[Illustration: UNDER THE WILLOWS]
her woodland music. But when that meeting was, and how that secret was
given, like a true lover, he will never tell.
“Others abide our questions; thou art free:
We ask and ask; thou smilest and art still.”
As we paddled down past Tiddington the willows grew closer. Between
their stems we could see, far away on our left, the blue Edge Hills; and
to the right, above the Warwick road, a hill surmounted by an obelisk.
This is Welcome, and behind it lies Clopton House, a former owner of
which, Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London, built in the reign of
Henry VII. the long stone bridge of fourteen Gothic arches just above
Stratford. In a minute or two we had passed under this bridge and were
floating down beside the Memorial Theatre, the new Gardens, and the
brink of Shakespeare’s town.
[Illustration: THE CLOPTON BRIDGE, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON]
A man may take pen and ink and write of a place as he will, and the
page will, likely enough, be a pretty honest index to his own
temperament. But never will it do for another man’s reliance. So let it
be confessed that for a day we searched Stratford streets, and found
nothing of the Shakespeare that we sought. Neither in the famous
birthplace in Henley Street--restored “out of all whooping,” crammed
with worthless mementos, and pencilled over with inconsiderable names;
nor in the fussy, inept Memorial Theatre; nor in the New Place, where
certain holes, protected with wire gratings, mark what may have been the
foundations of Shakespeare’s house: in none of these could we find him.
His name echoed in the market-place, on the lips of guide and sightseer,
and shone on monuments, shops, inns, and banking-houses. His effigies
were everywhere--in photographs, in statuettes; now doing duty as a
tobacco-box (with the bald scalp removable), now as a trade-mark for
beer. And even while we despised these things the fault was ours. All
the while the colossus stood high above, while we “walked under his huge
legs and peep’d about,” too near to see.
Nor until we strolled over the meadows to Ann Hathaway’s cottage at
Shottery did understanding come with the quiet falling of the day.
Rarely enough, and never, perhaps, but in the while between sunset and
twilight, may a man hear the sky and earth breathing together, and,
drawing his own small breath ambitiously in tune with them, “feel that
he is greater than he knows.” But here and at this hour it happened to
us that, our hearts being uplifted, we could measure Shakespeare for a
moment; could know him for the puissant intelligence that held communion
with all earth and sky, and all mortal aspirations that rise between
them; and knew him also for the Stratford youth treading this very
foot-path beside this sweet-smelling hedge towards those elms a mile
away, where the red light lingers,
[Illustration: STRATFORD CHURCH]
and the cottage below them, where already in the window Ann Hathaway
trims her lamp. You are to believe that our feet trod airily across
those meadows. And at the cottage, old Mrs. Baker, last living
descendant of the Hathaways, was pleased with our reverent behavior, and
picked for each of us at parting a sprig of rosemary from her garden for
remembrance. May her memory be as green and as fragrant!
[Illustration: ANN HATHAWAY’S COTTAGE]
It was easy now to forgive all that before had seemed unworthy in
Stratford--easy next morning, standing before Shakespeare’s monument,
while the sunshine, colored by the eastern window, fell on one
particular slab within the chancel rails, to live back for a moment to
that April morning when a Shakespeare had passed from the earth, and
earth “must mourn therefor;” to follow his coffin on its short journey
from the New Place, between the blossoming limes of the Church Walk, out
of the sunlight into the lasting shadow, up the dim nave to this spot;
and easy to divine, in the rugged epitaph so often quoted, the man’s
passionate dread lest his bones might be flung in time to the common
charnel-house, the passionate longing to lie here always in this dusky
corner, close to his friends and kin and the familiar voices that meant
home--the talk of birds in the near elms, the chant of Holy Trinity
choir, and, night and day, but a stone’s-throw from his resting-place,
the whisper of Avon running perpetually.
[Illustration: THE MOUTH OF THE STOUR]
For even the wayfarer finds Stratford a hard place to part from. And
looking back as we left her, so kindly, so full of memories, giving her
haunted streets, her elms, and river-side to the sunshine, but guarding
always as a mother the shrine of her great son, I know she will pardon
my light words.
The river runs beneath the elms of the church-yard to Lucy’s Mill and
the first locks. On the mill wall are marked the heights of various
great floods. The highest is dated at the beginning of this century:
just below is the high-water mark of October 25, 1882. Take the level of
this with your eye, and you will wonder that any of Stratford
[Illustration: THE LOCK AND CHURCH]
is left standing; and lower down the river the floods are very serious
matters to all who live within their reach. If you disbelieve me, read
“John Halifax.” “We don’t mind them,” an old lady told us at Barton,
“till the water turns red. Then we know the Stour water is coming down,
and begin to shift our furniture.” The Arrow, too, that joins the Avon
below Bidford, is a great helper of the floods, but rushes down its
valley more rapidly than the Stour, and so its flooding is sooner over.
[Illustration: WEIR BRAKE]
The lock at Stratford is now choked with grass and weed, and the town no
longer (to quote the Rev. Richard Jago)
“Hails the freighted Barge from Western Shores,
Rich with the Tribute of a thousand Climes.”
The Avon, from Tewkesbury to Stratford, was made navigable in 1637 by
Mr. William Sandys, of Fladbury, “at his own proper cost.” But the
railways have ruined the waterways for a time, and Mr. Sandys’s
handiwork lies in sore decay. Till Evesham be passed we shall meet with
no barges, but with shallows, dismantled locks, broken-down weirs to be
shot, and sound ones to be pulled over that will give us excitement
enough, and toil too.
Below the lock we drifted under a hanging copse, the Weir Brake, where a
pretty foot-path runs for Stratford lovers. Below it, by a cluster of
willows, the Stour comes down; and a little farther yet stands
Luddington, where Shakespeare is said to have been married; but the
church and its records have been destroyed by fire. From Luddington you
spy Weston-upon-Avon, in Gloucestershire, across the river, the tower of
its sturdy perpendicular church peering above the elms that hide it from
the river-side throughout the summer.
[Illustration: WESTON-UPON-AVON]
By Weston our remembrance keeps a picture--a broken lock and weir, an
islet or two heavy with purple loosestrife, a swan bathing in the
channel between. These were of the foreground. Beyond them, a line of
willows hid the flat fields on our right; but on the left rose a steep
green slope, topped with poplars and dotted with red cattle; and ahead
the red roof of Binton church showed out prettily from the hill-side. As
we saw the picture we broke into it, shooting the weir, scaring the
swan, and driving her before us to Binton Bridges. By Binton Bridges
stands an inn, the Four Alls. On its sign-board, in gay colors, are
depicted four figures--the King, the Priest, the Soldier, and the
Yeoman; and around them runs this chiming legend:
“Rule all,
Pray all,
Fight all,
Pay all.”
We could not remember a place so utterly God-forsaken as this inn beside
the bridge, nor a woman so weary of face as its once handsome landlady.
She spoke of the inn and its custom in a low, musical voice that caused
Q. to rush out into the yard to hide his pity; and there he found a gig,
and, sitting down before it, wondered.
Change and decay fill our literature; but we have not explained either.
For instance, here was a gig--a soundly built, gayly painted gig. A
glance told that it had not been driven a dozen times, that nothing was
broken, and that it had been backed into this heap of nettles years ago
to rot. It had been rotting ever since. The paint on its sides had
blistered, the nettles climbed above its wheels and flourished over its
back seat. Still it was a good gig, and the most inexplicable sight that
met us on our voyage. Only less desolate than Binton Bridges is Black
Cliff, below--a bank covered with crab-trees and thorns and hummocks of
sombre grass. It was here that one Palmer, a wife-murderer, drowned his
good woman in Avon at the beginning of the century; and the oldest man
in Bidford, not far below, remembers seeing a gibbet on the hill-side,
with chains and a few bones and rags dangling--all that was left of him.
A gate post at the top of the hill on the Evesham road is made of this
gibbet, and still groans at night, to the horror of the passing native.
Soon we reach Welford, the second and more beautiful Welford on the
river. It stands behind a stiff slope, where now the chestnuts are
turning yellow, and the village street is worth following. It winds by
queer old cottages set down in plum and apple orchards; by a modern
Maypole; by a little church of stained buff sandstone, with oaken
lych-gate and church-yard wall scarcely containing the dead, who already
are piled level with its coping; by more queer crazy cottages--and then
suddenly melts, ends, disappears in grass. It is as if the end of the
world were reached. Of course we wanted to settle down and spend our
lives here, but were growing used to the desire by this time, and
dragged each other away without serious resistance down to the old mill,
where our canoe lay waiting.
[Illustration: WELFORD WEIR AND CHURCH]
Passing the weir and mill, the river runs under a grassy hill-side,
where the trimmed elms give a French look to the landscape. Within
sight, in winter, lie the roofs and dove-cotes of Hillborough--“haunted
Hillbro’,” as Shakespeare called it, but nothing definite is known of
the ghost. The local tale says that the poet and some boon companions
walked over once to a Whitsun ale at the Falcon Inn, Bidford (just below
us), to try their prowess in drinking against the Bidford men. They
drank so deeply that night that
[Illustration: ELMS BY BIDFORD GRANGE]
sleep overtook them before they had staggered a mile on their homeward
way, and, lying down under a crab-tree beside the road, they slept till
morning, when they were awakened by some laborers trudging to their
work. His companions were for returning and renewing the carouse, but
Shakespeare declined.
[Illustration: HILLBOROUGH]
“No,” said he; “I have had enough; I have drinked with
“Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillbro’, hungry Grafton,
Dudging Exhall, papist Wixford,
Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.”
“Of the truth of this story,” says Mr. Samuel Ireland, “I have little
doubt.”
“Of its entire falsehood,” says Mr. James Thorne, “I have less. A more
absurd tale to father upon Shakespeare was never invented, even by Mr.
Ireland or his son.”
The reader may decide.
Close by is Bidford Grange, once an important manorhouse; and on the
left bank of Avon--you may know it by the gray stone dove-cotes--stands
Barton, where once dwelt another famous drinker, “Christophero Sly, old
Sly’s son of Burton heath: by birth a peddler, by education a cardmaker,
by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker.
Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if
she say I am not fourteen-pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up
for the lyingest knave in Christendom.” And from Barton hamlet a
foot-path leads across the meadows over the old bridge into Bidford.
[Illustration: BIDFORD BRIDGE]
You are to notice this bridge, not only because the monks of Alcester
built it in 1482, to supersede the ford on the old Roman road which
crosses the river here, but for a certain stone in its parapet, near the
inn window. This stone is worn hollow by thousands of pocket knives that
generations of Bidford men have sharpened upon it. For four centuries it
has supplied in these parts the small excuse that men
[Illustration: OLD THORNS, MARCLEEVE HILL]
need to club and lounge together; and of an evening you may see a score,
perhaps, hanging by this end of the bridge and waiting their turn, while
the clink, clink of the sharpening knife fills the pauses of talk. When
at last the stone shall wear all away there will be restlessness and
possibly social convulsions in Bidford, unless its place be quickly
supplied.
[Illustration: CLEEVE MILL--AN AUTUMN FLOOD]
We lingered only to look at the building that in Shakespeare’s time was
the old Falcon Inn, and soon were paddling due south from Bidford
Bridge. The Avon now runs straight through big flat meadows towards a
steep hill-side, with the hamlet of Marcleeve (or Marlcliff) at its
foot. This line of hill borders the river on the south for some miles,
and is the edge of a plateau which begins the ascent towards the
Cotswold Hills. Seen from the river below, this escarpment is full of
varying beauty, here showing a bare scar of green and red marl, here
covered with long
[Illustration: THE YEW HEDGE--CLEEVE PRIOR MANOR-HOUSE]
gray grass and dotted with old thorn and crab trees, here clothed with
hanging woods of maple, ash, and other trees, straggled over and
smothered with ivy, wild rose, and clematis. By Cleeve Mill, where
clouds of sweet-smelling flour issued from the doorway, we disembarked
and climbed up between the thorn-trees until upon the ridge we could
look back upon the green vale of Evesham, and southward across ploughed
fields, and cottages among orchards and elms, to the gray line of the
Cotswolds, over which a patch of silver hung, as the day fought hard to
regain its morning sunshine. The narrow footway took us on to Cleeve
Priors and through its street--a village all sober, gray, and beautiful.
The garden walls, coated with lichen and topped with yellow quinces or a
flaming branch of barberry; the tall church tower; the
[Illustration: MEADOWS BY THE AVON]
quaintly elaborate grave-stones below it, their scrolls and cherubim
overgrown with moss; the clipped yew-trees that abounded in all
fantastic shapes; the pigeons wheeling round their dove-cote, and the
tall poplar by the manor farm--all these were good; but best of all was
the manor farm itself, and the arched yew hedge leading to its Jacobean
porch, a marvel to behold. We hung long about the entrance and stared at
it. But no living man or woman approached us. The village was given up
to peace or sleep or death.
Returning, we paused on the brow of the slope above Avon for a longer
look. At our feet was spread the vale of Evesham; the river, bordered
with meadows as green and flat as billiard-tables; the stream of Arrow
to northward, which rises in the Lickey Hills, and comes down through
Alcester to join the Avon here; the villages of Salford Priors and
Salford Abbots; farther to the west, among its apple-trees, the roofs
and gables of Salford Nunnery, the village of Harvington. And all down
the stream, and round the meadows, and in and out of these
“low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,”
are willows innumerable--some polled last year, and looking like green
mops, others with long curved branches ready to be lopped and turned
into fence poles next winter, until they are lost in the hills round
Evesham, where the dim towers stand up and the bold outline of Bredon
Hill shuts out the view of the Severn Valley.
The mound on which we are standing is surmounted by the stone socket of
an old cross, and beneath the cross are said to lie many of those who
fell on Evesham battle-field; for the vale below was on August 4th,
1265, the scene of one of the bloodiest and most decisive conflicts in
English history. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, victor of Lewes,
and champion of the people’s rights, was hastening back by forced
marches from Wales, having King Henry III. in his train, a virtual
hostage. He was hurrying to meet his son, the young Simon, with
reinforcements from the southeast; but young Simon’s troops had been
surprised by Prince Edward at Kenilworth in the early morning and
massacred in their beds, their leader himself escaping with difficulty,
almost naked, in a boat across the lake of Kenilworth Castle.
Unconscious of their fate, the old earl reached Evesham on Monday,
August 3d, and, crossing the bridge into the town, sealed his own doom.
For Evesham is a trap. The Avon forms a loop around it, shutting off
escape on three sides, while the fourth is blocked by an eminence called
the Green Hill. And while yet Simon and his king were feasting and
making merry in Evesham Abbey, Edward’s troops were crossing the river
here at Cleeve Ford in the darkness, and moving on their sure prey.
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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 and flowery 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.
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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 their files
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.
[Illustration: 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 pigs
trotting 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.
[Illustration: 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 1150 A.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.
[Illustration: 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 at once 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.
[Illustration: 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, peering
above 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.
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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.