A gruesome carving--Architectural tit-bits--An ancient and
historic hostelry--Chipping Norton--Wychwood--A parson's
story--"Timothying"--Shipton-under-Wychwood--On the Cotswolds--"The
grey old town" of Burford--Two old manor-houses--A new
profession--Highworth--Church relics.
I left Banbury one sunshiny morning, shaking "the very dust" of the
town from my wheels "as a testimony against it," and driving by its
modern cross I took the road before me, letting it lead me where it
would. Out of Banbury I would go the nearest way. The road climbed
Wickham Hill and then dropped sharply down to the quiet old-world
village of Bloxham, that boasts of one of the many "finest parish
churches" in the kingdom. How many are there, I wonder? Certainly it is
a fine church and has a fine spire; this all must grant. I thought it
worthy of inspection. I found its windows guiltless of stained glass
excepting for two in the chancel, but this was not a matter to grieve
about, for I much prefer plain glass to the rubbishy modern stained
variety one too often comes upon, and that so offends the cultured
eye by its garish crudity. A peep of the blue sky, of green trees and
of even the rain, framed by the graceful tracery of a Gothic window,
is more to my mind than visions of stiffly posed angular saints with
ill-fitting halos round their heads; I have always an uneasy feeling
that the halos may tumble off. Not that all modern stained and painted
glass is bad, but most of it is--hopelessly bad; its drawing when
rarely correct is spiritless, it lacks inspiration; its colouring
lacks richness; so unlike the lovely medieval stained glass, it has no
gem-like qualities whatever. I honestly find difficulty in worshipping
in a church with angular saints in ill-fitting robes and halos askew
staring at me! It seems more the idea of a sinner doing penance than a
saint glorified.
I noticed in the church a carved and coloured screen with some faded
figures on it, and on the wall of a side chapel hung two old helmets
and breastplates, somewhat rusty. I love to see ancient armour hanging
in our churches, it takes the mind back to the days of knightly
chivalry and recalls the never-returning romance of them--not the
romance of fancy, but the romance of a past reality. Outside the
church I found some open stone steps leading to two priests' chambers,
one chamber over the other, but what interested me most was its
richly sculptured west front; at the top of this are some good but
unfortunately much weather-worn grinning gargoyles, for Time has been
at work on these and has supplemented the carving of the monks with
his, even, it may be, adding to their grotesqueness. Over and round
the top of the big doorway is a quaint and gruesome representation
of the resurrection, showing dead men rising from their coffins, one
man being represented as lifting the lid of his and peering out
with a look of genuine surprise as though he did not realise what
was happening; others had risen and were kneeling on the ground with
hands folded in the attitude of prayer, and all looked very much
aghast. Skilful indeed was the hand of the medieval sculptor to obtain
these expressions. It was a nightmare in carving, crudely done but
startlingly effective. I am glad I do not attend that church and have
to face each Sunday that terrible story in stone; it is enough to wish
death the end of all. When men could not read the monks talked to them
in carving, though rarely so horribly as this; mostly those monks were
in a jovial mood, and so I prefer them, as witness their grinning
gargoyles, their merry devils, and frequent mirthful representations
of men in the dumps; they were artists of no mean order, and verily,
I believe, in their hearts loved a joke better than a sermon: truly
they joked far better than they preached, for their preaching seems
forced--not so their jokes! To the right of the doorway there is a
curious carving of a man entering the jaws of some unearthly monster;
the drift of this was wholly beyond me--surely it could not have been
intended for Jonah being swallowed by the whale, for the monster's
head, and that was all there was of him, bore no resemblance to that of
a whale or to any creature that ever walked the earth or swam the sea,
unless doubtfully in the prehistoric ages. A local rhyme perpetuates
the character of the spire of this church with two of its near
neighbours thus:
Bloxham for length,
Adderbury for strength,
And King's Sutton for beauty.
The next village of South Newington, a village of stone-built cottages
with thatched roofs, had by way of contrast a very small and poor
church with square-headed windows, not those of the usual pointed
Gothic type. I did not trouble to inspect it, though generally the
poorest little country church can boast of some architectural feature
more or less interesting. I came to a country church with only one
point of interest, and that was a narrow priests' doorway gracefully
designed; I presume it served the priests of past times, but I was told
there was one parson of the good old Georgian days who could not use it
because he was too fat! So he could not enter by the "narrow way," but
had to go through the porch like any sinner.
Doorways in human habitations are often the keynote to the character
of the house, and I was tempted in some of the country villages I
passed through to photograph a few of their ancient doorways, for
they interested me; two of these photographs, reproduced, will be
found in pages farther on. The one of the fourteenth century is
noteworthy, for it is a rare thing for so ancient a doorway to
belong to a dwelling-house. I gathered the house had originally been
a pre-Reformation vicarage; now it makes a quaint and picturesque
home, with its low stone-slated roof, its mullioned windows, and its
ivy-clad walls, boasting too the bloom of age that so beautifies a
building. The other shows a simple type of Tudor doorway with steps
up to it from the village street, but, though so simple and devoid
of ornament, it is so well proportioned that it both pleases and
satisfies the eye. I am rather fond of photographing architectural
bits that take my fancy, and the English country abounds in such bits,
apart from the larger features of buildings. It is curious to note how
different districts afford and abound in special subjects: here you
find ancient pigeon-cotes, often centuries old, of some pretence, and
frequently most picturesque; here the minor items of sun-dials and of
artistically wrought weather-vanes are most in evidence; at another
spot you discover interesting "lion-guarded" gateways and picturesque
doorways; again, it may be, it is the inn signs, with their crudely
painted signboards and their elaborate scroll-work of wrought iron
that surrounds them, that attract your attention; here a gazebo, and
there an ancient roofed-in village fountain, claims your notice; anon
a quaint conceit in carving on church or house, and so forth, not to
waste space in needlessly enumerating the many and varied architectural
tit-bits the wanderer by road constantly comes across, nor need he keep
his eyes very wide open to discover them.
[Illustration: THE PRIEST'S DOORWAY.]
After South Newington we had another long stretch of very lonely
road, but charming on account of its loneliness; the country we
passed through was elevated and undulating and afforded us many fine
and far-reaching prospects. There were wide margins of grass by the
sides of our road, so wide in places as to be almost fields; on these
multitudes of silly sheep were grazing--I say silly, for when they
heard the car approaching they would quietly cross the road in front of
us, first one, then another, then the whole flock in slow procession,
causing us to make many a stop, for sheep and cattle are lords of the
road; they used even to stop a king's mails in the days of yore. These
sheep really seemed to do it out of sheer perversity, and it was the
more provoking as the otherwise forsaken road was so tempting to speed
along, and occasionally, when all is safe, a turn of speed is a very
inspiriting thing; it wipes the cobwebs from the brain, it drives the
good fresh air into the lungs, it stimulates the mind, and braces the
body. Not that I am an advocate of speed, except as a rare indulgence
on lonely roads when there can be no hurt in it, and so you may test
the mettle of your car.
Then we came to the old mail and turnpike highway from London to
Birmingham; this crossed our road at a lonely, bleak, and elevated spot
close to which formerly stood the once flourishing "Chapel House Inn";
the building still stands there indeed, but it has been converted into
a residence: an inn of wide renown in the old road-travelling days,
where the Birmingham coaches changed horses and stopped whilst their
passengers dined; an inn far famous for its fare and its wines--so good
were the latter that it has been said, and I see no reason to doubt the
saying, that "there was a strong temptation to indulge in them which
was rarely resisted, even the king's cellars could produce nothing
better," and there over their wines our ancestors doubtless made merry
as was their wont. At least they enjoyed their lives. It was to this
inn that Dr. Johnson and Boswell came in a postchaise during the early
summer of 1776, and it was then when posting across country that the
former, lover of towns though he was, suddenly exclaimed, "Life has
little better to offer than this." It was on the same day, whilst
dining at the "Chapel House Inn," that the learned doctor delivered
his much-quoted eulogy on inns: "There is no private house in which
people can enjoy themselves so well as in a capital tavern," declared
he. "You are sure of a welcome, and the more noise you make, the more
good things you call for, the more trouble you give, the welcomer you
are. There is nothing that has been invented by man by which so much
happiness is produced as a good tavern or inn." What road traveller
will not re-echo those sentiments?--though I grieve for the one who can
honestly say with Shenstone he has found his "warmest welcome at an
inn," however warm the welcome at his inn may be.
About Chapel House many stories, astonishing and otherwise, truthful
and untruthful, of old days and old ways are told; but though sadly
tempted to relate some of these, I refrain, for I find I am always
writing about inns. It does not do to keep harping on one subject,
to be for ever "spinning your own wheel." I know a man, and a very
good-natured, clubbable man is he, but even he gets bored by listening
to one tune too long; his sole crime is that he is not a golfer--it is
a serious one, I own. Now at his club he frequently meets a golfing
friend who will talk golf and nothing else as long as any man will
listen to him, just as some fishermen and motorists enlarge about their
hobby. Now my friend had listened long times patiently to the golfer's
endless stories, but when one day the golfer complained that he was
suffering badly from a "golfer's arm," my friend exclaimed, "I have
suffered from a worse disease than that, 'golfer's jaw.'" Now I do not
wish my readers to suffer from my "jaw" about inns.
From Chapel House we dropped down to Chipping Norton, a quiet, clean,
contented-looking little town, and that I think sufficiently describes
it. As Clarendon remarked of Aldermaston, it is "a town out of any
great road," though near to one. So perhaps on that account it has no
special history.
Beyond Chipping Norton the country grew lonely again, delightfully,
restfully lonely, and all the way we went to Shipton-under-Wychwood I
do not find a single house marked on my excellent and accurate map.
We were in a bleak stone country, where stone walls take the place
of hedges, and where the landscape bears a Cotswold look. Those who
know the Cotswolds know what that look is, a rarely pleasant one to me
in the summer time, with a sense of openness about it; and how fresh
and free and bracing are the airs that blow over the Cotswold hills.
There you can keep cool in the hottest weather. Is there not an old
saying that at "Stow-on-the-Wold, the wind always blows cold"? It is a
truthful one as far as my experience goes, for I have passed through
Stow on the hottest of summer days and found it none too warm there
even then.
By degrees we descended into a valley and into a warmer atmosphere, and
crossing the little river Evenlode (of which I had not heard before,
so does a driving tour extend one's knowledge of one's own country)
we found ourselves in the attractive and interesting village of
Shipton-under-Wychwood, but of the once wild Wychwood forest, formerly
a royal hunting ground, there is not much to boast of left--sufficient,
however, to earn for it to-day the title of "The Forest Country of
Oxfordshire." There is a story told of a traveller in the pre-railway
days whose road took him close by Wychwood, and he asked of a boy
the name of the wood. "Wychwood," the boy replied. "Which wood?" the
traveller exclaimed. "Why, that wood, you fool," pointing with his
finger to it. Again he received the same reply. Once more the traveller
repeated his query and received the same reply again; whereupon the
traveller grew wroth, and deeming the boy was making fun of him, got
down from his horse and soundly boxed his ears. One story calls forth
another. This I had from a parson on my journey. It appears that one
of his parishioners was over-fond of frequenting the public-house, and
one day finding him coming out of it the parson said to him, "Williams,
why do you go to the public-house so often?" To which the non-abashed
Williams made reply, "Because they sell good ale there," and then
he quoted the Bible to the parson. "You know, sir, the Bible tells
us 'Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's
sake'--now I cannot afford wine, so I drink ale"; and the parson was
hard put how to answer him. It appears that the villagers there
employ the expression "Timothying" when they have been drinking. Still
another story of a parson I was told occurs to me; this may be an old
one, but it is one I have not heard before, nor seen it in print. It
appears that this parson had recently lost his only son, to whom he was
devoted, and was preaching on the text of Abraham offering up his son
Isaac as a sacrifice, and during the sermon his feelings so overcame
him that thus unknowingly he delivered himself: "And it was his son,
his only son; now if it had only been a sheep or a daughter."
I found so much to interest me in Shipton, for there I noticed some
old stone buildings, now forming part of what I took to be a farmyard,
buildings with Gothic windows of good design and a graceful Gothic
doorway in their walls; these could hardly be mere farm-buildings. That
they possessed some history was from their character highly probable,
but of that history, if there was any, I could glean nothing; as
usual, nobody knew anything about them but that "they be very old."
That appears to be the stock reply of the villager when you question
him about such things. Then I wandered to the church a little way
off, and there, for a wonder, I found the clerk within, "tidying up,"
as he called it. There was not much of interest in the church except
a gruesome brass of a figure in a shroud, dated 1548, and a gloomy
priest's chamber above the porch, reached by a dark stone stairway.
This chamber, the clerk told me, was eight hundred years old; in truth
it had an ancient look. Hanging on the wall, though why it should find
a place there I could not understand, was a long-winded and framed
account of the life of "John Foxe the Martyrologist born 1517," leaving
no particulars of his life untold, I gathered from a hasty glance at
it.
[Illustration: DOORWAY OF THE CROWN INN, SHIPTON-UNDER-WYCHWOOD.]
In the village stands a very ancient inn with a weather-worn aspect
and a pathetic look of having seen better days, for its architectural
features suggest it has been a house of some importance in times past.
The old inn possesses a fine, early, and well-preserved high-pointed
Tudor archway that, with its big door below with long exterior hinges,
the quaint little two-lighted window by its side, and the old-fashioned
mounting-block in front, presents a pleasing bit of ancient
architecture. My photograph, here reproduced, will give some idea of
this ancient doorway and of the quaint little window shown to the right
of it. On leaving the village I caught to the left a delightful vision
of a stately, many-gabled, stone-built Elizabethan home, standing in
its pleasant park at a friendly short distance from the road. Shipton
Court was, I learnt, the name of this picture in stone, for it is a
home and a picture in one. Very beautiful did the building look with
the warm sunshine resting upon it, for, though ancient, the house had
a cheerful countenance; there was nothing gloomy or ghostly about it,
nothing mysterious or suggestive of legend, but the word Home was
written largely on it.
Beyond Shipton we rose on to high ground and found ourselves in a
breezy open country. Again our road was a deserted one. Few people
appear to travel the byways of the Cotswolds, yet, within the same
distance of London, nowhere else, I think, can such spacious solitudes
be found, such wide and glorious sweeps of uplands and valleys
stretching far away into dim and dreamy distances where the round hills
seem to melt into the sky. The Cotswolds always delight me, for on
them I realise the sense of solitude, silence, and space--a solitude
that would satisfy an anchorite. Not that I love solitude except as a
restful and occasional change from the burden of too much society; even
when I was enjoying my solitude that day I had still a thought for the
company I hoped to meet that night at my inn, and a thought of home and
family when I returned to them.
After a time we dropped down to the lonely, ancient town of Burford,
forgotten by the railway; but Burford does not mind, it exists quite
well without the railway. There the little town lay before us, hidden
in a hollow, at the foot of the hill, and we looked down upon its
uneven roof-trees, and on the silvery Windrush quietly flowing by. Of
all the old-world Cotswold towns none has a greater charm than Burford.
Thus sings one of its many lovers:
O fair is Moreton in the Marsh
And Stow on the wide wold,
But fairer far is Burford town
With its stone roofs grey and old.
And he calls it "The grey old town on the lonely down." But Burford is
not on the lonely down--far from it; it lies sheltered, half forgotten,
deep in a hollow; a place of peace.
At Burford Speaker Lenthall lived, and his home, painted by Waller,
stands there to-day a little removed from the quiet street--a fine
specimen of Jacobean architecture. Burford church is one of the finest
of the many fine Cotswold churches raised by the pious and prosperous
wool merchants of the country, and contains the truly magnificent
tomb, in a chapel all to itself, of Sir Lawrence Tanfelde (deceased
1625), besides many other fine monuments. The church was turned into a
prison for his captives by Cromwell, after his fight with the Banbury
Levellers here, who outdid Cromwell himself in zeal and struggle
against authority. At "The George Inn" here Charles I. slept on his
retreat from Oxford to Worcester, and on the glass of a window, in
the upper room of the same inn, there was, and may be now for aught
I know, the diamond-scratched name of Samuel Pepys below the date
of 1666, though whether this be genuine or a forgery perhaps no man
now can say; if a forgery, it is a clever imitation of that famous
Diarist's signature. So Burford, though much out of the world to-day,
was not always so. It has witnessed stirring events, it has welcomed
and entertained many famous travellers, and people of renown have lived
within its walls. All the roads into Burford are hilly, all the stages
into the town are long and trying for horses, so that in the past
coaching, posting, and horseback days horses coming there were usually
given an extra allowance of corn; hence probably arose the local
proverb, "To take a Burford bait," meaning to make a big meal.
It was a steep climb out of Burford, at the top of which we crossed
the old highway from London to Gloucester and South Wales that runs
for many miles on the undulating ridge of the hills. The Cotswolds
are little given to change, and much as the country looks now it must
have looked to our coach-travelling ancestors, excepting that to-day
long lines of telegraph poles faithfully follow the road in long array
lessening to the horizon, and the sound of the wind on the wires as we
passed was like the hum of innumerable bees, and it broke pleasantly
the silence of the hills.
At the corner of the highway, just where our road crossed, I noticed a
large board set up with a boldly lettered inscription on it, and this
is what I read there:
Only a few yards to the North is one of the most ancient towns to be
seen in this part of the Country. It has historical associations of
the most interesting nature. Its church is renowned for its beauty.
Thus Burford appeals to the hurrying motorists who speed upon this fine
highway. I should not have thought Burford would have done any such
thing; it appears to me a little undignified; yet without such a notice
the motorists mentioned would doubtless rush along heedless of the
ancient, grey old town that sleeps so peacefully in the hollow below.
Still, I trust other interesting towns off the highway will not take
this as a precedent, else we shall have all England turned into a sort
of gigantic peep-show.
Now we got on to a wilderness of lanes, mostly narrow and rough of
surface, but they took us into an old-world land of stone-built
villages, very ancient, very grey, and past many a time-mellowed
home that hinted of legend. One rambling, neglected-looking old home
especially took my fancy, with its great gables, clustering chimneys,
and shapely stone diamond-paned windows; it had such a look of mystery
about it, high-walled in as it was, and half hidden from the road, and
over its porch the lichens had traced strange hieroglyphics. There
appeared to be no life about the place, though a film of smoke uprose
from one tall, solitary chimney. An ancient manor-house fallen to
decay--
A jolly place in days of old,
But something ails it now; the place is curst.
In its forsaken courtyard stood a tumble-down pigeon-cote of some size,
so that I knew it had been a manor-house, for in the medieval days no
lesser personage than the lord of the manor had the right of pigeonry,
and the pigeon-cote was very ancient. Unfortunately, owing to the high
wall without and the trees that had grown up at their own sweet will
close around it, I was unable satisfactorily to photograph the old
house. Some day I hope to re-discover it and to see if I can trace
anything of its history.
Another fine old manor-house I came to I found has also fallen on
to evil days and was doing duty as a farmhouse, the farmer and
his wife inhabiting but a small portion of it. By happy chance I
came across the farmer in a field and I got a-chatting with him,
first diplomatically about the weather and the crops; neither were
satisfactory to him--I hardly thought they would be--but I listened to
his complaints about both, and to his complaints about the low price
of produce. I listened patiently, and I think my patience pleased--I
had "an axe to grind." Then I led up to the old house and ventured to
remark what a picturesque place it was. "It's all right to look at,"
said he, "but it's not good to live in. It's too big, and it's so
draughty, and it's so cold and damp in winter, it would take a fortune
to keep fires going over it to warm it properly. There's only the wife
and self lives in it, and it would hold a large family, and they would
only fill a part of it. Would you care to take a glance inside?" Now
that is just what I wanted. I said I would. In truth it was a rambling
old house. We entered by a large hall, with a fine old carved oak but
much damaged fireplace at one end, and dog-irons on the wide hearth
below. I could fancy that in the old days, when the lord of the manor
lived there, merry were the doings and the dances that took place in
that now vacant hall; the very thought of such things made it, in its
bareness, look the more forsaken. One wing, where the farmer lived, was
furnished fairly comfortably; the rest of the mansion, divided from it
by the hall, was a very picture of desolation. Even the once strong
oak staircase was shaky, and the floors of the rooms were in places so
rotten that it was hardly safe to tread on them; in some the panelling
was tumbling from the walls, and in others the bare walls were adorned
with cobwebs, erst doubtless covered with tapestry. Such is the fate
of some old houses that have come down in the world, but there are
others that have fortunately found purchasers and have been restored
to something of their ancient dignity. I know at least a good dozen
fine old houses of the Elizabethan and Jacobean days that had fallen to
decay, but which have been so restored by loving hands that they now
form delightful and picturesque homes, and yet have not lost the charm
of their ancient look.
I met a man, when house-hunting for a friend some little time ago,
who confided to me that he made it a business of buying any ruinous
old house, if of any architectural merit and agreeably situated, that
was for sale at a low price--"and many such houses fetch low prices,"
he said, "often, the land apart, not more than the value of their
materials; sometimes these old houses possess a bit of interesting
history, but that goes for nothing"; and purely as a speculation,
though the speculation was not without its pleasure, he skilfully
restored it, as far as possible, to its pristine estate, and he had
done this each time at a considerable profit on the sale of the
restored house. "I call myself a house improver," he said, with a
laugh, "quite a novel and paying profession." This confession was made
to me whilst looking over an interesting old Jacobean house that he had
recently purchased and restored, and exceedingly well had he done it.
"This," he explained, "had been let and occupied as a farmhouse for
years, and little care was taken of it; as you see, it is a picturesque
old building, but it was in a dreadful state when I bought it--indeed
at first I almost thought it was beyond restoration. I have spent a lot
of money on it, but I expect to get it all back with a fair margin of
profit. Here you see an ancient house with a formal garden to match,
and even an old-fashioned sun-dial in it, to say nothing of the Haddon
Hall-like terrace, and all this cost me a lot; but one has to do the
thing properly or you may make a failure of it, and this house is ready
for occupation. Meanwhile I make it my home; I must live somewhere,
and here I abide till I find a purchaser. Then I shall go in search
of another old house to restore. The idea of doing such a thing came
quite accidentally to me; originally I purchased an old house and
restored it for my own occupation, but I had so many unsought offers
for it at a big figure, nearly double what it cost me altogether, that
I was tempted to sell it. Then I bought another old house and restored
it in the same way, and that I sold at a substantial profit; so now
I have made a trade of doing this. Look at the panelling of these
rooms, all of seasoned oak, a careful copy of old panelling of the
period, every bit done by adze and hand; the hinges and locks, too,
are copies of old ones I found in the house. I have opened up all the
fireplaces, and on removing the modern grates I luckily discovered the
open hearths behind; the firebacks are all castings from old ones, and
the fire-dogs are copies too from fine past specimens. The whole thing
has been properly done. I have pulled down all the plaster ceilings and
revealed the old rafters. The one or two sash windows I found I have
replaced with mullion ones, so now you have before you the house much
as it looked when first built over two centuries ago." This was quite
a new way to me of making a living, or a fortune, but one learns many
unexpected things when travelling by road.
To some there is a potent magnetism, an irresistible fascination about
certain old houses, a subtle influence from which there is no escape.
I confess to it myself. I have lived in them and love them. Of course
there are old houses and old houses; not all possess this peculiar
power to charm, and only those of the Elizabethan or Jacobean period,
with their panelled halls and chambers, their beamed ceilings, their
great gables, their clustering chimneys, their many mullioned windows
and big fireplaces, hold it over me. Those of the Queen Anne or
Georgian age leave me cold; they are too formal; they lack the sense
of mystery and atmosphere of romance. The old moated granges pictured
in the Christmas numbers of the _Illustrated London News_ of many
years back, how they charmed me when a boy! What romances about them
did not I weave to myself! I thought they were only artists' dreams,
but since I have happily discovered them actually existing. I shall
never forget the thrill of delightful surprise the first discovery of
the kind gave me; I could hardly believe my eyes, yet there before
me stood an ancient moated home, grey, gabled, and ivy-clad, with a
broken bell-turret on its lichen-laden roof, its leaded-light windows
reflecting the sunlight, and its big chimney-stacks rising boldly up
against the sky; nor shall I forget the special moment when I crossed
the deep moat by a moss-grown bridge and knocked at the great oak and
nail-studded door. I felt like one in a dream, that this could not be a
reality, and that I should suddenly wake up and find myself deceived,
disenchanted, and in the commonplace world again. Happily it was no
vain imagining.
But I am digressing. We were wandering on winding lanes south of
Burford when I began this overlong digression, and on that maze of
lanes we wandered for some miles--many they seemed to me; first in one
direction, then in another we went, without arriving anywhere. All the
same, it was very pleasant wandering through a land purely given over
to agriculture, somnolent and restful. At last we reached a fair road,
and this took us to the little Wiltshire town of Highworth, boldly set
on a hill, so that we could see it from afar long before we came to
it, its grey church tower and irregular roofed houses outlined sharply
against the sky. Seen thus the town looked like those one finds in
early engravings.
A clean, homely, dreamy little town is Highworth, very ancient, even
quaint in parts, and this in spite of the fact that a branch line of
railway has found it out; but so far the railway does not appear to
have disturbed its old-world tranquillity There I halted a while at
"The Saracen's Head," a relic of the old coaching days, and the inn,
like the town, seemed half asleep. Then I took a quiet walk round
the place, and eventually found my way to the church; there appeared
to be nothing else noteworthy there except the old houses and old
shops, and these, though they grouped well and made a picturesque
whole, were not individually of much interest. So it was I strolled
into the church, and there I found the clerk: twice running had I
done this unusual thing. I bade him good-morning. He told me he was
looking after a bat that had got into the roof of the building and
was making a mess there. I have heard of owls in a church tower, but
here was a bat in the church itself. "How are you going to catch the
bat?" queried I, for he had no ladder, and he believed the bat was
somewhere hidden in the beams above. "That's just what I want to
know," he replied. "I'm thinking it over; meanwhile I'll show you the
church if you like." I thought he might as well do this whilst he was
thinking, so I accepted his services. The first thing I noticed was
a cannon-ball hanging by three chains from a bracket on the wall;
there must be some story attached to that, I thought, and there was.
It was another of Cromwell's countless cannon-balls--I have long ago
lost count of the many I have seen. "That," said the clerk, "was fired
against the church by Cromwell, and it lodged in the tower. I can
show you the hole it made there where it struck." Then I learnt that
the church had been fortified and held for Charles I., was besieged
by the Parliamentarians, who eventually captured it, taking seventy
prisoners; the earthworks a little beyond the town, where the cannon
was mounted, are still to be made out. Those were stirring times for
the countryside; the district between Oxford and Worcester had its full
share in them, and in some parts of it the fighting raged furiously.
"Now I think I can show you something that will interest you,"
exclaimed the clerk; then he pointed out the ancient oak and much
worm-eaten stalls (of the thirteenth century, he said they were), and
called my attention to a quaint carving on one of them of a mermaid
admiring herself in a handglass; but what interested me more than
this were the ancient helmet and sword of the Baston family suspended
against the wall, and still of greater interest a silk tabard belonging
to the same Baston family that was worn over the armour with a
coat-of-arms worked on it: this was needful in order to distinguish
the mail-clad warriors one from another. The tabard, preserved now
in a glass frame, is much decayed and faded, but still a lion boldly
worked thereon is visible. I understood that this tabard was discovered
stowed away somewhere in the church, and that the vicar had it framed
and hung up there, and I commend the action of the vicar. Many of our
old churches contain, to this day, treasures of various kinds hidden
away and forgotten in oak chests and cupboards, and even lost amongst
lumber. There was, too, a priest-chamber belonging to the church, with
the usual stone steps leading to it, but this special chamber had the
uncommon luxury of a washing place. I noticed when leaving a curious
bit of bold sculpture over the entrance doorway; in the dim light of
the moment I could not very certainly make out what the carving was
about, but I read a notice beneath it stating that it was probably a
Norman Tympanon. There I bade the clerk good-day. I wondered how he was
going to catch that bat!