hard to choose among them, and Bath itself was so constantly pleasing
that it was a serious loss to leave it for a day, for an hour. I do not
know, now, why we should have gone first, when we gathered force to
break the charm, to Bradford-on-Avon. If we did not go first to Wells it
was perhaps because we balanced the merits of an eighth-century Saxon
Chapel against those of a twelfth-century Cathedral, and felt that the
chapel had prior claim. Possibly, spoiled as we were by the
accessibility of places in England, and relaxed as we were by the air of
Bath, we shrank from spending five or six hours in the run to Wells when
we could get to and from Bradford in little or no time. Wells is one of
the exceptions to the rule that in England everything is within easy
reach from everywhere, or else Bath is an exception among the places
that Wells is within easy reach of. At any rate we were at Bradford
almost before we knew it, or knew anything of its history, which there
is really a good deal of.
The best of this history seems to be that when in the year 652 the Saxon
King of Wessex overcame the Britons in a signal victory, he did not
exterminate the survivors, but allowed them to become the
fellow-subjects of their Saxon conquerors under his rule. Just how
great a blessing this was it would not be easy to say at the actual
distance of time, but it seems to have been thought a good deal of a
blessing for a King of Wessex to bestow. To crown it, some fifty years
later, a monastery was founded in Bradford, by St. Aldhelm, a nephew of
the King. A chapel was built on the site of the uncle’s battle with the
Britons, and such as it was then such we now saw it, the vicar of the
parish having not long ago rescued it from its irreligious uses as a
cottage dwelling and a free school, and restored it spiritually and
materially to its original function. It is precious for being the only
old church in England which is wholly unchanged in form, and though very
small and very rude it is pathetically interesting. It seemed somehow
much older than many monuments of my acquaintance which greatly
antedated it; much older, say, than the Roman remains at Bath, for it is
a relic of the remote beginning of an order of things, and not the
remnant of a fading civilization. No doubt the Saxons who built it on
the low hill slope where it stands, in a rude semblance of the Roman
churches which were the only models of Christian architecture they could
have seen, thought it an edifice of the dignity since imparted to it by
the lapse of centuries. Without, the grass grew close to its
foundations, in the narrow plot of ground about it, and the sturdy
little fabric showed its Romanesque forms in the gray stone pierced by
mere slits of windows, which gave so faint a light within that, after
entering, one must wait a moment before attempting to move about in the
cramped, dungeon-like space. With the simple altar, and the chairs set
before it for worshippers, it gave an awful sense of that English
continuity on which political and religious changes vainly
[Illustration: SAXON CHAPEL AT BRADFORD
Wholly unchanged in form since it was built in the eighth century]
break: the parts knit themselves together again, and transmit the
original consciousness from age to age. The type of beauty in the child
who sold us permits to see the chapel and followed us into it was in
like manner that of the Saxon maids whose hulking fathers had beaten in
battle the fierce, dark little Britons on that spot twelve hundred years
before: the same blazing red cheeks, the same blue, blue eyes, the same
sunny hair which has always had to make up for the want of other
sunniness in that dim clime, falling round the fair neck. No doubt the
snuffles with which the pretty creature suffered were also of the same
date and had descended from mother to daughter in the thirty generations
dwelling in just such stone-cold stone cottages as that where we found
her. It was one of a row of cottages near the chapel, of a red-tiled,
many-gabled, leaden-sashed, diamond-paned picturesqueness that I have
never seen surpassed out of the theatre, or a Kate Greenaway picture,
and was damp with the immemorial dampness that inundated us from the
open door when we approached. What perpetuity of colds in the head must
be the lot of youths in such abodes; how rheumatism must run riot among
the joints of age in the very beds and chimney-corners! Better, it
sometimes seemed, the greatest ugliness ever devised by a Yankee
carpenter in dry and comfortable wood than the deadly poetry of such
dwellings.
But there were actually some wooden houses in Bradford, or partially
wooden, which the driver of our fly took us to see when we had otherwise
exhausted the place. They had the timbered gables of the Tudor times
when the English seemed to build with an instinct for domestic comfort
earlier unknown and later lost; but otherwise Bradford was of stone,
stony. It studded the slopes of its broken uplands with warts and knots
of little dwellings, and had a certain foreignness, possibly imparted by
the long abode of the Flemish cloth-workers whom an enterprising
manufacturer invited to the place centuries before, and whose skill
established its ancient industry in a finer product and a greater
prosperity. Now, one reads, the competition of the same art in Yorkshire
has reduced the weavers of Bradford to a fifth of their number fifty
years ago. But the presence of the Flemings was so influential in the
seventeenth century that they had a quarter of their own, and altogether
there were intimations in Bradford so Continental, the raw rainy day of
our visit, that I thought if it could have had a little sun on it there
were moments when it might have looked Italian.
Perhaps not, and I do not mean that in its own way it was not
delightful. We wandered from the station into it by a bridge over the
Avon that was all a bridge could be asked to be by the most exacting
tourist, who could not have asked more, midway, than a guardhouse which
had become a chapel, and then a lock-up, and finally an object of
interest merely. When we had got well into the town, and wanted a
carriage, we were taken in charge by the kindest policeman that ever
befriended strangers. If not the only policeman in Bradford, he was the
only one on duty, and his duty was mainly, as it seemed, to do us any
pleasure he could. He told us where we could find a fly, and not content
with this, he went in person with us to the stable-yard, and did not
leave us till he had made a boy come out and promise us a fly
immediately. Never, even when girdled by the protecting arm of a blue
giant resolved to bring my gray hairs in safety to some thither side of
Fifth Avenue or Broadway, have I known such sweetness in a minister of
the law. We could only thank him again and again, and vainly wish that
we might do something for him in return. But what can one do for a
policeman except offer him a cigar? But if one does not smoke?
The stable-boy seemed a well-grown lad in that character, but when he
put on a metal-buttoned coat and a top-hat, and coachman’s boots in
honor of us, he shrank into the smallest-sized man. It seemed the
harder, therefore, that when he proposed to bow us into the fly with fit
dignity, and pulled open the door, it should come off its hinge and hang
by its handle from his grasp. But we did what we could to ignore the
mortifying incident, and after that we abetted him in always letting us
out on the other side.
His intelligence was creditable to him as a large boy, if not as a small
man, and but for him we should not have seen those timbered houses which
were in a street dreadfully called, with the English frankness which
never spares the sensibilities of strangers, The Shambles. With us
shambles are only known in tragic poetry; in real life they veil their
horror in delicate French and become _abattoirs_; but as that street in
Bradford was probably the Shambles in 652, the year of the great Saxon
victory over the Britons, it was still so called in the year of our
visit, 1904. We did not complain; the houses were not so wooden as we
could have wished for the sake of the rheumatism and snuffles within,
but they must have been drier than houses entirely of stone. Besides we
had just come warm from the Italian aspect of one of the most charming
houses I saw in England, and we did not really much mind the discomfort
of others. The house was that Kingston House, world-famous for having
been reproduced in papier-maché at the last Universal Exposition in
Paris, which a wealthy cloth-manufacturer had had built for himself
about 1600 by Giovanni of Padua, and it was full of beautiful Italian
feeling in an English environment. Masses of cold, cold evergreen shrubs
hide it from the street, but at the moment the rain was briefly
intermitting, and we surprised it, as it were, in a sort of reverie of
the South under an afternoon sky, hesitating from gray to blue. At this
happy instant the place was embellished by a peacock, sweeping with
outspread tail the farthest green of a long velvet lawn, and lending the
splendor of his color to a picture richly framed by a stretch of
balustrade. The house, with English shyness (which it surely might have
overcome after being shown as the most beautiful house in England),
faced away from the street, towards a garden which sloped downward from
it, towards a dove-cote with pigeons in red and mauve cooing about its
eaves and roofs, and mingling their deep-throated sighs with the murmur
of a mill somewhere beyond the Avon.
There were other beautiful and famous houses not far from Bradford, but
our afternoon was waning, and we consoled ourselves as we could with the
old Barton Barn, which was built two hundred years after King Etheldred
had given the manor to the abbess of Shaftesbury, and became locally
known as the tithe-barn from its use in receiving the dues of the church
in kind during the long simple centuries when they were so paid. It is a
vast, stately structure, and is now used for the cow-barn of a dairy
farmer, whose unkempt cattle stood about, knee-deep in the manure, with
the caked and clotted hides which the West of England cattle seem to
wear all winter. It did not look such a place as one would like to get
milk from in America, but if we could have that
[Illustration: KINGSTON HOUSE, BRADFORD
Built by Giovanni of Padua, about 1600]
old cow-barn, without the cows, at home, I think we might gainfully
exchange our neatest and wholesomest dairy for it. The rich
superabundance of the past in England is what always strikes one, and
the piety with which the past is preserved and restored promises more
and more of antiquity. I am sure the Barton Barn at Bradford is only
waiting for some public-spirited magnate who will yet drive the untidy
kine from its shelter, clean up, and sod and plant its yard, and with
the help of some reverent architect renew it in the image of its prime,
and stock it as a museum with the various kinds of tithes which in the
ages of faith the neighboring churls used to pay into it for the comfort
of the clergy here, and the good of their own souls hereafter.
When we got well away from the tithe-barn we felt the need of tea, and
we walked back from the station where our large boy, or little man, had
put us down, to the shop of a green-grocer, which is probably the most
twentieth-century building in Bradford. It is altogether of wood, and
behind the shop, where the vegetables vaunted themselves in all the
variety of cabbage, there is a clean little room, with the walls and
roof sheathed in matched and painted pine. In this cheerful place, two
rustics, a man and a boy, were drinking tea at the only table, but at
our coming they politely choked down all the tea that was in their cups,
and in spite of our entreaties hurried out with their cheeks bulged by
what was left of their bread and butter. It was too bad, we murmured,
but our hostess maintained that her late guests had really done, and she
welcomed us with a hospitality rendered precious by her dusting off the
chairs for us with her apron: I do not know that I had ever had that
done for me before, and it seemed very romantic, and very English. The
tea and butter were English too, and excellent, as they almost
unfailingly are in England, no matter how poor the place where they are
supplied, and the bread was no worse than usual. In a morsel of garden
under the window some gillyflowers were in bloom, and when we expressed
our surprise, the kind woman went out and gathered some for us: they
bloomed pretty well all the winter, there, she said; but let not this
give the fond reader too glowing an idea of the winter’s warmth in the
West of England. It only proves how sturdy the English flowers are, and
how much raw cold they can stand without turning a petal.
Before our train went, we had time to go a longish walk, which we took
through some pleasant, rather new, streets of small houses, each with
its gardened front-yard hedged about it with holly or laurel, and
looking a good, dull, peaceful home. It may really have been neither,
and life may have been as wild, and bad, and fascinating in those
streets as in the streets of any American town of the same population as
Bradford. There was everything in the charming old place to make life
easy; good shops, of all kinds, abundant provisions, stores, and not too
many licensed victuallers, mostly women, privileged to sell wine and
spirits. Yet, as the twilight began to fall, Bradford seemed very
lonely, and we thought with terror, what if we should miss our train
back to Bath! We got to the station, however, in time to cower half an
hour over a grate in which the Company had munificently had a fire early
in the day; and to correct by closer observation of an elderly pair an
error which had flattered our national pride at the time of our arrival.
In hurrying away to get the only fly at the station the lady had then
fallen down and the gentleman had kept on, leaving her to pick herself
up as she could, while he secured the fly. Perhaps he had not noticed
her falling, but we chose to think the incident very characteristically
middle-class English; for all we knew it might be a betrayal of the way
all the English treated their wives. Now the same couple arrived to take
the train with us for Bath, and we heard them censuring its retard in
accents unmistakably American! We fell from our superiority to our
English half-brothers instantly; and I think the little experience was
useful in confirming me in the resolution throughout my English travels
to practise that slowness in sentencing and executing offenders against
one’s native ideals and standards which has always been the conspicuous
ornament of English travellers among ourselves.
The day that we drove out from Bath to a certain charming old house
which I wish I could impart my sense of, but which I will at once own
the object of a fond despair, was apparently warm and bright, but was
really dim and cold. That is, the warmth and brightness were
superficial, while the cold and dimness were structural. The fields on
either side of the road were mostly level, though here and there they
dipped or rose, delicately green in their diaphanous garment of winter
wheat, or more substantially clad in the grass which the winter’s cold
had not been great enough to embrown. Here and there were spaces of
woodland, withdrawn rather afar from our course, except where the trees
of an avenue led up from the highway to some unseen mansion. To complete
the impression you must always, under the tender blue sky, thickly
archipelagoed with whity-brown clouds, have rooks sailing and dreamily
scolding, except where they wake into a loud clamor among the leafless
tops surrounding some infrequent roof. There are flights of starlings
suddenly winging from the pastures, where the cows with their untidily
caked and clotted hides are grazing, and the sheep are idling over the
chopped turnips, and the young lambs are shivering with plaintive cries.
Amid their lamentations the singing of birds makes itself heard; the
singing of larks, or the singing of robins, Heaven knows which, but
always angelically sweet. The bare hedges cross and recross the fields,
and follow the hard, smooth road in lines unbroken save near some
village of gray walls and red roofs, topped by an ancient church. In the
background, over a stretch of embankment or along the side of a low
hill, sweeps a swift train of little English cars, with a soft whirring
sound, as unlike the giant roar of one of our expresses as it is unlike
the harsh clatter of a French _rapide_. The white plumes of steam
stretch after it in vain; break, and float thinner and thinner over the
track behind.
There were, except in the villages, very few houses; and we met even
fewer vehicles. There was one family carriage, with the family in it,
and a sort of tranter’s wagon somewhere out of Hardy’s enchanted pages,
with a friendly company of neighbors going to Bath inside it. At one
exciting moment there was a lady in a Bath chair driving a donkey
violently along the side of the road. A man slashing and wattling the
lines of hedge, or trimming the turf beside the foot-path, left his
place in literature, and came to life as the hedger and ditcher we had
always read of. Beneath the hedges here and there very “rathe primroses”
peered out intrepidly, like venturesome live things poising between
further advance and retreat. The road was admirable, but it seemed
strange that so few people used it. The order in which it was kept was
certainly worthy of constant travel, and we noted that from point to
point there was a walled space beside it for the storage of road-mending
material. At home we should dump the broken stone in the gutter near
the place that needed mending, or on the face of the highway, but in
England, where everything is so static, and the unhurried dynamic
activities are from everlasting to everlasting, a place is specially
provided for broken stone, and the broken stone is kept there.
The drive from Bath to our destination was twelve miles, and the friend
who was to be our host for the day had come as far on his wheel to ask
us. It was the first of many surprises in the continued use of the
bicycle which were destined to confound strangers from a land whose
entire population seemed to go bicycle-mad a few years ago, and where
now they are so wholly recovered that the wheel is almost as obsolete as
the russet shoe. As both the wheel and the russet shoe are excellent
things in their way, though no American could now wear the one or use
the other without something like social suicide, the English continue to
employ them with great comfort and entire self-respect. They fail so
wholly to understand why either should have gone out with us that one
becomes rather ashamed to explain that it was for the same reason that
they came in, merely because everybody had them.
Our friend had given us explicit directions for our journey, and it was
well that he did so, for we had two turnings to take on that lonely
road, and there were few passers whom we could ask our way. We really
made the driver ask it, and he did not like to do it, for he felt, as we
did, that he ought to know it. I am afraid he was not a very active
intelligence, and I doubt if he had ever before been required to say
what so many birds and flowers were. I think he named most of them at
random, and when it came at last to a very common white flower, he
boldly said that he had forgotten what it was. As we drew near the end
of our journey he grew more anxiously complicated in the knowledge of
our destination which he acquired. But he triumphed finally in the
successive parleys held to determine the site of a house which had been
in its place seven or eight hundred years, and might, in that time have
ceased to be a matter of doubt even among the farther neighbors. It was
with pride on his part and pleasure on ours that suddenly and most
unexpectedly, when within a few yards of it, he divined the true way,
and drove into the court-yard of what had at times been the dower-house,
where we were to find our host and guide to the greater mansion.
As this house is a type of many old dower-houses I will be so intimate
as to say that you enter it from the level of the ground outside, such a
thing as under-pinning to lift the floor from the earth and to make an
air-space below being still vaguely known in England, and in former
times apparently unheard of. But when once within you are aware of a
charm which keeps such houses in the inviolate form of the past; and
this one was warmed for us by a hospitality which refined itself down to
the detail of a black cat basking before the grate: a black cat that
promptly demanded milk after our luncheon, but politely waited to be
asked to the saucer when it was brought. From the long room which looked
so much a study that I will not call it differently, the windows opened
on the shrubberies and lawns and gardens that surround such houses in
fiction, and keep them so visionary to the comer who has known them
nowhere else that it would be easy to transgress the bounds a guest must
set himself, and speak as freely of the people he met there as if they
were persons in a pleasant book. Two of them, kindred of the
[Illustration: SUTTON COURT, ONE OF ENGLAND’S HISTORIC HOUSES]
manor-house and of the great house near, had come from three or four
miles away on their wheels. Our host himself, the youngest son of the
great house, was a painter, by passion as well as by profession, and a
reviewer of books on art, such as plentifully bestrewed his table and
forbade us to think of the place in the ordinary terms as a
drawing-room. It seemed to me characteristic of the convenient insular
distances that here, far in the West, almost on the Welsh border, he
should be doing this work for a great London periodical, in as direct
touch with the metropolis as if he dwelt hard by the Park, and could
walk in fifteen minutes to any latest exhibition of pictures.
When he took us after luncheon almost as long a walk to his studio, I
fancied that I was feeling England under my feet as I had not before. We
passed through a gray hamlet of ten or a dozen stone cottages, where,
behind or above their dooryard hedges, they had gradually in the long
ages clustered near the great house, and a little cottage girl, who was
like a verse of Wordsworth, met us, and bidding us good-day, surprised
us by dropping a courtesy. It surprised even our friends, who spoke of
it as if it were almost the last courtesy dropped in England, and made
me wish I could pick it up, and put it in my note-book, to grace some
such poor page as this: so pretty was it, so shy, so dear, with such a
dip of the suddenly weakening little knees.
We were then on our way to see first the small gray church which had
been in its place among the ancient graves from some such hoary eld as
English churches dream of in like places all over the land, and make our
very faith seem so recent a thing. It was in a manner the family chapel,
but it was also the spiritual home of the lowlier lives of village and
farm, and was shared with them in the reciprocal kindness common in
that English world of enduring ties. There for ages the parish folk had
all been christened, and all married, and all buried, and there in due
time they had been or would be forgotten. The edifice was kept in fit
repair by the joint piety of rich and poor, with the lion’s share of the
expense rightfully falling to the rich, as in such cases it always does
in England; and within and without the church the affection of the
central family had made itself felt and seen, since the Christian
symbols were first rudely graven in the stone of the square
church-tower.