It was a wish of Seneca's that the wise and virtuous when they slept
could lend their thoughts and their feelings out to less wise and
less virtuous people. It would be equally admirable if we could
occasionally let our spiritual selves take wing and go on holiday,
leaving the body at home to carry on the routine business, receive
callers, answer the telephone, pay the bills, and so on. If it were
possible for me to take such a holiday I should go to Tewkesbury,
where the eighth centenary of the famous Norman church of that town
is being celebrated. There was a time when I had no desire to go to
Tewkesbury. It was one of the places I did not want to go to because
I feared that seeing it would destroy the Tewkesbury of my fancy. No
one would hesitate to go to a place like Birmingham or Glasgow, for
their names awaken no emotions in the mind, and experience of them
can shatter no pleasant images.
But Tewkesbury is a name to conjure with. It belongs to the poetry
of things. It is entangled in history and comes with the pomp of
trumpets and the echoes of far-off deeds. It has the tang of
Shakespeare about it. Was it not with its name that that great star
swam into our ken with the earliest of our remembered lines?--
... false, fleeting, perjured Clarence
That stabbed me on the field by Tewkesbury.
Observe, not "the field at Tewkesbury" or "of Tewkesbury," but "the
field by Tewkesbury." A subtle difference, but enough to convince
anyone who has been to that field that Shakespeare wandered there in
his young days, perhaps boating thither from Stratford some summer
day with Ann Hathaway. Was it not Tewkesbury's mustard that Falstaff
hurled at Poins--or was it Pistol? "His wits are as thick as
Tewkesbury mustard," he said. I like to think that Falstaff stayed
at the "Hop Pole" at Tewkesbury on that famous recruiting journey
into Gloucestershire, when he ate a pippin in Squire Shallow's
orchard, and that it was the mustard he got there that made his eyes
water and stuck in his memory. It was certainly at the "Hop Pole"
that Mr. Pickwick stopped for dinner on his journey from Bath. That
is the last time, I think, that anything important happened at
Tewkesbury. Since then it has slept, and one liked to think it was
sleeping in a beautiful mediæval dream, undisturbed by anything more
modern than an occasional stage-coach or the horn of the red-coated
huntsman clattering through the street.
That was how I liked to think of Tewkesbury, and I stayed away from
it, lest I should find it was all cinemas, fried-fish shops and tin
tabernacles. But one day last summer I was journeying by road from
Wales and found Tewkesbury in my path, and that it was convenient to
stay like Mr. Pickwick at the "Hop Pole." And now I know that
Tewkesbury is as good as its name, and that I can go there and see as
perfect a bit of old England as can be seen from the Tamar to the
Tweed. Of course, a city like York will give you infinitely more,
layer on layer of history written on its stones, telling of the
England of the Britons, of the Romans, the Saxons, the Normans, and
so onward.
But these are remains--the splendid litter of the centuries. The
wonderful thing about Tewkesbury is that it is a living whole, a
single town of Tudor England left apparently almost
untouched--certainly unspoiled. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
timbered houses, with their upper floors overhanging the pavements,
line the three broad compact streets, and between these reverend
buildings little doorways admit to multitudinous courts where the
poor live. I daresay it oughtn't to be so. I daresay the courts
ought to be swept away and the people housed with gardens far afield.
But at this moment I am not a social enthusiast, but a lover of the
picturesque, and no doubt it is this compact structure of the place
that has kept it so perfect a survival of the past. By the gardens
and the courts flows Shakespeare's Avon, and just beyond the town it
joins the broad flood of the Severn near the Bloody Field where the
Wars of the Roses ended--a place of rank grass, left, I was told,
untouched since that day of slaughter, nearly half a thousand years
ago. "They're afeard o' what they might find," said the old man who
directed me. And over all is the great Abbey Church, next to Durham
Cathedral perhaps the finest piece of Norman ecclesiastical
architecture in England. Thither from the Bloody Field on that day
of battle long ago were borne the corpses of the two rivals, and
there their bones lie side by side, preaching, for those who care to
hear, more potent sermons on the fitful fever of life than ever came
from the pulpit.
And this beautiful town is set in a landscape as gracious as "a
melody that's sweetly played in tune"--a wide, rich vale, the most
fertile part of England. The sun comes up over the Cotswolds in the
morning, and sets over the great range of the Malverns in the
evening. Between these two sheltering ramparts Tewkesbury lies,
dreaming of the Middle Ages. I daresay it has its worries like any
other place. But I refuse to be a realist about Tewkesbury. I will
indulge my love of romance. I will remember only that as I came away
from the "Hop Pole" a vehicle with four jolly-looking fellows inside
came up tooting a horn that played old-fashioned airs, and bringing
in its train a swarm of boys. And as the boys gathered round the car
one of the jolly-looking fellows put his hand in his pocket and drew
out a heap of coins that he scattered among them. It was in the true
spirit of the place. I fancy Mr. Pickwick did the same thing when he
left the "Hop Pole," and I am sure that Falstaff did--in spite of the
mustard. I would have done the same thing myself, if I had had the
courage and the coppers. The next time I go to Tewkesbury I will
fill my pockets with coppers.