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THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER
=The Portsmouth Road=, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days
of Old.
=The Dover Road=: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
=The Bath Road=: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old
Highway.
=The Exeter Road=: The Story of the West of England Highway.
=The Great North Road=: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.
=The Norwich Road=: An East Anglian Highway.
=The Holyhead Road=: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.
=The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road=: The Great Fenland
Highway.
=The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road=: Sport and
History on an East Anglian Turnpike.
=The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road=: The Ready Way
to South Wales. Two Vols.
=The Brighton Road=: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic
Highway.
=The Hastings Road= and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”
=Cycle Rides Round London.=
=A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of
Reproduction.=
=Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore.= Two Vols.
=The Ingoldsby Country=: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby
Legends.”
=The Hardy Country=: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
=The Dorset Coast.=
=The South Devon Coast.=
=The Old Inns of Old England.= Two Vols.
=Love in the Harbour=: a Longshore Comedy.
=Rural Nooks Round London= (Middlesex and Surrey).
=Haunted Houses=: Tales of the Supernatural.
=The Manchester and Glasgow Road.= This way to Gretna Green.
Two Vols.
=The North Devon Coast.=
=Half Hours with the Highwaymen.= Two Vols.
=The Autocar Road Book.= Four Vols.
=The Tower Of London=: Fortress, Palace, and Prison.
=The Somerset Coast.=
=The Smugglers=: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an
Ancient Craft.
=The Cornish Coast.= North.
=The Cornish Coast.= South.
=The Kentish Coast.= [_In the Press._
=The Sussex Coast.= [_In the Press._
[Illustration: BISHAM CHURCH.]
THAMES VALLEY
VILLAGES
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
VOL. II
_ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY W. S. CAMPBELL
AND FROM DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR_
[Illustration: TAMESIS]
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1910
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
SONNING—HURST, “IN THE COUNTY OF WILTS”—SHOTTESBROOKE—WARGRAVE 1
CHAPTER II
HENLEY—THE BRIDGE AND ITS KEYSTONE-MASKS—REMENHAM—
HAMBLEDEN—MEDMENHAM ABBEY AND THE “HELL FIRE
CLUB”—HURLEY—BISHAM 25
CHAPTER III
GREAT MARLOW—COOKHAM—CLIVEDEN AND ITS OWNERS—MAIDENHEAD 51
CHAPTER IV
BRAY AND ITS FAMOUS VICAR—JESUS HOSPITAL 69
CHAPTER V
OCKWELLS MANOR-HOUSE—DORNEY COURT—BOVENEY—BURNHAM ABBEY 82
CHAPTER VI
CLEWER—WINDSOR—ETON AND ITS COLLEGIANS—DATCHET—LANGLEY
AND THE KEDERMINSTERS 109
CHAPTER VII
DATCHET—RUNNYMEDE—WRAYSBURY—HORTON AND ITS MILTON
ASSOCIATIONS—STAINES MOOR—STANWELL—LALEHAM AND MATTHEW
ARNOLD—LITTLETON—CHERTSEY—WEYBRIDGE—SHEPPERTON 131
CHAPTER VIII
COWAY STAKES—WALTON-ON-THAMES—THE RIVER AND THE WATER
COMPANIES—SUNBURY—TEDDINGTON—TWICKENHAM 157
CHAPTER IX
PETERSHAM 185
CHAPTER X
ISLEWORTH—BRENTFORD AND CÆSAR’S CROSSING OF THE THAMES 211
CHAPTER XI
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN—KEW—CHISWICK—MORTLAKE—BARNES 236
CHAPTER XII
PUTNEY—FULHAM BRIDGE—FULHAM 258
INDEX 293
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SEPARATE PLATES
BISHAM CHURCH _Frontispiece_
PAGE
SONNING BRIDGE 5
SHOTTESBROOKE CHURCH 13
WARGRAVE CHURCH 19
UNDER THE WILLOWS: A BACKWATER NEAR WARGRAVE 23
ARCH CARRYING THE ROAD, PARK PLACE 27
REMENHAM CHURCH 27
HENLEY-ON-THAMES 31
REGATTA ISLAND 35
MEDMENHAM ABBEY 39
THE BELL INN, HURLEY 43
BISHAM ABBEY 47
“TOP O’ THE TOWN,” GREAT MARLOW 47
A THAMES REGATTA 53
COOKHAM LOCK 57
COOKHAM CHURCH 61
BRAY CHURCH 61
COOKHAM WEIR 65
LYCHGATE, BRAY 71
JESUS HOSPITAL, BRAY 79
THE HALL, OCKWELLS 83
DORNEY CHURCH: THE MINSTREL-GALLERY 87
THE PALMER SAMPLER, WORKED ABOUT 1620 91
DORNEY COURT 95
DORNEY COURT: THE GREAT HALL, SHOWING THE MODEL PINE-APPLE 99
PRESENTATION TO CHARLES THE SECOND OF THE FIRST PINE-APPLE
GROWN IN ENGLAND 103
BURNHAM ABBEY 107
AN ENGLISH FARMYARD: BURNHAM ABBEY FARM 111
BOVENEY 113
THE KEDERMINSTER PEW: INTERIOR 117
THE KEDERMINSTER PEW: EXTERIOR 121
THE KEDERMINSTER LIBRARY 125
THE ALMSHOUSES, LANGLEY 129
BACKWATER NEAR WRAYSBURY 133
HORTON CHURCH 139
LALEHAM CHURCH 147
MATTHEW ARNOLD’S GRAVE, LALEHAM 147
LITTLETON CHURCH 151
INTERIOR, LITTLETON CHURCH 155
SHEPPERTON 159
GRAVE OF THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK’S DAUGHTER, SHEPPERTON 163
HALLIFORD 171
WATERSPLASH NEAR HALLIFORD 171
SUNBURY 175
A BUSY DAY, MOLESEY LOCK 179
TEDDINGTON WEIR 183
TWICKENHAM CHURCH 187
PETERSHAM POST-OFFICE 187
PETERSHAM POST-OFFICE 191
PETERSHAM: THE “FOX AND DUCK,” OLD LOCK-UP AND VILLAGE POUND 195
PETERSHAM, FROM THE MIDDLESEX SHORE 199
THE OLD LODGES OF PETERSHAM PARK 203
RIVER LANE, PETERSHAM 207
ISLEWORTH 213
THE DOCK AT ISLEWORTH 217
THE “LONDON APPRENTICE,” ISLEWORTH 217
“OLD ENGLAND” 223
“OLD ENGLAND”: MOUTH OF THE BRENT, AND BRENTFORD FERRY 227
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN 239
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN: VIEW UP-RIVER 243
CHISWICK CHURCH 249
MONUMENT TO VISCOUNT MORDAUNT, FULHAM CHURCH 271
THE TOWER, FULHAM CHURCH 277
THE FITZJAMES COURTYARD, FULHAM PALACE 281
THE GREAT HALL, FULHAM PALACE 287
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT.
Hour-Glass and Wrought-Iron Stand, Hurst 8
St. Lawrence Waltham 11
East Window, Shottesbrooke 16
Medmenham 37
From the Monument to Sir Myles Hobart, Great Marlow 52
Brass to an Eton Scholar, Wraysbury 136
Bradshaw’s House, Walton-on-Thames 165
Brass to John Selwyn 167
Walton-on-Thames Church 169
Ferry Lane, Brentford 233
Tomb of Edward Rose, Barnes 255
The Old Toll-House, Barnes Common 261
THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
CHAPTER I
SONNING—HURST, “IN THE COUNTY OF WILTS”—SHOTTESBROOKE—WARGRAVE
As Reading can by no means be styled a village, seeing that its
population numbers over 72,000, the fact of its not being treated of in
these pages will perhaps be excused. You cannot rusticate at Reading:
the electric tramways, the great commercial premises, and the crowded
state of its streets forbid; but Reading, taken frankly as a town and
a manufacturing town at that, is not at all a place for censure. The
Kennet, however, that flows through it, has here become a very different
Kennet from that which sparkles in the Berkshire meads between Hungerford
and Kintbury, and has a very dubious and deterrent look where it is
received into the Thames.
The flat, open shores at Reading presently give place to the wooded banks
approaching Sonning, where the fine trees of Holme Park are reflected in
the waters of the lock—the lock that was tended for many years, until his
death, about 1889, by a lock-keeper who also kept bees, made beehives,
and wrote poetry. Sonning, and its Thames-side “Parade,” certainly invite
to poetry.
To say there is no Thames-side village prettier, or in any way more
delightful, than Sonning is vague praise and also in some ways
understates its peculiar attractiveness, which, strange to say,
seems to increase, rather than decrease, with the years. It might
have been expected that a village but three miles from the great and
increasing town of Reading would suffer many indignities from that
proximity, and would be infested with such flagrant nuisances as wayside
advertisement-hoardings and street-loafers, but these manifestations of
the _zeitgeist_ are, happily, entirely absent.
Let us, however, halt for a moment to give a testimonial of character to
Reading itself, which is far above the average of great towns in these
and many other matters. Loafers and street-hoardings are found there,
without doubt—and can we find the modern town of its size where they are
not?—but they do not obtrude; and, in short, Reading is, with all its
bustle of business, a likeable place.
There are reasons for Sonning remaining unspoiled. They are not
altogether sufficient reasons, for they obtain in other once delightful
villages similarly situated, which have unhappily been ravaged by modern
progress; but here they have by chance sufficed. They are found chiefly
in the happy circumstances that Sonning lies three-quarters of a mile
off the main-road—off that Bath road, oh! my brethren, that was once
so delightful, with its memories of a bypast coaching-age; and is now
little better than a race-track for motor-cars, and, by reason of their
steel-studded tyres, cursed with a bumpy surface full of pot-holes.
Time was when the surface of the Bath road was perfection. Nowadays, no
ingenuity of mortal road-surveyors can keep it in repair, for the suction
of air caused by pneumatic tyres travelling at great speed tears out the
binding material and leaves only loose grit and stones. The Bath road on
a fine summer’s day has become unendurable by reason of the dust raised
in this manner. If you stand a distance away, in the fields, out of sight
of the actual road, its course can yet be distinctly traced for a long
way by the billows of dust, rising like smoke from it.
Happily, motor-cars do but rarely come into Sonning, although at the
turning out of the high road a prominent advertisement of the Bull, the
White Hart, or the French Horn—the three hostelries that Sonning can
boast—invites them hither.
The other prominent reason for this village being allowed to remain quiet
is found in the fact of Twyford, the nearest railway station, being two
miles distant.
There are many branching streams of the Thames here, and the hamlet of
Sonning Eye, on the Oxfordshire side, takes its name either from this
abundance of water, or from the eyots, or islands, formed by these
several channels, crossed by various bridges.
Sonning Bridge _par excellence_ is a severely unornamented structure of
red brick, obviously built by the very least imaginative of architects,
in the eighteenth century. If it were new it would be an offence, but
there is now a mellowness of colour in that old red brick, embroidered
richly as it is in green and gold by the lichens of nearly two
centuries, that gives the old bridge a charm by no means inherent in its
originator’s design.
Trees, great, noble, upstanding woodland trees, lovingly enclasp Sonning
village and form a background for its ancient cottages and fine old
mansions, and against the dark green background of them you see on summer
afternoons the blue smoke curling up lazily from rustic chimneys. In
midst of this the embattled church-tower rises unobtrusively; and indeed
the church is so hidden, although it is a large church, that strangers
are generally directed to find it by way of the Bull Inn: a rambling old
hostelry occupying two sides of a square, and covered in summer with a
mantle of roses and creepers. And it must, by the way, not be forgotten
that Sonning in general displays a very wealth of flowers for the delight
of the stranger.
I would it were possible to be enthusiastic upon the church, but thorough
“restoration,” and a marvellously hideous monument to Thomas Rich,
Alderman of Gloucester, 1613, and his son, Sir Thomas Rich, Bart., 1667,
forbid. There are brasses on the floor of the nave, to Laurence Fyton,
1434, steward of the manor of Sonning, and to William Barber, 1549,
bailiff of the same manor; with others.
[Illustration: SONNING BRIDGE.]
Here, too, is a monument of Canon Pearson, vicar for over forty years,
and reverently spoken of—or is it the monument that is reverenced?—by
the caretaker. I have sought greatly to discover something by which the
Canon’s career may be illustrated in these pages, but, upon my soul, the
most notable things available are precisely that he held this excellent
living for that long period, and that he sometimes preached before Queen
Victoria. These things do not in themselves form a title to reverence.
Something of the distinct stateliness of Sonning is due to the fact that
anciently the Bishops of Salisbury were owners of the manor, and before
them the Bishops of the Saxon diocese of Dorchester. Their manor-house
was in the time of Leland “a fair old house of stone by the Tamise ripe”;
but of this desirable residence nothing remains. The Deanery, too, has
disappeared, but the fine old stone and brick enclosing-walls of its
grounds remain, and there a picturesque modern residence has been built.
Those walls, of an immense thickness and solidity, are indeed a sight to
see, for the saxifrage and many beautiful flowering plants growing in and
upon them.
[Illustration: HOUR-GLASS AND WROUGHT-IRON STAND, HURST.]
Sonning itself, being a place so delightful, invites those to whom
locality has interest to explore into the country that lies in the rear
of it. In a work styled _Thames Valley Villages_ we may go very much
where we please, and here the valley broadens out considerably, for it
includes, and insensibly merges with, that of the river Loddon, which
flows down quite a long way, even from the heights of northern Hampshire.
The Loddon, the loveliest tributary of the Thames, flows into it by three
mouths, from one mile to two miles and a half below Sonning, and its
various loops and channels make the four-mile stretch of country in the
rear a particularly moist and water-logged district. Here, crossing the
dusty Bath road at Twyford, which takes its name from the ancient double
ford of the Loddon at this point, the secluded village of Hurst may be
found. Its name of “Hurst,” i.e. a woodland, indicates its situation in
what was once the widespreading Windsor Forest. The village lies along
gravelly roads, scattered about fragments of village green and a large
pond; its church, hidden three-quarters of a mile away, forming, with a
country inn and some old almshouses, a curiously isolated group. To see
the interesting Norman and Early English church, with red-brick tower,
dated 1612, crowned with quaint cupola, is worth some effort; for it
contains a very handsome chancel-screen, probably placed here _circa_
1500. The repainting of it in 1876, under the direction of J. D. Sedding,
the architect who then restored the church, is, if indeed in accordance
with the traces of the original decoration then found, certainly more
curious than beautiful; but it should be seen, if only to show that our
ancestors were, after all, not a little barbaric in their schemes of
decoration. The hour-glass, with beautiful wrought-iron bracket dated
1636, should be noticed. Behind it, on the wall, is painted “As this
Glasse runneth, so Man’s Life passeth.” A queer memorial brass to Alse
Harison, representing the lady in a four-poster bed, is on the north
wall. A large grey-and-white marble monument to others of the Harison
family includes an epitaph on Philip Harison, who died in 1683. The
sorrowing author of it ends ingeniously:
“A double dissolution there appears,
He into dust dissolves; she into tears.”
Surely a mind capable of such ingenious imagery on such a subject cannot
have been wholly downcast.
The old almshouses by the church were founded, as appears on a tablet
over the entrance, by one William Barker:
This Hospitall for the
Maintenance of eight poor persons,
Each at 6_d._ pr diem for euer, was
Erected and Founded in ye year 1664
At the Sole Charge of
WILLIAM BARKER
of Hurst, in the County of
Wilts, Esq.
Who dyed ye 25th of March, 1685
And lies buried in the South
Chancell of this Parish.
Note you that, gentle reader, “the county of Wilts,” we being in the
midst of Berkshire? A considerable tract of surrounding country is
in fact (or was until comparatively recent years) a detached portion
of Wiltshire, and was invariably shown so on old maps. Examples of
such isolated portions of counties, and even of detached fragments
of parishes, are by no means rare: Worcestershire in England and
Cromartyshire in Scotland, forming the most notable examples; but the
reasons for these things are obscure, and all attempts at explaining them
amount to little more than the unsatisfying conclusion that they are
thus because—well, because they are, you know! That is the net result of
repeated discussions upon the subject in _Notes and Queries_, in which
publication of wholly honorary and unpaid contributions the majority of
noters, querists, and writers of replies have during the space of some
sixty years past been engaged in chasing their own tails, like so many
puppies. The process is amusing enough, but as you end where you began,
the net result is no great catch.
Apart from legends and traditions, it would seem that the explanation of
the Berkshire districts of Hurst, Twyford, Ruscombe, Whistley Green, and
a portion of Wokingham having been accounted in Wiltshire, may be found
in the fact, already remarked, that Sonning was a manor of the Bishops of
Salisbury. The question appears to have been largely an ecclesiastical
affair. The anomaly of a portion of Wiltshire being islanded in Berkshire
was, however, ended by Acts of Parliament during the reigns of William
the Fourth and Queen Victoria, by which the area concerned was annexed to
Berkshire.
Returning from Hurst to Twyford, expeditions to Ruscombe, St. Lawrence
Waltham, and Shottesbrooke will amply repay the explorer in these
wilds—for wilds they are in the matter of perplexing roads. They are good
roads, in so far that they are level, but they would seem to have come
into existence on no plan; or, if plan there ever were, a malicious plan,
intended to utterly confound and mislead the stranger. But this is no
unpleasant district in which to wander awhile.
[Illustration: ST. LAWRENCE WALTHAM.]
Ruscombe is notable as the place where William Penn, founder of
Pennsylvania, died, in 1718. Its church stands solitary in the meadows—a
red-brick, eighteenth-century building, as ruddy as a typical beef-eating
and port-drinking farmer of Georgian days. The neighbouring St.
Lawrence Waltham is entirely delightful. The fine church tower of St.
Lawrence, the ancient brick and plaster and timbered Bell Inn, and the
old village pound, with an aged elm at each corner of it, composing a
rarely-beautiful picture.
The stone spire of Shottesbrooke church is seen, not far off, peering
up from among the trees of Shottesbrooke Park, in which it is situated.
When we see a stone church spire in Berkshire, where we do not commonly
find ancient spires, we are apt to suspect at once a modern church, and
our suspicions are generally well-founded; but here is a remarkably fine
Decorated building of the mid-fourteenth century (it was built 1337). It
stands finely in a noble park for many years belonging to the Vansittart
family, and has been well described as “a cathedral in miniature.” Its
origin appears by tradition to have been due to the unexpected recovery
of Sir William Trussell, the then owner of the estate, who had been
brought to the verge of death by a long-continued course of drunkenness.
He built it by way of thankoffering, and as he would seem to have been
intemperate in all he did, he not only built this very large and noble
church, but founded a college for five priests. This establishment
went the way of all such things, hundreds of years ago, and the great
building, standing solitary in the park, except for the vicarage and the
manor-house, now astonishes the stranger at its loneliness. He wonders
where the village is, and may well continue to wonder, for village there
is none.
[Illustration: SHOTTESBROOKE CHURCH.]
A versifier in the Ingoldsby manner narrates the building of it by
Trussell:
“An oath he sware
To his lady fair,
‘By the cross on my shield,
A church I’ll build,
And therefore the deuce a form
Is so fit as a cruciform;
And the patron saint that I find the aptest
Is that holiest water-saint—John the Baptist.’”
A legend of the building of the spire tells how the architect, completing
it by fixing the weathercock, called for wine to drink a health to the
King, and, drinking, fell to the ground and was dashed to pieces. The
only sound he uttered, says the legend, was “O! O!” and that exclamation
was the sole inscription carved upon his tomb, erected upon the spot
where he fell. Many have been those pilgrims drawn to Shottesbrooke by
this picturesque story, seeking that tomb. Tombstones of any kind are few
in Shottesbrooke churchyard, and the only one that can possibly mark the
architect’s grave is a coped stone on which an expectant and confiding
person may indeed faintly trace “O, O”; but as the stone is probably not
so old as the fourteenth century, and as it is extremely likely that
an expectant person will, if in any way possible, find that which he
expects, it would not be well to declare for the genuineness of it. But
it is at any rate a very old and cracked and moss-grown stone.
Of a bygone Vansittart, who filled this family living for forty-four
years, we read some highly eulogistic things upon a monument near by.
Born 1779, he died 1847, “the faithful pastor of an attached flock.
Meek, mild, benevolent. In domestic life tender, kind, considerate. In
all relations revered, respected, beloved.” One is tempted to repeat the
unfortunate architect’s exclamation, “O! O!”
The church, serving no village, and standing in a park close by the noble
country seat of the Vansittarts, is for all practical purposes a manorial
chapel. That it has long been used as such is very evident from the many
tablets to Vansittarts which line its walls. The remains of the founder’s
tomb are seen in the north transept, in a long stretch of delicate
arcading along the north wall, beautifully wrought in chalk.
[Illustration: EAST WINDOW, SHOTTESBROOKE.]
A singular effigy to William Throckmorton, Doctor of Laws, “warden of
this church,” who died in 1535, is on the north side of the chancel. It
is of diminutive size, and is what archæologists call an “interrupted
effigy,” showing only head and breast and feet, the middle being occupied
by a brass with Latin inscription.
There are several brasses in the church: the finest of them, a
fourteenth-century example in the chancel, very deeply and beautifully
cut, representing two men; one with forked beard, a long gown and a
sword; the other an ecclesiastic. They stand side by side, and are
reputed to represent the founder and his brother, but the inscription
has been torn away, together with most of the canopy.
A brass in the north transept to Richard Gill, Sergeant of the
“Backhouse”—i.e. the Bakehouse—to Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth,
describes him as “Bailey of the Seaven Hundreds of Cookeham and Bray in
the Forest Division.” Near by is a brass to “Thomas Noke, who for his
great Age and vertuous Lyfe was reverenced of all Men, and was commonly
called Father Noke, created Esquire by King Henry the Eight. He was of
Stature high and comly; and for his excellency in Artilery made Yeoman of
the Crowne of England which had in his Lyfe three Wives, and by every of
them some Fruit and Off-spring, and deceased the 21 of August 1567 in the
Yeare of his Age 87, leaving behind him Julyan his last Wife, two of his
Brethren, one Sister, one only Son, and two Daughters living.”
Thomas Noke is represented with his three wives, while six daughters and
four sons are grouped beneath.
Returning through Twyford to Sonning, the outlet of the Loddon,
“The Loddon slow, with verdant alders crowned,”
is found in that exquisite backwater, the Patrick Stream, where a
picture of surpassing beauty is seen at every turn. By a long, winding
course, fringed richly with rushes, and overhung with lovely trees, the
Patrick Stream wanders through meadow lands and finally emerges into the
Thames again, just below Shiplake Lock. By dint of making this long but
delightful _détour_, and thus avoiding Shiplake Lock, it is possible to
do the Thames Conservancy out of one of those many threepences for which
it has so insatiable an appetite.
Shiplake, on the Oxfordshire bank, is the place where Tennyson was
married, but the church has been largely rebuilt since then. The windows
are mostly filled with ancient glass brought from the abbey of St.
Bertin, at St. Omer. Shiplake Mill, once a picturesque feature, is now,
at this time of writing, a squalid heap of ruins.
Wargrave, on the Berkshire side, is said to have once been a market-town,
and it is now growing again so rapidly that a town it will soon be once
more. Its houses crowd together on the banks, where the George and Dragon
Inn stands, giving upon the slipway to the water: all looking out upon
the spacious Oxfordshire meadows. The sign of the George and Dragon Inn—a
double-sided one—painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A., and J. E. Hodgson, R.A.,
in 1874, shows St. George on one side, as we are accustomed to see him on
the reverse of coins, engaged in slaying the dragon; and on the other,
the monster duly slain, the saint is refreshing himself with a noble
tankard of ale.
[Illustration: WARGRAVE CHURCH.]
Wargrave church has been restored extensively, and its tower is of red
brick, and not ancient; but it forms, for all that, a very charming
picture. Here we may see a tablet to the memory of that remarkable prig,
Thomas Day, the author of that egregious work for the manufacture of
other prigs, _Sandford and Merton_. He was born about 1748, and died
1789. Of his good and highly moral life there can be no doubt; but moral
philosophers are rarely _personæ gratæ_ in a naughty and frivolous world.
We fight shy of them, and of all instructive and improving persons, and
make light of their works; and if nowadays we read _Sandford and Merton_
at all, it is for the purpose of extracting some satirical amusement from
the pompous verbiage of the Reverend Mr. Barlow, and from the respective
“wickedness” and goodness of Tommy and the exemplary Harry.
Among Thomas Day’s peculiar views was that by a proper method of
education (i.e. a method invented by himself) there was scarcely anything
that could not be accomplished. He certainly began courageously, about
the age of twenty-one, by choosing two girls, each about twelve years of
age, whom he proposed to educate after his formula, and then to marry
the most suitable of them. He, however, did not carry this plan so far
as the marrying of either. It is not clear whom we should congratulate:
the girls or their eccentric guardian, who at last met his death from
the kick of a horse which resented the entirely novel philosophical
principles on which he was training it.
In the churchyard is the grave of Madame Tussaud, of the famous waxworks,
and here lies Sir Morell Mackenzie, the surgeon who attended the Emperor
Frederick. He died in 1892. Near by is a quite new columbarium for
containing the ashes of cremated persons.
A singular bequest left to Wargrave by one Mrs. Sarah Hill is that by
which, every year at Easter, the sum of £1 is to be equally divided, in
new crown pieces, between two boys and two girls, who qualify for this
reward by conduct that must needs meet with the approval of all. The
five-shilling pieces are not forthcoming unless the candidates are known
never to have been undutiful to their parents, never to swear, never to
tell untruths, or steal, break windows, or do “any kind of mischief.”
The good lady would appear either to have been bent upon finding the
Perfectly Good Child, or to have been a saturnine humorist, with a
cynical disbelief in these annual distributions ever being made. But they
_are_ made; and we can only suppose that the vicar and churchwardens
allow themselves just a little charitable latitude in the annual judging.
And, you know, after all, is it worth while being so monumentally
good for the poor reward of five shillings a year? Consider how much
delightful mischief you forgo.
Hennerton backwater, below Wargrave, is another of the delightful
side-streams that are plentiful here, and is now, after a good deal of
litigation, pronounced free. The wooded road between Wargrave and Henley
skirts it, and is carried over a lovely valley in the grounds of Park
Place by a very fine arch of forty-three feet span, built of gigantic
rough stones.
[Illustration: UNDER THE WILLOWS: A BACKWATER NEAR WARGRAVE.]