[Illustration: STANFORD CHURCH]
(or Dove) Bridge, Watling Street pushes across the river with Roman
directness. This bridge marks the meeting-point of three counties, for
beyond it we step into Warwickshire. It is indifferently modern, yet
“the scene, though simple, aided by a group of cattle then passing, had
sufficient attraction in the meridian of a summer sun to induce” the
egregious Ireland “to attempt a sketch of it as a picturesque view,” and
supply us with a sentence to be quoted a thousand times during our
voyage, and always with ribald appreciation.
[Illustration: CATTHORPE CHURCH]
The valley narrows as we draw near Rugby. Clifton on Dunsmore, eminent
by situation only, stands boldly up on the left, and under it, by
Clifton mill, the stream runs down to Brownsover. Brownsover too has its
mill, with a pool and cluster of wych-elms below. And hard by we find
(as we think) Tom Brown’s willow, the tree which wouldn’t “throw out
straight hickory shoots twelve feet long, with no leaves, worse luck!”
where Tom sat aloft, and “Velveteens,” the keeper, below, through that
soft, hazy day in the Mayfly season, till the sun came slanting through
the branches, and told of locking-up near at hand. We are hushed as we
stand before it, and taste the reward of such as “identify.”
[Illustration: DOW BRIDGE ON WATLING STREET]
And now, just ahead, on the same line of hill as Clifton, stands the
town of Rugby. No good view of it can be found from the river-side, for
the middle distance is always a straight line of railway sheds or
embankments. Perhaps the best is to be had from the towpath of the
Oxford Canal, marked high above our right by a line of larch and poplar,
where a tall aqueduct carries it over the river Swift.
This is the stream which, coming from Lutterworth, bore down in 1427 the
ashes of John Wiclif to the Avon. Forty years after his peaceful
interment the Council of Constance gave orders to exhume and burn his
body, to see if it could be discerned from those of the faithful. “In
obedience thereto,” says Fuller, “Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln,
diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight
sent at a dead carcass!) to ungrave him accordingly. To Lutterworth they
come--sumner, commissary, official, chancellor, proctors, doctors, and
the servants (so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone
amongst so many hands), take what is left out of the grave, and burn
them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a brook running hard by. Thus
the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn
into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of
Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the
world over.”
For aught we know, the upper part of this stream may justify its name.
[Illustration: RUGBY FROM BROWNSOVER MILL]
The two streams unite in that green vale over which Dr. Arnold used to
gaze in humorous despair. “It is no wonder,” he said, “we do not like
looking that way, when one considers that there is nothing fine between
us and the Ural Mountains;” and, in a letter to Archbishop Whately,”
... we have no hills, no plains, not a single wood, and but one single
copse; no heath, no down, no rock, no river, no clear stream, scarcely
any flowers--for the lias is particularly poor in them--nothing but one
endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedge-row trees;” lastly, “I
care nothing for Warwickshire, and am in it like a plant sunk in the
ground in a pot; my roots never strike beyond the pot, and I could be
transplanted at any moment without tearing or severing my fibres.” And
we consent, in part, for the fibres of great men lie in their work, not
in this or that soil. But what fibres--not his own--were cracked when
Rugby lost its great schoolmaster we feel presently as, haunted by his
son’s noble elegy, we stand before the altar of the school chapel, where
he rests.
[Illustration: AVON INN, RUGBY]
At Rugby our narrative, hitherto smilingly pastoral, quickens to epic.
So far we had followed Avon afoot, but here we meant to launch a
Canadian canoe on its waters, creating a legend. She lay beside a small
river-side tavern, her bright basswood sides gleaming in the sunshine. A
small crowd had gathered, and was being addressed with volubility by a
high complexioned man of urbane demeanor. He was bareheaded and
coatless; he was shod in blue carpet slippers, on each of which a yellow
anchor (emblem of Hope) was entwined with sprays of the pink
convolvulus, typifying (according to P., who is a botanist), “I
recognize your worth, and will sustain it by judicious and tender
affection.” As we launched our canoe and placed our sacks on board, he
turned his discourse on us. It breathed the spirit of calm confidence.
There were long shallows just below (he said), and an uprooted willow
blocking the stream, and three waterfalls, and fences of barbed wire. He
enumerated the perils; he was sanguine about each; and ours was the
first canoe he ever set eyes on.
We pushed off and waved good-bye. The sun shone in our faces; behind,
the voice of confidence shouted us over the first shallow. Our canoe
swung round a bend beside a small willow coppice, and we sighed as the
kindly crowd was hidden from us.
We turned at the sound of stertorous breathing. A pair of blue slippers
came twinkling after us over the meadow. Our friend had fetched a
circuit round the coppice, and soon both craft and crew were as babes in
his hands. Was it a shallow?--he hounded us over. Was it a willow fallen
“ascaunt the brook?”--he drove us under, clambering himself along the
trunk, as once Ophelia, and exhorting always. At the foot of the first
waterfall he took leave of us, and turned back singing across the
fields. He was a good man, but would be obeyed. We learned from him,
first, that the art of canoeing has no limits; second, that the
“impenetrability of matter” is a discredited phrase; and, after the
manner of Bunyan, we called him Mr. Win-by-Will.
By many dense beds of rushes, through which a flock of ducks scattered
before us, we dropped down to Newbold on Avon, a pretty village on the
hill-side, with green orchards sloping to the stream. By climbing
through them and looking due south, you may see the spire of Bilton,
where Addison lived for many years. Below Newbold the river tumbles over
two waterfalls, runs thence by a line of rush beds to a railway bridge,
and so beneath Caldecott’s famous spinney, where Tom Brown, East, and
the “Madman” sought the kestrel’s nest. Many Scotch firs mingle with the
beeches of the spinney, and just below them the stream divides,
enclosing a small island, and recombines to hold a southward course past
Holbrook Court.
[Illustration: NEWBOLD UPON AVON]
[Illustration: HOLBROOK COURT]
Holbrook Court is a gloomy building that looks down its park slope upon
a weir, a red-brick mill, and a gloomier farm-house of stone. This
farm-house has a history, being all that is left of Lawford Hall, the
scene of the once notorious “Laurel-Water Tragedy.”
[Illustration: LAWFORD MILL]
The tale is briefly this: In 1780 Sir Theodosius Boughton, a vicious and
sickly boy, was squiring it at Lawford Hall, and fast drinking out his
puny constitution. “To him enter” an evil spirit in the shape of a
brother-in-law, an Irish adventurer, one Captain Donellan. This graduate
in vice took the raw scholar in hand, and with the better will as being
next heir to his estates. But it seems that drink and debauchery worked
too slowly for the impatient captain, for one evening the wretched boy
went to bed, called for his sleeping-draught, and drank the wrong liquid
out of the right bottle. And as for Captain Donellan, he bungled matters
somehow, and was hanged at Warwick in the following spring--an elegant,
well-mannered man in black, who displayed much ceremonious punctilio at
ascending the scaffold ahead of the sheriff. Ten years later Lawford
Hall was pulled down as an accursed thing, and the building before us is
all that survives of it. To-day the Gloire de Dijon rose, the jasmine,
and the ivy sprawl up its sad-colored walls and over the porch, which
still wears the date 1604.
Either at Lawford Hall, or just above, at the old Holbrook Grange,
lived, in Elizabeth’s time, One-handed Boughton, who won an entirely
posthumous fame by driving a ghostly coach and six about the
country-side. His spirit was at length caught in a phial by certain of
the local clergy, corked down, sealed, thrown into a neighboring
marl-pit, and so laid forever. Therefore his only successes of late have
been in frightening maid-servants out of their situations at the farm.
Leaving Lawford, we paddle through a land pastorally desolate, seeing,
often for miles together, neither man’s face nor woman’s. The canoe
darts in and out of rush beds; avoids now a shallow, now a snag, a clump
of reeds, a conglomerate of logs and pendent shrivelled flags, flotsam
of many floods; and again is gliding easily between meadows that hold,
in Touchstone’s language, “no assembly but horn beasts.” Our canoe wakes
strange emotions in these cattle. They lift their heads, snort, fling up
their heels, and, with rigid tails, come capering after us like so many
bacchanals. At length a fence stops them, and they obligingly watch us
out of sight. The next herd repeats the performance. And always the
river is vocal beside us,
“Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;”
while ahead the water-rat dives, or the moor-hen splashes from one green
brim to another; and around the land is slowly changing from the
monotonous to the “up-and-down-hilly;” and we, passing through it all,
are thankful.
A small cottage appears beside some lime-pits on the right bank. Over
its garden gate a blackboard proclaims that here are the “Newnham Regis
Baths.” A certain Walter Bailey, M.D., writing in 1587 A Brief Discourse
of Certain Baths, etc., sings loud praise of these waters, but warns
drinkers to “consist in a mediocrity, and never to adventure to drink
above six, or at the utmost eight, pints in one day.” Also, he “will not
rashly counsel any to use them in the leap-years.” We disregarded this
latter warning, but observed the former; yet the plain man who gave us
our glassful asserted that a friend of his, “all hot and sweaty,” drank
two quarts of the water one summer day, and took no harm. As a fact, the
springs which here rise from the limestone were known and esteemed by
the Romans; the remains of their baths were found, and the present
one--a pump within a square paling--built on the same spot. But their
fame has not travelled of late.
[Illustration: CHURCH LAWFORD]
We embarked again, and were soon floating down to Church Lawford. What
shall be said of this spot? As we saw it happily, one slope of
green--vivid, yet in shadow--swelled up to darker elms and a tall church
tower, set high against an amber sunset. Beyond, the sky and the river’s
dim reaches melted together, through all delicate yellows, mauves, and
grays, into twilight. A swan, scurrying down stream before us, broke
the water into pools of gold. And so a bend swept Church Lawford out of
our sight and into our kindliest memories.
Nearly opposite lies Newnham Regis, about a mile from its baths. In
Saxon times, they say, a king’s palace stood here; and three large
fish-ponds, with some mounds, remain for a sign of it. Here, beside a
pleasant mill, the foot-path crosses to Church Lawford. Just below, the
stream is blocked by an osier bed; and we struggled there for the half
of one mortal hour, and mused on the carpet slippers, and Hope, and such
things; and “late and at last” were out and paddling through the
uncertain light under the pointed arches of Bretford Bridge.
[Illustration: RUINS OF NEWNHAM REGIS CHURCH]
Here crosses the second great Roman road, the Fosseway,
“that tilleth from Toteneys
From the one end of Cornewaile anon to Cateneys,
From the South-west to North-est, into Englonde’s ende.
_Fosse_ men callith thilke way, that by mony town doth wende.”
[Illustration: _From Wolston to Wasperton_]
Thenceforward for a mile we move in darkness over glimmering waters,
until a railway bridge looms ahead, and we spy, half a mile away, the
lights of a little station. This must be Brandon, we decide; and running
in beside the bank, begin a quick contention with the echo.
Voices answer us, male and female, and soon many villagers are about us,
peering at the canoe.
“Are we in time for the last train to Coventry?”
Chorus answers “Yes;” only one melancholy stripling insists that it
isn’t likely.
[Illustration: BRETFORD]
And he is right. We hear a rumble; a red eye flames out; the last train,
with a hot trail of smoke, comes roaring over the bridge and shoots into
Brandon station. We are too late.
“Beds?”
The melancholy one echoes: “Beds! In Brandon?”
“The inn?”
“Well, you might try the inn.”
We march up to try the inn. There are forty-four men in the bar, as we
have leisure to count, and all are drinking beer. Clearly we are not
wanted. The landlady has eyes like beads, black and twinkling, but they
will not rest on us. The outlook begins to be sombre, when P., who,
beneath a rugged exterior, hides much aptitude for human affairs,
announces that he has a way with landladies, and tries it. He says:
“Can we have a horse and trap to take us to Coventry to-night? No?
That’s bad. Nor a bed? Dear me! Then please draw us half a pint of
beer.”
The beer is brought. P. tastes it, looks up with a happy smile, and
begins again:
“Can we have a horse and trap?” etc., etc.
It is astounding, but at the tenth repetition of this formula the
landlady becomes as water, and henceforth we have our way with that inn.
Moreover, we have the landlord’s company at supper--a deliberate, heavy
man, who tells us that he brews his own beer, and has twenty-three
children. He adds that the former distinction has given him many
friends, the latter many relatives. A niece of his is to be married at
Coventry to-morrow.
Q., who ran into Coventry by an early train next morning to fetch some
letters that awaited us, was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the
bride as she stepped into her carriage. He reported her to be pretty,
and we wished her all happiness. P. meanwhile had strolled up the river
to Wolston Mill, which we had passed in the darkness, and he too had
praises to chant of that, and of a grand old Elizabethan farm-house that
he had found outside the village.
We embarked again by Brandon Castle, the abode once of a Roman garrison,
and later of an exclusive Norman
[Illustration: SITE OF BRANDON CASTLE]
family that kept its own private gallows at Bretford, just above. Where
the castle stood now thrive the brier, the elder, the dogrose, the
blackthorn twined with clematis; the outer moat is become a morass,
choked with ragwort and the flowering rush; the inner moat is dry, and a
secular ash sprawls down its side. We left it to glide beneath a
graceful Georgian bridge; past a lawn dotted with sleek cattle, a small
red mill, a row of melancholy anglers, a mile of giant alders, and so
down to Ryton-on-Dunsmore, the western outpost of the great heath. As
the heath ended, the country’s character began to change, and all grew
open. On either hand broad pastures divided us from the arable slopes
where a month ago the gleaners were moving amid
“Summer’s green, all girded up in sheaves;”
and therefore by Ryton’s two mills and Ryton’s many alders we moved
slowly, inviting our souls, careless of Fate, that lay in her ambush,
soon to harry us. A broad road crossed above us, and, alighting, we
loitered by the bridge, and discovered a mile-stone that marks
eighty-seven miles from London and three from Coventry. We could descry
the three lovely spires of Lady Godiva’s town, mere needle-points above
the trees to northward.
[Illustration: RYTON-ON-DUNSMORE]
[Illustration: WOLSTON PRIORY]
It was but shortly after that we came on an agreeable old gentleman, who
stood a-fishing with a little red float, and lied in his teeth, smiling
on us and asserting that Bubbenhall (where we had a mind to lunch) was
but a mile below. A mile!--for a crow, perhaps, but not for proper old
gentlemen, and most surely not for Avon. The freakish stream went round
and round, all meanders
[Illustration: GLEANERS]
with never a forthright, narrowing, shallowing, casting up here a snag
and there a thicket of reeds. And round and round for miles our canoe
followed it, as a puppy chases his own tail; yet Bubbenhall was not, nor
any glimpse of Bubbenhall.
Herodotus, if we remember, tells of a village called Is beside the
Tigris, far above Babylon, at which all voyagers down the river must put
up on three successive nights, so curiously is the channel looped about
it. Nor, after twice renewing our acquaintance with one particular
guelder-rose bush, did we see our way to doubt the tale when we recalled
it that day.
These windings above Bubbenhall have their compensations, keeping both
hand and eye amusedly alert as our canoe tacks to and fro, shooting down
the V of two shallows, or running along quick water beneath the bank,
brushing the forget-me-nots (the flower that Henry of Bolingbroke wore
into exile from the famous lists of Coventry, hard by), or parting
curtain after curtain of reeds to issue on small vistas that are always
new. And Bubbenhall is worth the pains to find--a tiny village of brick
and timber set amid elms on a quiet slope, where for ages “bells have
knolled to church” from the old brick-buttressed tower above. Below
sleeps a quaint mill, also of brick and timber, and from its weir the
river wanders northeast, then southeast, and runs to Stoneleigh Deer
Park.
A line of swinging deer fences hangs under the bridge, the river
trailing between their bars. We push cautiously under them, and look to
right and left in amazement. A moment has translated us from a sluggish
brook, twisting between water plants and willows, to a pleasant river,
stealing by wide lawns, by slopes of bracken, by gigantic trees--oaks,
Spanish oaks, and wych-elms, stately firs, sweet chestnuts, and filmy
larch coppices. We are in Arden, the land
[Illustration: IN STONELEIGH DEER PARK]
of Rosalind and Touchstone, of Jaques and Amiens. Their names may be
French, English, what you will, but here they inhabit, and almost we
look to spy the suit of motley and listen for its bells, or expect a
glimpse of Corin’s crook moving above the ferns, Orlando’s ballads
Muttering on a chestnut, or the sad-colored cloak of Jaques beneath an
oak--such an oak as this monster, thirty-nine feet around--whose
“antique root” writhes over the red-sandstone rock down to the water’s
brim. The very bed of Avon has altered. He runs now over smooth slabs of
rock, and now he brawls by a shallow, and now,
“where his fair course is not hindered,
He makes sweet music with the enamell’d stones.”
Down to the shallow ahead of us--their accustomed ford--a herd of deer
comes daintily and splashes across, first the bucks, then the does in a
body. If they are here, why not their masters, the men and women whom we
know? We disembark, and letting the canoe drift brightly down stream,
[Illustration: BUBBENHALL]
stroll along the bank beside it, and “fleet the time carelessly,” as
they did in that golden world.
Too soon we reach the beautiful sandstone bridge, tinted by time and
curtained with creepers, that divides the deer park from the home park;
and soon, beside an old oak, the size of Avon is almost doubled by
junction with the Sowe, a stream that comes winding past Stoneleigh
village on our right, and brings for tribute the impurities of Coventry.
The banks beside us are open no longer; but for recompense we have the
birds--the whir-r-r of wood-pigeons in the nigh willow copse, the heron
sailing high, the kingfisher sparkling before us, the green woodpecker
condensing a whole day’s brilliance on his one small breast, the
wild-duck, the splashing moor-hen, and water-fowl of rarer kinds--that
tell us we are nearing Stoneleigh Abbey.
The abbey was founded in 1154 by Henry II. for a body of Cistercian
monks, and endowed with privileges “very many and very great, to wit,
free warren, infangthef, outfangthef, wayfs, strays, goods of felons and
fugitives, tumbrel, pillory, sok, sak, tole, team, amercements, murders,
assize of bread and beer; with a market and fair in the town of
Stoneleigh”--a comprehensive list, as it seems. There were, says
Dugdale, in the manor of Stoneleigh, at this time, “sixty-eight villains
and two priests; as also four bondmen or servants, whereof each held one
messuage, and one quatrone of land, by the services of making the
gallows and hanging of thieves; every one of which bondmen was to wear a
red clout betwixt his shoulders, upon his upper garment.” The original
building was burnt in 1245, and what little old work now remains belongs
to a later building. The abbey went the way of its fellows under Henry
VIII.; was granted to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; changed hands
once or twice; and was finally bought by Sir Thomas Leigh, alderman of
London, in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The present Ionic mansion, now the
home of Lord Leigh, his descendant, was built towards the close of the
last century. The river spreads into a lake before it, and then, after
passing a weir, speeds briskly below a wooded bank, with tiny rapids,
down which our canoe dances gayly. As twilight overtakes us we reach
Ashow.
[Illustration: STONELEIGH ABBEY, OCT. 15, 1884]
A little weather-stained church stands by Ashow shore--a church, a
yew-tree, and a narrow graveyard. Close under it steals the gray river,
whispers by cottage steps where a crazy punt lies rotting, by dim willow
aits and eel bucks, and so passes down to silence and the mists. Seeing
all
[Illustration: ASHOW]
this, we yearn to live here and pass our days in gratuitous melancholy.
We revisited Ashow next morning, and were less exacting. And the reason
was, that it rained. Indeed, we were soaked to the skin before paddling
a mile; and as for the canoe,
“Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.”
[Illustration: CHESFORD BRIDGE]
We passed, like Mrs. Haller’s infant, “not dead, but very wet,” under
old Chesford Bridge, whereby the road runs to Kenilworth, that lies two
miles back from the river, and shall therefore, for once in its history,
escape description; and from Chesford Bridge reached Blakedown Mill and
another old bridge beside the miller’s house. This “simply elegant form
of landscape” led Samuel Ireland to ask “why man should with such eager
and restless ambition busy himself so often in the smoke and bustle of
populous cities, and lose his independence and too often his peace in
the pursuit of a phantom which almost eludes his grasp, little thinking
that with the accumulation of wealth he must create imaginary wants,
under which, perhaps, that wealth melts away as certainly as under the
more ready inlet of inordinate passion happiness is sacrificed.” We
infer that Mr. Samuel Ireland was never rained upon hereabouts.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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 trudged on 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 house
Out of a craggy rock of stone;
And livèd like a Palmer poore
Within that Cave myself alone;
“And daily came to beg my bread
Of 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 their arms 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.
[Illustration: 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,
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.”
[Illustration: 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 been gathering 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.
[Illustration: 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 materials
being 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 did
_not_ steal the deer.
[Illustration: 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 is founded 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.’”
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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 Bed
Hele’s gentle current wooes, by Lucy’s hand
In 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.
[Illustration: 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 know
What 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:
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.”