[Illustration: CROPTHORNE MILL]
massive, take but a century or so to fall into complete ruin, how soon
will mere man revert to savagery? Our host at Fladbury parsonage was a
painter, one in whom Americans take a just pride, and the talk at his
table that evening was brisk enough, had we but possessed ears for it.
Instead, we who had journeyed for ten days from inn to inn, reading no
newspapers, receiving no letters, conversing with few fellows, regarding
only the quiet panorama of meadow, wood, and stream, sat in a mental
haze. We were stupefied with long draughts of open air. The dazzle of
the river, the rhythmical stroke of the paddle, had set our wits to
sleep. Once or twice we strove to rally them, and listen to the talkers;
but always the ripple of Avon rose and ran in our ears, confusing the
words, and we sank back into agreeable hebetude. The same held us, too,
next morning, as we ported our canoe over Fladbury weir, and started for
Tewkesbury in the teeth of a west wind that blew “through the sharp
hawthorn” and curled the water. The year had aged noticeably in the past
night, and the country-side wore a forlorn look. None the less, the
reaches below Cropthorne struck us as singularly beautiful. From a
fringe of fantastic pollard willows, out of whose decayed trunks grew
the wild rose and bramble,
[Illustration: WILLOWS BY CROPTHORNE]
orchards and pastures swelled up to a line of cottages and a
square-towered church standing against the sky. Cropthorne church is to
be visited as well for its beauty as for the monuments it contains of
the Dingley family, to which the manor formerly belonged. There is one
to the memory of Francis Dingley, Esq., who happily matched with
Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Brigge, Esq., and Mary Hoby, his wife, had
issue eleven sons and eight daughters, and died in peace, anno 1624. The
last of the Dingleys, a girl, married Edward Goodyeare, of Burghope, and
bore him two sons, whose history is tragic. The elder, Sir John, was a
childless man; and his brother, Samuel, who followed the sea, and had
become captain of the Ruby man-of-war, expected in time to have the
estates. But the two men hated each other, and at last a threat of
disinheritance so angered the captain that he took the desperate
resolution of murdering the baronet, and carried it out on the 17th of
January, 1741. Dr. Nash tells the story: “A friend at Bristol, who knew
their mortal antipathy, had invited them both to dinner, in hopes of
reconciling them, and they parted in seeming friendship. But the captain
placed some of his crew in the street near College Green, with orders to
seize his brother, and assisted in hurrying him by violence to his
ship, under pretence that he was disordered in his senses, where, when
they arrived, he caused him to be strangled in the cabin by White and
Mahony, two ruffians of his crew, himself standing sentinel at the door
while the horrid deed was perpetrating.” The captain, with his two
accomplices, was soon taken and hanged. He was a brave sailor, and had
distinguished himself at St. Sebastian, Ferrol, and San Antonio, at
which last place he burned three men-of-war, the magazine, and stores.
[Illustration: AT WYRE]
Four miles below Fladbury lies Wyre lock, with Wyre village on the right
bank, its cottage gardens planted with cabbages and winter lettuce, or
hung with nets drying in the wind. Across the river, a few fields back,
Wick straggles, a long street of timbered cottages, with a little
church, and
[Illustration: OLD PEAR-TREES AT PERSHORE]
before the church a cross. And ahead of us, over its acres of plum and
pear orchards, the fine tower of Pershore rises.
[Illustration: NETS DRYING AT WYRE]
[Illustration: WYRE LOCK]
Of all the abbeys that once graced the Avon, Tewkesbury alone retains
some of its former splendor. Sulby is a farm-house; of Stoneleigh but a
gateway is left; of Evesham an arch and a tower; while Pershore keeps
only its tower and choir. Oswald, nephew of our old friend Ethelred,
King of Mercia, founded a house of secular canons here A.D. 689, who by
a charter of King Edgar, two centuries later, were superseded by
Benedictine monks. Being built of wood, both church and convent were
thrice destroyed by fire, first about the year 1000, then in 1223, and
again in 1288; on this last occasion by the sin of a brother, who went
a-courting with a lantern within the sacred walls (“muliebri consilio
infatuatus, in loco illo sacrato ignem obtulit alienum”). This fire
consumed not only the abbey, but the greater part of the town, and the
wicked cause of it led to a suspension of all religious services until
1299, when the Bishop of Llandaff came and “reconciled” the Church. All
that remains to-day is used as the parish church of the Holy Cross, and
is a beautiful piece of Early-English work. Pershore itself bears all
the markings of a quietly prosperous market town. Its wide street is
lined with respectable red-brick houses, faced with stone, having
pediments over their front doors, and square windows, some of them
blocked ever since the days of the window-tax. Its plums are known
throughout England; its pears yield excellent perry; and on pears and
plums together it relies for a blameless competence.
[Illustration: THE SUMMER-HOUSE ON BREDON HILL]
[Illustration: PERSHORE BRIDGE]
[Illustration: GREAT COMBERTON]
We passed Pershore bridge, which the Royalists broke down in their
retreat from Worcester field; and Pershore water-gate. There was a
water-gate at Fladbury also, one post of which we were assured was the
same that Mr. Sandys planted in 1637. For long the chine of Bredon Hill
had lain ahead of us, closing the view. We had first spied yesterday,
from the hill-side below Cleeve, and ever since it had been with us; but
below Pershore the river so winds that whether you row down stream or
up, Bredon Hill will be found the dominant feature in the landscape. But
whether a passing cloud paints it purple, or the sun shines on it,
lighting the grassy slopes, and showing every bush and quarry on the
sides, it is always a beautiful background for the villages that cluster
round its foot--Great and Little Comberton, Bricklehampton, Elmley
Castle, and Norton-by-Bredon. As we passed them the day relented for a
while, and in the pale sunshine their gray church towers stood out,
bright spots against the hill-side.
[Illustration: NAFFORD MILL]
[Illustration: ECKINGTON BRIDGE]
We floated under the steep bank that separates Comberton and its poplars
from the stream, along to the dusty mill beside Nafford Lock, and drew
close under this hill-side until the old beacon at its top (called the
Summer-house) stood right above our heads. At Nafford Lock there is a
drop of six or eight feet before the river runs on by yet more
villages--Eckington, Birlingham, and Defford. Here in the sombre west
ahead of us the Malverns come into view; and here, between Eckington and
Defford, a bridge crosses, over
[Illustration: PERSHORE WATER-GATE]
which we leaned for a quiet half-hour before going on our way.
[Illustration: BREDON]
It was a time, I think, that will pleasantly come back to us in days
when we shall fear to trust our decrepit limbs in a canoe. The bridge,
six-arched, with deep buttresses, seemed as old as Avon itself. It is
built of the red sandstone so common in the neighborhood; but time has
long since mellowed and subdued its color to reflect the landscape’s
mood, which just now was sober and even mournful. Rain hung over the
Malverns; down on the flat plain, where the river crept into the
evening, the poplars were swaying gently; a pair of jays hustled by with
a warning squawk. Throughout this, the last day of our voyage, we had
travelled dully, scarce exchanging a word, possessed with the stupor
before alluded to. A small discovery awoke us. As we rested our elbows
on the parapet, we noticed that many deep grooves or notches ran across
it. They were marks worn in the stone by the tow-ropes of departed
barges.
Those notches spoke to us, as nothing had spoken yet, of the true secret
of Avon. Kings and their armies have trampled its banks from Naseby to
Tewkesbury, performing great feats of war; castles and monasteries have
risen over its waters; yet none of them has left a record so durable as
are these grooves where the bargemen shifted their
[Illustration: TITHE BARN, BREDON]
ropes in passing the bridge. The fighting reddened the river for a day;
the building was reflected there for a century or two; but the slow toil
of man has outlasted them both. And, looking westward over the homely
landscape, we realized the truth that Nature, too, is most in earnest
when least dramatic; that her most terrible power is seen neither in the
whirlwind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the catkins
budding on the hazel--the still, small voice that proves she is not
dead, but sleeping lightly, and already dreaming of the spring.
“Sed neque Medorum silvæ, ditissima terra--”
the note of Virgil’s praise of Italy was ours for a while, and
[Illustration: NEAR ECKINGTON]
his pride to inherit a land of immemorial towns--a land made fertile by
tillage and watered by “rivers stealing under hoary walls.”
[Illustration: STRENSHAM CHURCH]
A little below the bridge Avon is joined by the Defford (or, as it was
once called, Depeford) Brook, its last considerable tributary, which
rises on the west of the Lickey Hills; and a little farther on we turn a
sharp bend where, above the old willows on our right, a field of rank
grass rises steeply to Strensham church and vicarage. Behind the stumpy
tower lies Strensham village, not to be seen from the river. Here, in
1612, Samuel Butler was born, the author of “Hudibras,” and a monument
stands to his memory within the church, beside other fine ones belonging
to the Russell family. He was born in obscurity, and died a pauper--a
poet (to use the words which Dennis wrote for his other monument in
Westminster Abbey) who “was a whole species of poets in one; admirable
in a manner in which no one else has been tolerable--a manner in which
he knew no guide, and has found no follower.” Very few can read that
epitaph without recalling the more famous epigram upon it:
“The poet’s fate is here in emblem shown;
He asked for bread, and he received a stone.”
[Illustration: STRENSHAM MILL]
Below Strensham we pass a lock--the last before reaching Tewkesbury--and
two mills, the first and larger and more modern one deserted. Mr.
Sandys’s task was here not difficult, for the Avon Valley is so level
that only two locks are required in the fifteen miles from Pershore. We
have scarcely left the lock when the sharp steeple of Bredon,
[Illustration: ARROW-HEADS, NEAR TEWKESBURY]
at the western extremity of Bredon Hill, points out the direction of the
river. To this village, during the civil war, Bishop Prideaux, of
Worcester, retired on a stipend of four shillings and sixpence a week.
“This reverse of fortune,” says Ireland, “he bore with much
cheerfulness, although obliged to sell his books and furniture to
procure subsistence. One day, being asked by a neighbor, as he passed
through the village with something under his gown, what had he got
there?--he replied he was become an ostrich, and forced to live upon
iron--showing some old iron which he was going to sell at the
blacksmith’s to enable him to purchase a dinner.” The living of Bredon
was, in more peaceful times, one of the fattest in the bishop’s diocese,
as is hinted by a huge tithe-barn on the slope above us, with a chamber
over its doorway, doubtless for the accountant.
From Bredon we came to Twining Ferry, three miles below Strensham, and
the flat meadows beyond it, over which the tower of Tewkesbury Abbey and
the tall chimneys of its mills now began to loom through a rainy sky
upon which night was fast closing. It is just before the town is reached
that the Avon parts to join the Severn in four streams--one over a weir,
another through a lock, the remaining two after working mills. Being by
this both wet and hungry, we disembarked at the boat-yard beside Mythe
Bridge, and walked up to our inn beneath the dark, irregular gables of
High Street, resolved to explore the town next day.
Tewkesbury lies along the southern bank of Mill Avon, the longest branch
of our divided river, which, flowing under Mythe Bridge, washes on its
left the slums and back gardens of the town before it passes down to
work the Abbey Mill. One of these gardens--that of the Bell and
Bowling-Green Inn--will be recognized by all readers of “John Halifax,
Gentleman,” and the view from the yew-hedged bowling-green itself shall
be painted in Mrs. Craik’s own words:
[Illustration: MYTHE BRIDGE, TEWKESBURY]
“At the end of the arbor the wall which enclosed us on the riverward
side was cut down--my father had done it at my asking--so as to make a
seat, something after the fashion of Queen Mary’s seat at Stirling, of
which I had read. Thence one could see a goodly sweep of country. First,
close below, flowed the Avon--Shakespeare’s Avon--here a narrow,
sluggish stream, but capable, as we sometimes knew to our cost, of being
roused into fierceness and foam. Now it slipped on quietly enough,
contenting itself with turning a flour-mill hard by, the lazy whir of
which made a sleepy, incessant monotone which I was fond of hearing.
From the opposite bank stretched a wide green level called the Ham,
dotted with pasturing cattle of all sorts. Beyond it
[Illustration: TWINING FERRY]
was a second river, forming an arc of a circle round the verdant flat.
But the stream itself lay so low as to be invisible from where we sat;
you could only trace the line of its course by the small white sails
that glided in and out, oddly enough, from behind clumps of trees and
across meadow-lands.”
[Illustration: THE BOWLING-GREEN, TEWKESBURY]
This second stream is, of course, the Severn, sweeping broadly by the
base of Mythe Hill. An advertisement that we saw posted in Tewkesbury
streets gave us the size of the intervening meadow; it announced that
the after or latter math of the Severn Ham was to be sold by order of
the trustees--172 acres, 2 roods, 28 perches of grass in all. The Ham is
let by auction, and the money divided among the inhabitants of certain
streets.
We lingered to observe the yew hedge, “fifteen feet high and as many
thick,” and talk to a waiter who now appeared at the back door of the
inn. He seemed to feel his black suit and white shirt-front incongruous
with their surroundings, and explained the cause of their presence. The
Tewkesbury Bowling Club had held its annual dinner there the night
before. He showed us the empty bottles.
“Evidently a very large club,” we said.
“No, sirs; thirsty.”
The Abbey Mill, which droned so pleasantly in Phineas Fletcher’s ears,
stands close by, under the shadow of the Abbey Church, its hours of work
and rest marked by the clock and peal of eight sweet-toned bells in the
Abbey Tower.
[Illustration: TEWKESBURY, FROM THE SEVERN]
It is well that this tower should stand where it does. If to one who
follows the windings of Avon the recurrent suggestion of its scenery be
that of permanence, here fitly, at his journey’s end, he finds that
permanence embodied monumentally in stone. No building that I
know in England--not Westminster Abbey, with all its sleeping
generations--conveys the impression of durability in the same degree as
does this Norman tower, which, for eight centuries, has stood foursquare
to the storms of heaven and the frenzy of men. Though it rises one
hundred and thirty-two feet from the ground to the coping of its
battlements, and though its upper stages contain much exquisite carving,
there is no
[Illustration: MILL STREET, TEWKESBURY]
lightness on its scarred, indomitable face, but only strength. The same
strength is repeated within the church by the fourteen huge cylindrical
columns from which the arches spring to bear the heavy roof of the nave.
In spite of the groining and elaborate traceries above, the rich eastern
windows, the luxuriant decoration of the chantry chapels and their
monuments, these fourteen columns give the note of the edifice. To them
we return, and, standing beside them, are able to ignore the mutilations
of years, and see the old church as it was on a certain spring day in
1471, when its painted windows colored the white faces, and its ceilings
echoed the cries, of the beaten Lancastrians that clung to its altar for
sanctuary.
[Illustration: OLD HOUSE, TEWKESBURY]
For “in the field by Tewkesbury,” a little to the south, beside the
highway that runs to Gloucester and Cheltenham, the crown of England has
been won and lost. There, on the 4th of May, 1471, the troops of Queen
Margaret and the young Prince Edward, led by the Duke of Somerset from
Exeter to join another army that the Earl of Pembroke was raising in
Wales, were overtaken by Edward IV., who had hurried out from Windsor to
intercept them. Footsore and bedraggled, they had reached Tewkesbury on
the 3d, and “pight their field in a close euen hard at the towne’s end,
hauing the towne and abbeie at their backes; and directlie before them,
and upon each side of them, they were defended with cumbersome lanes,
deepe ditches, and manie hedges, besides hils and dales, so as the place
seemed as noisome as might be to approach unto.” From this secure
position they were drawn by a ruse of the Crookback’s, and slaughtered
like sheep. Many, we know, fled to the abbey, were seized there and
executed by dozens at Tewkesbury Cross, where High Street and Burton
Street divide. Others were chased into the river by the Abbey Mill and
drowned. A house in Church Street is pointed out as the place where
Edward, Prince of Wales, was slain, and some stains in the floor boards
of one of the upper rooms are still held to be his blood-marks.
Tradition has marked his burial-place in the Abbey Church, and written
above it, “Eheu, hominum furor: matris tu sola lux es, et gregis ultima
spes.” The dust of his enemy Clarence--“false, fleeting, perjured
Clarence”--lies but a little way off, behind the altar-screen.
There is a narrow field, one of the last that Avon washes, down the
centre of which runs a narrow, withy-bordered watercourse. It is called
the “Bloody Meadow,” after the carnage of that day, when, as the story
goes, blood enough lay at its foot to float a boat; and just beyond our
river is gathered to the greater Severn.