with great state by the Bishop
of Lincoln in 1138. There is little need here to dwell upon the history
of the nunnery, which in general is sufficiently dull; and Godstow is, in
fact, interesting only on account of that highly improper person known in
romantic history as “Fair Rosamond,” who was educated here. The name of
Rosamond, if we may believe Dryden, who, as a poet, is perhaps not to be
altogether relied upon as an authority, was really Jane. It might have
been worse. However:
“Jane Clifford was her name, as books aver,
Fair Rosamond was but her _nom de guerre_.”
That she was daughter of Walter, Baron Clifford, of Hay, in Wales, is
historically certain; but much else relating to her is merely picturesque
legend. She appears to have been born about 1150, and was educated
in this then newly-built nunnery. Here, in some unexplained way, she
attracted the attention of the King, Henry the Second, and became his
mistress, greatly to the jealous rage of his Queen, Eleanor of Poitou,
the divorced consort of the King of France, who by many was held to be no
better. This association of the King and of Rosamond seems to have lasted
about four years.
Legends tell variously how Queen Eleanor burst in upon a secret bower
in which the King had hidden her at Woodstock, and gave her the choice
of death by dagger or poison, and how she chose the bowl rather than
the steel, drank of it and so died; but these are unhistorical. All
that seems fairly certain is that a break in her relations with Henry
occurred, and that she retired to Godstow and died there, some four years
later, about 1176.
A great mass of legend has accumulated around these bare outlines of her
story, and poets have freely employed their imagination upon her. With
remarkable unanimity, they assume Rosamond to have been a blonde:
“Her locks of curlèd hair
Outshone the golden ore;
Her skin with whiteness may compare
With the fine lily-flower;
Her breasts are lovely to behold,
Like to the driven snow.”
That she had two children seems to be established, but that they were,
as often stated, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, and Geoffrey,
Archbishop of York, has been disputed.
Rosamond, we are told, was for sake of her wit and beauty received back
by the nuns of Godstow with alacrity. Doubtless she told them many
strange tales of the wicked world, for who better qualified to know? Her
body was buried before the high altar. King John, according to Lambarde,
raised a gorgeous monument to her, inscribed,
_Hic jacet in tumba, Rosa Mundi, non Rosa Munda,_
_Non redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet._
Speed paraphrased this as follows:
“This tomb doth here enclose the world’s most beauteous Rose,
Rose, passing sweet erewhile, now nought but odour vile.”
A few years later, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, paying a round of pastoral
visits in his diocese, in which Oxford was then included, coming to
Godstow, saw this gorgeous monument and asked what great and good person
it was, then, who lay here. It was, said the nuns, the tomb of Rosamond,
sometime mistress of Henry the Second, who for love of her had done
much good to that church. Thereupon the saintly and scandalised Bishop
declared that the “hearse of a harlot was not a fit spectacle for a quire
of virgins to contemplate, nor was the front of God’s altar a proper
station for it”; and he directed that she should be removed and buried
outside, “lest Christian religion should grow in contempt.”
Leland, diligent antiquary, tells us that in after-years Rosamond’s tomb
was here, inscribed “Tumba Rosamundæ,” and that her bones had been found,
enclosed in lead, “and within that closed in leather; when it was opened
there was a very swete smell came out of it.” Time thus gave the lie to
that fearful old epitaph of King John’s day.
The nunnery of Godstow when dissolved in the reign of Henry the Eighth
contained eighteen nuns, and its annual income was £274; a considerable
sum as prices then ruled. The property was granted to that Dr. Owen who
at the same time secured Cumnor, and the domestic buildings became a
secular residence. This was held during the Civil War by Colonel Walter,
and was taken by Fairfax in May 1646, and burned.
All we see nowadays of Godstow nunnery is a small building, ruined
and roofless, apparently of no very great antiquity, for besides the
Perpendicular window there are no other evidences of Gothic architecture,
the two other windows being merely flat-headed Elizabethan insertions.
Efforts have been made from time to time to discover the remains of
Rosamond. Two stone coffins were dug up about 1800, and in one of them
were the bones of a young woman. On the supposition that this was the
sarcophagus of Rosamond, a once well-known antiquary and citizen of
Oxford, Alderman Fletcher, appropriated it, and conceived the eccentric
idea of being buried therein; and when his time came, in 1826, he was
accordingly laid in it, in the church of Yarnton, a few miles distant.
An uncommon plant, said to have been introduced from foreign parts by the
nuns, still grows freely in these meadows by the grey ruins. It is known
to botanists as _Aristolochia clematitis_, but to ordinary country folk
as “birthwort” and was used in confinement cases. You may identify it by
its heart-shaped leaf and bold yellow flower.
The charm of the river fades away after passing Medley Lock and nearing
Oxford, and suffers a change into the commercial ragged edges and untidy
squalid purlieus of a great city.
We may read in old dry-as-dust authors how “Medley” derives from
“Middleway”—this being midway between Godstow and Oxford—but we need
not (indeed, we had better not) put any faith in that derivation. Also,
according to those same authorities, it was a scene of great resort for
“divers pleasures.” Of what those diversified pleasures chiefly consisted
we must judge rather from the verses of George Withers than from the
grudging phrase of Dryasdust, who, forgetful of his own youth, gives us
no details. But let George Withers himself inform us:
“In summer-time to Medley
My love and I would goe,
The boatmen there stood ready
My love and I to rowe;
For creame there would we call,
For cakes, for pruines too;
But now, alas! sh’as left me,
Falero, lero, loo.”
Let nothing be said of the river between Medley and Folly Bridge. What
should one say of gas-works in these pages, or of other evidences that
we are not living in ancient times, and that the city of Oxford is
a populous place, and up-to-date in all respects except that of its
University?
Folly Bridge serves to mark the limits of the Upper and the Lower river,
as well as its prime purpose of carrying the road to Abingdon across the
stream; and it stands in the minds of many for the enterprising and
industrious Salter, whose steamboats and whose row-boats are centred
thereby.
The real original name of Folly Bridge, dating back to Norman times, is
“Grand Pont,” that is to say, Great Bridge; great according to the ideas
of those times. Even so lately as 1844, when the first Great Western
railway-station was opened near this point, the bridge was still well
known by its old name, in addition to the other, for the station was
called after it, “Grandpont”; but, in the years that have passed since
then, the name of “Folly Bridge” alone has survived, and you might expend
the whole of a day asking for it by its original style, and not find any
one who knows it.
In the middle of the old bridge stood an ancient tower known
traditionally as “Friar Bacon’s Study,” where that learned man had
been accustomed to take astronomical observations. It straddled across
the roadway and formed, in fact, one of the gateways of the city. A
strange saying was current of this tower, to the effect that when a man
of greater learning than Bacon passed under it, the tower would fall.
It never did fall, but was pulled down by the city corporation, as an
obstruction to the road, in 1779. Years before that date, it had been let
to a person named Welcome, who not only repaired it, but built another
storey. The citizens of Oxford then called it “Welcome’s Folly.”
The bridge was rebuilt between the years 1825 and 1827; but, although
Welcome is forgotten, his supposed folly still, as we perceive, gives the
place a name. There can be no doubt that, to many uninquiring people,
the name of the bridge seems to be a satire on the pleasure-seeking life
of those so-called scholars, the University men, to whom boating and the
“bumping” races are more than all the wisdom of the schools.
Below Folly Bridge begins that long line of glorified house-boats,
headquarters of the various college boating-clubs, known as the
“University Barges,” stationary along the left bank of the river, by
Christ Church meadows. The ethics of bumping or being bumped, and
the sporting politics of the Torpids or the Eights are subjects by
themselves, and not to be discussed here.
What, strangers ask, are Torpids? The name suggests a boa-constrictor
dined to repletion, and reduced to a state of torpidity; it is, however,
merely the survival of an old Oxford nickname for the less active among
boating men, who, roused by it, and adopting it, took to racing among
themselves, as a separate class. The extinct “sloggers” on the river Cam
at Cambridge, derived similarly, from the taunt of “slow-goer.”
The racecourse of these clubs is between Folly Bridge and Iffley:
scenically a dull stretch of river, however exciting it may be from the
aquatic sportsmen’s point of view. And if the river between Oxford and
Iffley be dull, what shall we say of the road thither?