Title: The Warsickshire Avon
Author: Quiller-Couch, Arthur
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Warsickshire Avon" ***

                     [Illustration: NASEBY CHURCH]



                            [Illustration:

                                 _The
                             Warwickshire
                                 Avon_

                               _Notes by
                         A. T. Quiller-Couch_

                           _Illustrations by
                            Alfred Parsons_

                               _New York
                           Harper & Brothers
                                 1892_]



                COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY HARPER & BROTHERS.

                        _All rights reserved._

[Illustration: _To all the Friends with whom I have spent happy hours on
        the Avon the drawings in this book are dedicated A.P._]



                 [Illustration: THE WARWICKSHIRE AVON]


Our journey opens in Northamptonshire, and in that season when the year
grows ancient,

    “Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth
     Of trembling winter.”

In the stubble the crack! crack! of a stray gun speaks, now and again,
of partridge-time. Over the pastures, undulating with ridge and furrow,
where the black oxen feed, patches of gloom and gleam are scurrying as
the wind--westerly, with a touch of north--chases the light showers
under a vivid sun. Along the drab road darts a bullfinch, his family
after him; pauses a moment among the dogrose berries; is off again, and
lost in the dazzle ahead.

A high grassy ridge stands up from the plain; and upon it, white and
salient against a dark cloud, the spire of a village church. From its
belfry, says the sexton, you may spy forty parishes: but more important
are the few cottages immediately below. They seem conspicuously
inglorious: yet their name is written large in the histories. It speaks
of a bright June day when along this ridge--then unenclosed and
scattered with broom and heath flowers--the rattle of musketry and
outcries of battle rolled from morning to late afternoon, by which time
was lost a king with his kingdom. For the village is Naseby. Here, by
the market green, the Parliamentarians ranged their baggage. Yonder, on
Mill Hill and Broad Moor, with just a hollow between, the two armies
faced each other; the royalists with bean-stalks in their hats, their
enemies with badges of white linen. To the left, Sulby hedges were lined
with Ireton’s dragoons. And the rest is an old story: Rupert, tardily
returning from a headlong charge, finds no “cause” left to befriend, no
foe to fight. While his men were pillaging, Cromwell has snatched the
day. His Majesty is flying through Market-Harborough towards Leicester,
and thither along the dusty roads his beaten regiments trail after him,
with the Ironsides at their heels, hewing hip and thigh.

[Illustration: NASEBY MONUMENT]

An obelisk, set about with thorn-bushes and shaded by oak and birch,
marks the battle-field. It rests on a base of rough moss-grown stones,
and holds out “a useful lesson to British kings never to exceed the
bounds of their just prerogative, and to British subjects never to
swerve from the allegiance due to their legitimate monarch.” And the
advice is well meant, no doubt; but, as the Watch asked of Dogberry,
“How if they will not?”

[Illustration: _The Avon from Noseby field to Wolston_]

Naseby, however, has another boast. Here, beside the monument, we are
standing on the water-shed of England. In the fields below rise many
little springs, whereof those to the south and east unite to form the
Ise brook, which runs into the Nen, and so find their goal in the North
Sea; those to the west form the Avon, and seek the British Channel. And
it is westward that we turn our faces--we, whom you shall briefly know
as P. and Q.; for the business that brings us to Naseby is to find here
the source of Shakespeare’s Avon, and so follow its windings downward to
the Severn.

[Illustration: SULBY ABBEY]

The source is modest enough, being but a well amid the “good cabbage” of
the inn garden. To-day, a basin of mere brick encloses it; but in 1823,
the date of the obelisk, some person of refinement would adorn also Avon
Well; and procured from Mr. Groggan of London a Swan of Avon in plaster;
and Mr. Groggan contrived that the water should gush elegantly from her
bill, but not for long. For the small boy came with stones, after his
kind; and now, sans wing, sans head, sans everything, she crouches among
the cabbages, “a rare bird upon earth.”

From Avon Well the spring flows to the northwest, and we follow it
through “wide-skirted meads” dotted with rubbing-posts and divided by
stiff ox fences (the bullfinches of the fox-hunter--for we are in the
famous Pytchley country), past a broad reservoir fringed with reed and
poplars, and so through more pastures to Sulby Abbey. And always, as we
look back, Naseby spire marks our starting-point. About three miles
down, the runnel has grown to a respectable brook, quite large enough to
have kept supplied the abbey fish-ponds.

[Illustration: WELFORD CANAL HOUSE]

On the site of this abbey--founded circa 1155 by William de Wydeville in
honor of the Blessed Virgin--now stands a red-brick farm-house, passably
old, and coated with ivy. Of the vanished building it conserves but two
relics--a stone coffin and the floriated cover of another. The course of
the stream beside it, and for some way below, is traced by the
thorn-bushes under which it winds (in springtime how pleasantly!) until
Welford is reached--a small brick village. Here, after rioting awhile in
a maze of spendthrift channels, it recombines its waters to run under
its first bridge, and begin a sober life by supplying a branch of the
Grand Junction Canal. A round-house at the canal’s head forms, with the
bridge, what Mr. Samuel Ireland, in his Beauties of the Warwickshire
Avon (1795), calls “an agreeable landscape, giving that sort of view
which, being simple in itself, seldom fails to constitute elegance.”
Rather, to our thinking, the landscape’s beauty lies in its suggestion,
in that here we touch the true heart of the country life; of quiet
nights dividing slow, familiar days, during which man and man’s work
grow steeped in the soil’s complexion, secure of all but

[Illustration: SWING-BRIDGE NEAR WELFORD]

        “the penalty of Adam,
    The season’s difference.”

It is enough that we are grateful for it as we pass on down the valley
where the canal and stream run side by side--the canal demurely between
straight banks, the stream below trying always how many curves it can
make in each field, until quieted for a while by the dam of a little
red-brick mill, set down all alone in the brilliant green. The
thorn-bushes are giving place to willows--not such as fringe the Thames,
but gray trees of a smaller leaf, and, by your leave, more beautiful.
Our walk as we follow the towpath of the canal, having the river on our
left, is full of peaceful incidents and subtle revelations of color--a
lock, a quaint swing-bridge, a swallow taking the sunlight on his breast
as he skims between us and the inky clouds, a white horse emphasizing
the meadow’s verdure. The next field holds a group of sable--a flock of
rooks, a pair of black horses, a dozen velvet-black oxen, beside whom
the thirteenth ox seems consciously indecorous in a half-mourning suit
of iron-gray. Next, from a hawthorn “total gules” with autumn berries,
we start six magpies; and so, like Christian, “give three skips and go
on singing” beneath the spires and towers of this and that small village
(Welford and North and South Kilworth) that look down from the edging
hills.

[Illustration: STANFORD HALL]

Below South Kilworth, where a windmill crowns the upland, the valley
turns southward, and we leave the canal to track the Avon again, that
here is choked with rushes. For a mile or two we pursue it, now jumping,
now crossing by a timely pole or hurdle, from Northamptonshire into
Leicestershire and back (for the stream divides these counties), until
it enters the grounds of Stanford Hall, and under the yellowing
chestnuts of the park grows suddenly a dignified sheet of water, with
real swans.

Stanford Hall (the seat of Lord Bray) is, according to Ireland,
“spacious, but wants those pictorial decorations that would render it an
object of attention to the traveller of taste.” But to us, who saw it in
the waning daylight, the comfortable square house seemed full of quiet
charm, as did the squat perpendicular church, untouched by the restorer,
and backed by a grassy mound that rises to the eastern window, and the
two bridges (the older one disused) under which the Avon leaves the
park. A twisted wych-elm divides them, its roots set among broad burdock
leaves.

[Illustration: ROMAN CAMP, LILBURNE]

Below Stanford the stream contracts again, and again meanders among
black cattle and green fields to Lilburne. Here it winds past a
congeries of grassy mounds, dotted now with black-faced sheep, that was
once a Roman encampment, the Tripontium mentioned by the emperor
Antoninus in his journey from London to Lincoln. Climbing to the
eminence of the prætorium and gazing westward, we see on the high ground
two beech-crowned tumuli side by side, clearly an outpost or speculum
overlooking Watling Street, the Roman road that passes just beyond the
ridge “from Dover into Chestre.” This same high ground is the eastern
hem of Dunsmore Heath, once so dismally ravaged by the Dun Cow of
legend, till Guy of Warwick rode out and slew her in single combat. The
heath, a long ridge of lias bordering our river to the south for many
miles to come, is now enclosed and tilled; but its straggling cottages,
duck ponds, and furze clumps still suggest the time when all was common
land.

At our feet, close under the encampment, an antique bridge crosses Avon.
Beside it is hollowed a sheep-washing pool, and across the road stands a
little church. Tempted by its elaborate window mouldings, we poke our
heads in at the door, but at once withdraw them to cough and sneeze. The
place is given over to dense smoke and a small decent man, who says that
a service will be held in ten minutes, and what to do with the stove he
doesn’t know. So we leave him, and pass on, trudging towards Catthorpe,
a mile below.

A wooden paling, once green, but subdued by years to all delicate tints,
fronts the village street. Behind, in a garden of cypress and lilacs,
lies the old vicarage, with deep bow-windows sunk level with the turf, a
noteworthy house. For John Dyer, author of “Grongar Hill”--“Bard of the
Fleece,” as Wordsworth hails him--held Catthorpe living for a few years
in the last century; and here, while his friends

        “in the town, in the busy, gay town,
    Forgot such a man as John Dyer,”

looked out on this gray garden wall, over which the fig-tree clambers,
and “relished versing.” The church stands close by, a ragged cedar
beside it, an elm drooping before its plain tower. We take a long look
before descending again to the river, like Dyer

        “resolved, this charming day,
    Into the open fields to stray,
    And have no roof above our head
    But that whereon the gods do tread.”

Just below Catthorpe, by a long line of arches called Dow

[Illustration: STANFORD CHURCH]

(or Dove) Bridge, Watling Street pushes across the river with Roman
directness. This bridge marks the meeting-point of three counties, for
beyond it we step into Warwickshire. It is indifferently modern, yet
“the scene, though simple, aided by a group of cattle then passing, had
sufficient attraction in the meridian of a summer sun to induce” the
egregious Ireland “to attempt a sketch of it as a picturesque view,” and
supply us with a sentence to be quoted a thousand times during our
voyage, and always with ribald appreciation.

[Illustration: CATTHORPE CHURCH]

The valley narrows as we draw near Rugby. Clifton on Dunsmore, eminent
by situation only, stands boldly up on the left, and under it, by
Clifton mill, the stream runs down to Brownsover. Brownsover too has its
mill, with a pool and cluster of wych-elms below. And hard by we find
(as we think) Tom Brown’s willow, the tree which wouldn’t “throw out
straight hickory shoots twelve feet long, with no leaves, worse luck!”
where Tom sat aloft, and “Velveteens,” the keeper, below, through that
soft, hazy day in the Mayfly season, till the sun came slanting through
the branches, and told of locking-up near at hand. We are hushed as we
stand before it, and taste the reward of such as “identify.”

[Illustration: DOW BRIDGE ON WATLING STREET]

And now, just ahead, on the same line of hill as Clifton, stands the
town of Rugby. No good view of it can be found from the river-side, for
the middle distance is always a straight line of railway sheds or
embankments. Perhaps the best is to be had from the towpath of the
Oxford Canal, marked high above our right by a line of larch and poplar,
where a tall aqueduct carries it over the river Swift.

This is the stream which, coming from Lutterworth, bore down in 1427 the
ashes of John Wiclif to the Avon. Forty years after his peaceful
interment the Council of Constance gave orders to exhume and burn his
body, to see if it could be discerned from those of the faithful. “In
obedience thereto,” says Fuller, “Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln,
diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight
sent at a dead carcass!) to ungrave him accordingly. To Lutterworth they
come--sumner, commissary, official, chancellor, proctors, doctors, and
the servants (so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone
amongst so many hands), take what is left out of the grave, and burn
them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a brook running hard by. Thus
the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn
into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of
Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the
world over.”

For aught we know, the upper part of this stream may justify its name.

[Illustration: RUGBY FROM BROWNSOVER MILL]

The two streams unite in that green vale over which Dr. Arnold used to
gaze in humorous despair. “It is no wonder,” he said, “we do not like
looking that way, when one considers that there is nothing fine between
us and the Ural Mountains;” and, in a letter to Archbishop Whately,”
... we have no hills, no plains, not a single wood, and but one single
copse; no heath, no down, no rock, no river, no clear stream, scarcely
any flowers--for the lias is particularly poor in them--nothing but one
endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedge-row trees;” lastly, “I
care nothing for Warwickshire, and am in it like a plant sunk in the
ground in a pot; my roots never strike beyond the pot, and I could be
transplanted at any moment without tearing or severing my fibres.” And
we consent, in part, for the fibres of great men lie in their work, not
in this or that soil. But what fibres--not his own--were cracked when
Rugby lost its great schoolmaster we feel presently as, haunted by his
son’s noble elegy, we stand before the altar of the school chapel, where
he rests.

[Illustration: AVON INN, RUGBY]

At Rugby our narrative, hitherto smilingly pastoral, quickens to epic.
So far we had followed Avon afoot, but here we meant to launch a
Canadian canoe on its waters, creating a legend. She lay beside a small
river-side tavern, her bright basswood sides gleaming in the sunshine. A
small crowd had gathered, and was being addressed with volubility by a
high complexioned man of urbane demeanor. He was bareheaded and
coatless; he was shod in blue carpet slippers, on each of which a yellow
anchor (emblem of Hope) was entwined with sprays of the pink
convolvulus, typifying (according to P., who is a botanist), “I
recognize your worth, and will sustain it by judicious and tender
affection.” As we launched our canoe and placed our sacks on board, he
turned his discourse on us. It breathed the spirit of calm confidence.
There were long shallows just below (he said), and an uprooted willow
blocking the stream, and three waterfalls, and fences of barbed wire. He
enumerated the perils; he was sanguine about each; and ours was the
first canoe he ever set eyes on.

We pushed off and waved good-bye. The sun shone in our faces; behind,
the voice of confidence shouted us over the first shallow. Our canoe
swung round a bend beside a small willow coppice, and we sighed as the
kindly crowd was hidden from us.

We turned at the sound of stertorous breathing. A pair of blue slippers
came twinkling after us over the meadow. Our friend had fetched a
circuit round the coppice, and soon both craft and crew were as babes in
his hands. Was it a shallow?--he hounded us over. Was it a willow fallen
“ascaunt the brook?”--he drove us under, clambering himself along the
trunk, as once Ophelia, and exhorting always. At the foot of the first
waterfall he took leave of us, and turned back singing across the
fields. He was a good man, but would be obeyed. We learned from him,
first, that the art of canoeing has no limits; second, that the
“impenetrability of matter” is a discredited phrase; and, after the
manner of Bunyan, we called him Mr. Win-by-Will.

By many dense beds of rushes, through which a flock of ducks scattered
before us, we dropped down to Newbold on Avon, a pretty village on the
hill-side, with green orchards sloping to the stream. By climbing
through them and looking due south, you may see the spire of Bilton,
where Addison lived for many years. Below Newbold the river tumbles over
two waterfalls, runs thence by a line of rush beds to a railway bridge,
and so beneath Caldecott’s famous spinney, where Tom Brown, East, and
the “Madman” sought the kestrel’s nest. Many Scotch firs mingle with the
beeches of the spinney, and just below them the stream divides,
enclosing a small island, and recombines to hold a southward course past
Holbrook Court.

[Illustration: NEWBOLD UPON AVON]

[Illustration: HOLBROOK COURT]

Holbrook Court is a gloomy building that looks down its park slope upon
a weir, a red-brick mill, and a gloomier farm-house of stone. This
farm-house has a history, being all that is left of Lawford Hall, the
scene of the once notorious “Laurel-Water Tragedy.”

[Illustration: LAWFORD MILL]

The tale is briefly this: In 1780 Sir Theodosius Boughton, a vicious and
sickly boy, was squiring it at Lawford Hall, and fast drinking out his
puny constitution. “To him enter” an evil spirit in the shape of a
brother-in-law, an Irish adventurer, one Captain Donellan. This graduate
in vice took the raw scholar in hand, and with the better will as being
next heir to his estates. But it seems that drink and debauchery worked
too slowly for the impatient captain, for one evening the wretched boy
went to bed, called for his sleeping-draught, and drank the wrong liquid
out of the right bottle. And as for Captain Donellan, he bungled matters
somehow, and was hanged at Warwick in the following spring--an elegant,
well-mannered man in black, who displayed much ceremonious punctilio at
ascending the scaffold ahead of the sheriff. Ten years later Lawford
Hall was pulled down as an accursed thing, and the building before us is
all that survives of it. To-day the Gloire de Dijon rose, the jasmine,
and the ivy sprawl up its sad-colored walls and over the porch, which
still wears the date 1604.

Either at Lawford Hall, or just above, at the old Holbrook Grange,
lived, in Elizabeth’s time, One-handed Boughton, who won an entirely
posthumous fame by driving a ghostly coach and six about the
country-side. His spirit was at length caught in a phial by certain of
the local clergy, corked down, sealed, thrown into a neighboring
marl-pit, and so laid forever. Therefore his only successes of late have
been in frightening maid-servants out of their situations at the farm.

Leaving Lawford, we paddle through a land pastorally desolate, seeing,
often for miles together, neither man’s face nor woman’s. The canoe
darts in and out of rush beds; avoids now a shallow, now a snag, a clump
of reeds, a conglomerate of logs and pendent shrivelled flags, flotsam
of many floods; and again is gliding easily between meadows that hold,
in Touchstone’s language, “no assembly but horn beasts.” Our canoe wakes
strange emotions in these cattle. They lift their heads, snort, fling up
their heels, and, with rigid tails, come capering after us like so many
bacchanals. At length a fence stops them, and they obligingly watch us
out of sight. The next herd repeats the performance. And always the
river is vocal beside us,

    “Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
     He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;”

while ahead the water-rat dives, or the moor-hen splashes from one green
brim to another; and around the land is slowly changing from the
monotonous to the “up-and-down-hilly;” and we, passing through it all,
are thankful.

A small cottage appears beside some lime-pits on the right bank. Over
its garden gate a blackboard proclaims that here are the “Newnham Regis
Baths.” A certain Walter Bailey, M.D., writing in 1587 A Brief Discourse
of Certain Baths, etc., sings loud praise of these waters, but warns
drinkers to “consist in a mediocrity, and never to adventure to drink
above six, or at the utmost eight, pints in one day.” Also, he “will not
rashly counsel any to use them in the leap-years.” We disregarded this
latter warning, but observed the former; yet the plain man who gave us
our glassful asserted that a friend of his, “all hot and sweaty,” drank
two quarts of the water one summer day, and took no harm. As a fact, the
springs which here rise from the limestone were known and esteemed by
the Romans; the remains of their baths were found, and the present
one--a pump within a square paling--built on the same spot. But their
fame has not travelled of late.

[Illustration: CHURCH LAWFORD]

We embarked again, and were soon floating down to Church Lawford. What
shall be said of this spot? As we saw it happily, one slope of
green--vivid, yet in shadow--swelled up to darker elms and a tall church
tower, set high against an amber sunset. Beyond, the sky and the river’s
dim reaches melted together, through all delicate yellows, mauves, and
grays, into twilight. A swan, scurrying down stream before us, broke
the water into pools of gold. And so a bend swept Church Lawford out of
our sight and into our kindliest memories.

Nearly opposite lies Newnham Regis, about a mile from its baths. In
Saxon times, they say, a king’s palace stood here; and three large
fish-ponds, with some mounds, remain for a sign of it. Here, beside a
pleasant mill, the foot-path crosses to Church Lawford. Just below, the
stream is blocked by an osier bed; and we struggled there for the half
of one mortal hour, and mused on the carpet slippers, and Hope, and such
things; and “late and at last” were out and paddling through the
uncertain light under the pointed arches of Bretford Bridge.

[Illustration: RUINS OF NEWNHAM REGIS CHURCH]

Here crosses the second great Roman road, the Fosseway,

                      “that tilleth from Toteneys
    From the one end of Cornewaile anon to Cateneys,
    From the South-west to North-est, into Englonde’s ende.
    _Fosse_ men callith thilke way, that by mony town doth wende.”

[Illustration: _From Wolston to Wasperton_]

Thenceforward for a mile we move in darkness over glimmering waters,
until a railway bridge looms ahead, and we spy, half a mile away, the
lights of a little station. This must be Brandon, we decide; and running
in beside the bank, begin a quick contention with the echo.

Voices answer us, male and female, and soon many villagers are about us,
peering at the canoe.

“Are we in time for the last train to Coventry?”

Chorus answers “Yes;” only one melancholy stripling insists that it
isn’t likely.

[Illustration: BRETFORD]

And he is right. We hear a rumble; a red eye flames out; the last train,
with a hot trail of smoke, comes roaring over the bridge and shoots into
Brandon station. We are too late.

“Beds?”

The melancholy one echoes: “Beds! In Brandon?”

“The inn?”

“Well, you might try the inn.”

We march up to try the inn. There are forty-four men in the bar, as we
have leisure to count, and all are drinking beer. Clearly we are not
wanted. The landlady has eyes like beads, black and twinkling, but they
will not rest on us. The outlook begins to be sombre, when P., who,
beneath a rugged exterior, hides much aptitude for human affairs,
announces that he has a way with landladies, and tries it. He says:

“Can we have a horse and trap to take us to Coventry to-night? No?
That’s bad. Nor a bed? Dear me! Then please draw us half a pint of
beer.”

The beer is brought. P. tastes it, looks up with a happy smile, and
begins again:

“Can we have a horse and trap?” etc., etc.

It is astounding, but at the tenth repetition of this formula the
landlady becomes as water, and henceforth we have our way with that inn.

Moreover, we have the landlord’s company at supper--a deliberate, heavy
man, who tells us that he brews his own beer, and has twenty-three
children. He adds that the former distinction has given him many
friends, the latter many relatives. A niece of his is to be married at
Coventry to-morrow.

Q., who ran into Coventry by an early train next morning to fetch some
letters that awaited us, was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the
bride as she stepped into her carriage. He reported her to be pretty,
and we wished her all happiness. P. meanwhile had strolled up the river
to Wolston Mill, which we had passed in the darkness, and he too had
praises to chant of that, and of a grand old Elizabethan farm-house that
he had found outside the village.

We embarked again by Brandon Castle, the abode once of a Roman garrison,
and later of an exclusive Norman

[Illustration: SITE OF BRANDON CASTLE]

family that kept its own private gallows at Bretford, just above. Where
the castle stood now thrive the brier, the elder, the dogrose, the
blackthorn twined with clematis; the outer moat is become a morass,
choked with ragwort and the flowering rush; the inner moat is dry, and a
secular ash sprawls down its side. We left it to glide beneath a
graceful Georgian bridge; past a lawn dotted with sleek cattle, a small
red mill, a row of melancholy anglers, a mile of giant alders, and so
down to Ryton-on-Dunsmore, the western outpost of the great heath. As
the heath ended, the country’s character began to change, and all grew
open. On either hand broad pastures divided us from the arable slopes
where a month ago the gleaners were moving amid

    “Summer’s green, all girded up in sheaves;”

and therefore by Ryton’s two mills and Ryton’s many alders we moved
slowly, inviting our souls, careless of Fate, that lay in her ambush,
soon to harry us. A broad road crossed above us, and, alighting, we
loitered by the bridge, and discovered a mile-stone that marks
eighty-seven miles from London and three from Coventry. We could descry
the three lovely spires of Lady Godiva’s town, mere needle-points above
the trees to northward.

[Illustration: RYTON-ON-DUNSMORE]

[Illustration: WOLSTON PRIORY]

It was but shortly after that we came on an agreeable old gentleman, who
stood a-fishing with a little red float, and lied in his teeth, smiling
on us and asserting that Bubbenhall (where we had a mind to lunch) was
but a mile below. A mile!--for a crow, perhaps, but not for proper old
gentlemen, and most surely not for Avon. The freakish stream went round
and round, all meanders

[Illustration: GLEANERS]

with never a forthright, narrowing, shallowing, casting up here a snag
and there a thicket of reeds. And round and round for miles our canoe
followed it, as a puppy chases his own tail; yet Bubbenhall was not, nor
any glimpse of Bubbenhall.

Herodotus, if we remember, tells of a village called Is beside the
Tigris, far above Babylon, at which all voyagers down the river must put
up on three successive nights, so curiously is the channel looped about
it. Nor, after twice renewing our acquaintance with one particular
guelder-rose bush, did we see our way to doubt the tale when we recalled
it that day.

These windings above Bubbenhall have their compensations, keeping both
hand and eye amusedly alert as our canoe tacks to and fro, shooting down
the V of two shallows, or running along quick water beneath the bank,
brushing the forget-me-nots (the flower that Henry of Bolingbroke wore
into exile from the famous lists of Coventry, hard by), or parting
curtain after curtain of reeds to issue on small vistas that are always
new. And Bubbenhall is worth the pains to find--a tiny village of brick
and timber set amid elms on a quiet slope, where for ages “bells have
knolled to church” from the old brick-buttressed tower above. Below
sleeps a quaint mill, also of brick and timber, and from its weir the
river wanders northeast, then southeast, and runs to Stoneleigh Deer
Park.

A line of swinging deer fences hangs under the bridge, the river
trailing between their bars. We push cautiously under them, and look to
right and left in amazement. A moment has translated us from a sluggish
brook, twisting between water plants and willows, to a pleasant river,
stealing by wide lawns, by slopes of bracken, by gigantic trees--oaks,
Spanish oaks, and wych-elms, stately firs, sweet chestnuts, and filmy
larch coppices. We are in Arden, the land

[Illustration: IN STONELEIGH DEER PARK]

of Rosalind and Touchstone, of Jaques and Amiens. Their names may be
French, English, what you will, but here they inhabit, and almost we
look to spy the suit of motley and listen for its bells, or expect a
glimpse of Corin’s crook moving above the ferns, Orlando’s ballads
Muttering on a chestnut, or the sad-colored cloak of Jaques beneath an
oak--such an oak as this monster, thirty-nine feet around--whose
“antique root” writhes over the red-sandstone rock down to the water’s
brim. The very bed of Avon has altered. He runs now over smooth slabs of
rock, and now he brawls by a shallow, and now,

           “where his fair course is not hindered,
    He makes sweet music with the enamell’d stones.”

Down to the shallow ahead of us--their accustomed ford--a herd of deer
comes daintily and splashes across, first the bucks, then the does in a
body. If they are here, why not their masters, the men and women whom we
know? We disembark, and letting the canoe drift brightly down stream,

[Illustration: BUBBENHALL]

stroll along the bank beside it, and “fleet the time carelessly,” as
they did in that golden world.

Too soon we reach the beautiful sandstone bridge, tinted by time and
curtained with creepers, that divides the deer park from the home park;
and soon, beside an old oak, the size of Avon is almost doubled by
junction with the Sowe, a stream that comes winding past Stoneleigh
village on our right, and brings for tribute the impurities of Coventry.
The banks beside us are open no longer; but for recompense we have the
birds--the whir-r-r of wood-pigeons in the nigh willow copse, the heron
sailing high, the kingfisher sparkling before us, the green woodpecker
condensing a whole day’s brilliance on his one small breast, the
wild-duck, the splashing moor-hen, and water-fowl of rarer kinds--that
tell us we are nearing Stoneleigh Abbey.

The abbey was founded in 1154 by Henry II. for a body of Cistercian
monks, and endowed with privileges “very many and very great, to wit,
free warren, infangthef, outfangthef, wayfs, strays, goods of felons and
fugitives, tumbrel, pillory, sok, sak, tole, team, amercements, murders,
assize of bread and beer; with a market and fair in the town of
Stoneleigh”--a comprehensive list, as it seems. There were, says
Dugdale, in the manor of Stoneleigh, at this time, “sixty-eight villains
and two priests; as also four bondmen or servants, whereof each held one
messuage, and one quatrone of land, by the services of making the
gallows and hanging of thieves; every one of which bondmen was to wear a
red clout betwixt his shoulders, upon his upper garment.” The original
building was burnt in 1245, and what little old work now remains belongs
to a later building. The abbey went the way of its fellows under Henry
VIII.; was granted to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; changed hands
once or twice; and was finally bought by Sir Thomas Leigh, alderman of
London, in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The present Ionic mansion, now the
home of Lord Leigh, his descendant, was built towards the close of the
last century. The river spreads into a lake before it, and then, after
passing a weir, speeds briskly below a wooded bank, with tiny rapids,
down which our canoe dances gayly. As twilight overtakes us we reach
Ashow.

[Illustration: STONELEIGH ABBEY, OCT. 15, 1884]

A little weather-stained church stands by Ashow shore--a church, a
yew-tree, and a narrow graveyard. Close under it steals the gray river,
whispers by cottage steps where a crazy punt lies rotting, by dim willow
aits and eel bucks, and so passes down to silence and the mists. Seeing
all

[Illustration: ASHOW]

this, we yearn to live here and pass our days in gratuitous melancholy.

We revisited Ashow next morning, and were less exacting. And the reason
was, that it rained. Indeed, we were soaked to the skin before paddling
a mile; and as for the canoe,

    “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
     And therefore I forbid my tears.”

[Illustration: CHESFORD BRIDGE]

We passed, like Mrs. Haller’s infant, “not dead, but very wet,” under
old Chesford Bridge, whereby the road runs to Kenilworth, that lies two
miles back from the river, and shall therefore, for once in its history,
escape description; and from Chesford Bridge reached Blakedown Mill and
another old bridge beside the miller’s house. This “simply elegant form
of landscape” led Samuel Ireland to ask “why man should with such eager
and restless ambition busy himself so often in the smoke and bustle of
populous cities, and lose his independence and too often his peace in
the pursuit of a phantom which almost eludes his grasp, little thinking
that with the accumulation of wealth he must create imaginary wants,
under which, perhaps, that wealth melts away as certainly as under the
more ready inlet of inordinate passion happiness is sacrificed.” We
infer that Mr. Samuel Ireland was never rained upon hereabouts.

[Illustration: BLAKEDOWN MILL]

Just below, on the north bank, rises Blacklow Hill, whither, on the 19th
of June, 1312, Piers Gaveston, the favorite of King Edward II., was
marched out from Warwick Castle by the barons to meet his doom. His head
was struck off, and, rolling down into a thicket, was picked up by a
“friar preacher” and carried off in his hood. On the rock beside the
scene of that grim revenge this inscription was rudely cut: “P.
GAVESTON, EARL OF CORNWALL, BEHEADED HERE + 1312;” and to-day a simple
cross also marks the spot.

Hence, by the only rocks of which Avon can boast--and these are of
softest sandstone, their asperities worn all away by the weather--we
wind beneath Milverton village, with its odd church tower of wood, to
the weir and mill of Guy’s Cliffe.

The beauties of this spot have been bepraised for centuries. Leland
speaks of them; Drayton sings them.

[Illustration: GUY’S CLIFFE MILL]

“There,” says Camden, “have yee a shady little wood, cleere and cristal
springs, mossie bottoms and caves, medowes alwaies fresh and greene, the
river rumbling heere and there among the stones with his streame making
a milde noise and gentle whispering, and, besides all this, solitary and
still quietness, things most grateful to the Muses.” Fuller, who knew it
well, calls it “a most delicious place, so that a man in many miles’
riding cannot meet so much variety as there one furlong doth afford.”
The water-mill is mentioned in Domesday-book, and has been sketched
constantly ever since--a low, quaint pile, fronted by a recessed open
gallery, under which the water is forever sparkling and frothing, fresh
from its spin over the mill-wheels, or tumble down the ledges of the
weir.

[Illustration: GUY’S CLIFFE]

And below this mill rises the famous cliff, hollowed with many caves, in
one of which lived Guy of Warwick, slayer of the Dun Cow, of lions,
dragons, giants, paynims, and all such cattle; who married the fair
Phyllis of Warwick Castle; who afterwards repented of his much
bloodshed, and trudged on foot to Palestine by way of expiation; who
anon returned again on foot to Warwick, where was his home and his dear
Phyllis. And coming to his own house door, where his wife was used to
feed every day thirteen poor men with her own hand, he stood with the
rest, and received bread from her for three days, and she knew him not.
So he learned that God’s wrath was not sated, and betook him to a fair
rocky place beside the river, a mile and more from his town; where, as
his words go in the old ballad,

         “with my hands I hewed a house
       Out of a craggy rock of stone;
     And livèd like a Palmer poore
       Within that Cave myself alone;

    “And daily came to beg my bread
       Of Phyllis at my Castle gate;
     Not known unto my loving wife,
       Who daily mournèd for her mate.

    “Till at the last I fell sore sicke,
       Yea, sicke so sore that I must die;
     I sent to her a ring of golde,
       By which she knew me presentlye.

    “So she, repairing to the Cave,
       Before that I gave up the Ghost,
     Herself closed up my dying Eyes--
       My Phyllis fair whom I loved most.”

His statue stands in the little shrine above the cliff; his arms lie in
Warwick Castle; and in the cave over our head is carved a Saxon
inscription, which the learned interpret into this: “Cast out, thou
Christ, from thy servant this burden.”

We pass on by Rock Mill, haunted of many kingfishers; by Emscote Bridge,
where the Avon is joined by the Leam, and where Warwick and Leamington
have reached out their arms to each other till they now join hands; by
little gardens, each with its punt or home-made boat beside the river
steps; by a flat meadow, where the citizens and redcoats from Warwick
garrison sit all day and wait for the fish that never bites; and
suddenly, by the famous one-span bridge, see Warwick Castle full ahead,
its massy foundations growing, as it seems, from the living rock, and
Cæsar’s glorious tower soaring above the elms where Mill Street ends at
the water’s brink. Here once crossed a Gothic bridge, carrying the
traffic from Banbury. Its central arches are down now; but the bastions
yet stand, and form islets for the brier and ivy, and between them the
stream swirls fast for the weir and the ancient mill, by which it rushes
down into the park. We turn our canoe, and with many a backward look
paddle back to the boat-house at Emscote.

[Illustration: OLD BRIDGE, WARWICK]

Evening has drawn in, and still we are pacing Warwick streets. We have
seen the castle; have gazed from the armory windows upon the racing
waters, steep terraces, and gentle park below; have climbed Guy’s Tower
and seen far beneath us, on the one side, broad cedars and green lawns
where the peacocks strut; on the other, the spires,

[Illustration: CÆSAR’S TOWER, WARWICK CASTLE]

towers, sagged roofs, and clustering chimneys of the town; have
sauntered down Mill Street; have marvelled in the Beauchamp Chapel as we
conned its gorgeous tombs and canopies and traceries; have loitered by
Lord Leycester’s Hospital and under the archway of St. James’s Chapel.
Clearly we are but two grains of sand in the hour-glass of

[Illustration: The Hospital of Robert Earl of Leycester Warwick]

this slow mediæval town. Our feet, that will to-morrow be hurrying on,
tread with curious impertinence these everlasting flints that have rung
with the tramp of the Kingmaker’s armies, of Royalist and
Parliamentarian, horse and foot, drum and standard, the stir of royal
and episcopal visits, of mail-coach, market, and assize. But meanwhile
our joints are full of pleasant aches and stiffness, our souls of lofty
imaginings. As our tobacco smoke floats out on the moonlight we can
dwell, we find, with a quite kingly serenity on the transience of man’s
generations; nay, as we sit down to dinner at our inn we touch the high
contemplative, yet careless, mood of the gods themselves.

[Illustration: BARFORD BRIDGE]

It was a golden morning as we left Warwick, and with slow feet followed
Avon down through the park towards Barford Bridge, where our canoe lay
ready for us. The light, too generously spread to dazzle, bathed the
castle towers, lay on the terraces, where the peacocks sunned
themselves, and on the living rock below them, where the river washes.
Only on the weir it fell in splashes, scattered through the elms’ thick
foliage. At the water’s brim, below Mill Street, stood a man with a
pitcher--a stranger to us--who took our farewells with equable
astonishment. The stream slackened its hurry, and, keeping pace with our
regrets, loitered by the garden slopes, by the great cedars that the
Crusaders brought from Lebanon, among reeds and alder-bushes and under
tall trees, to the lake, where a small tributary comes tumbling from
Chesterton.

The land, as we went on, was full of morning sounds--the ring of a
wood-feller’s axe, the groaning of a timber-wagon through leafy roads,
the rustle of partridges, the note of a stray blackbird in the hedge,
and in valleys unseen the tune of hounds cub-hunting--

        “matched in mouth like bells,
    Each unto each.”

[Illustration: WARWICK CASTLE, FROM THE PARK]

At Barford we met the pack returning, and the sight of them and the
huntsman’s red coat in the village street was pleasant as a remembered
song.

Barford village has produced a well-known man of our time, Mr. Joseph
Arch, who here began his efforts to better the condition of the
agricultural laborer. If without honor, he is not without influence in
his own country, to judge by the neat cottages and trim gardens beside
the road. Roses love the rich clay, and roses of all kinds thrive here,
from the Austrian brier to the Gloire de Dijon. It was late in the
season when we passed, but many clusters lingered under the cottager’s
thatch, and field and hedge also spoke of past plenty.

By Barford Bridge, where a dumpy, water-logged punt just lifted her
stern and her pathetic name (the Dolly Dobs) above the surface, we
launched our canoe again. The stream here is shallow and the current
fast, with a knack of swinging you round a gravelly corner and tilting
you at the high scooped-out bank on the other side. So many and abrupt
are these bends that the slim spire of Sherborne across the meadows
appeared now to right, now to left; now dodged behind us, now stood up
straight ahead. Out of the water-plants at one corner rose a brace of
wild-duck, and sailed away with the sun gleaming on their iridescent
necks. We followed them with our eyes, and grew aware that the country
was altered. Sometimes, near Warwick, we had longed to exchange tall
hedge-rows and heavy elms for “an acre of barren ground, ling, heath,
brown furze, anything,” as Gonzalo says. Now we had full air and a
horizon. We had the flowers, too--the forget-me-not, the willow-herb,
and meadowsweet (though long past their prime), the bright yellow tansy,
and the loosestrife, with a stalk growing blood-red as its purple bloom
dropped away. Just above Wasperton we came on a young woman in a boat.
She had been gathering these flowers by the armful, and, having piled
the bows with them, made a taking sight; and, being ourselves not
without a certain savage beauty, we did not hesitate to believe our
pleasure reciprocated.

[Illustration: SHERBORNE]

A steep grassy bank runs beside the stream at Wasperton, concealing the
village. Many nut-trees grow upon it, and upon it also were ranged six
anglers, who caught no fish as we passed. No high-road goes through the
village above; but, climbing the bank, we found a few old timbered
cottages, and alone, in the middle of a field, a curious dove-cote, that
must be seen to be believed. It was empty, for the pigeons were all down
by the river among the gray willows on the farther shore, and our canoe
stole by too softly to disturb their cooing.

A short way below, Hampton Wood rises on a bold eminence to the right,
where once Fulbroke Castle stood. The “steep uphill” is now dotted with
elders, and tenanted only by “earth-delving conies;” for the castle was
destroyed and its land disparked in Henry VIII.’s time, the materials
being carried up to build Compton-Winyates, that beautiful and quiet
mansion in a hollow of the Edge Hills where Charles I. slept on the
night before Kineton (Edgehill) battle. The park passed in time to a
Lucy of Charlcote, and the name reminds us that we are in Shakespeare’s
country. In fact, we have reached the very place where Shakespeare did
_not_ steal the deer.

[Illustration: AT WASPERTON]

To shed a tear in passing this hallowed spot was but a natural impulse;
nor, on reading the emotions which Mr. Samuel Ireland squandered here,
did we grudge the tribute. “If,” he writes, “the story of this youthful
frolic is founded on truth, as well as that Sir Thomas Lucy’s rigorous
conduct subsequent to this supposed outrage really proved the cause of
our Shakespeare’s quitting this his native retirement to visit the
capital, it will afford us the means of contemplating, at least in one
instance, with some degree of complacency even the imperious dominion of
our feudal superiors, the tyranny of magistracy, and the harshest
enforcement of the remnant of our forest laws; since in their
consequences they unquestionably called into action the energies of that
sublime genius, and of those rare and matchless endowments which had
otherwise perhaps been lost in the shade of retirement, and have ‘wasted
their sweetness on the desert air.’”

[Illustration: DOVE-COTE, WASPERTON]

The river spread out as it swept round the base of Hampton Wood, and
took us to Hampton Lucy. Here is a beautiful modern church, in the worst
sense of the words, and beside it a village green, where, as we passed,
the villagers were keeping harvest-home. Lo! many countrymen in
wheelbarrows, and others, with loins girded, trundling them madly
towards a goal, where a couple of brand-new spades

[Illustration: From Hampton Lucy to Harrington]

were to reward the first-comers. Lo! also, Chloe, Lalage, and Amaryllis,
emulous for their swains, lifted exhorting voices; and the oldest
inhabitants “a-sunning sat” in the pick of the seats, and discussed the
competitors on their merits. It was with regret that we tore ourselves
away from these Arcadian games. The sounds of merrymaking followed us
through the trees as we dropped down to Charlcote, just below,

    “Where Avon’s Stream, with many a sportive Turn,
     Exhilarates the Meads, and to his Bed
     Hele’s gentle current wooes, by Lucy’s hand
     In every graceful Ornament attired,
     And worthier, such, to share his liquid Realms.”

So writes the Rev. Richard Jago, M.A., a local poet of the last century,
in “Edgehill; or, The Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralized. A Poem in
Four Books, printed for J. Dodsley in Pall Mall, 1767;” and though the
bard’s language is more flowery than Avon’s banks, it shall stand. We
had amused ourselves on the voyage by choosing and rechoosing the spot
whither we should some day return and pass our declining years. P. (who
has high thoughts now and then) had been all for Warwick Castle, Q. for
Ashow, and the merits of each had been hotly wrangled over. But we shook
hands over Charlcote.

[Illustration: HAMPTON LUCY, FROM THE MEADOWS]

Less stately than Stoneleigh, less picturesque than Guy’s Cliffe, less
imposing than Warwick Castle, Charlcote is lovelier and more human than
any. The red-brick Elizabethan house stands on the river’s brink. From
the geranium beds on its terrace a flight of steps leads down to the
water, and over its graceful balustrade, beside the little leaden
statuettes, you may lean and feed the swans just below. Across the
stream, over the fern-beds and swelling green turf, are dotted the
antlers of the Charlcote deer, red and fallow; yonder “Hele’s gentle
current” winds down from the Edge Hills; to your right, the trees part
and give a glimpse only of Hampton Lucy church; behind you rise the
peaked gables, turrets, and tall chimneys of the house, projecting and
receding, so that from whatever quarter the sun may strike there is
always a bold play of light and shade on the soft-colored bricks.

The house was built by Sir Thomas Lucy in the first year of Queen
Elizabeth’s reign; and in compliment to his queen, who paid Charlcote a
visit not long after, the knight built on the side which turns from the
river an entrance porch which, abutting between two wings, gives the
form of an E. This porch leads to the queer gate-house, whence, between
an avenue of limes, you reach Charlcote church--a sober little pile
beside the high-road, and just outside the rough-split oak palings of
the park. It holds the monuments of Sir Thomas Lucy and his wife, and in
praise of the latter an epitaph worth remembering for the tender
simplicity of its close:

    “Set down by him that best did know
     What hath been written to be true.--Thomas Lucy.”

In the graveyard outside is a plain stone to a lesser pair--John Gibbs,
aged 81, and his wife, aged 55--who are made to say, somewhat
cynically:

[Illustration: CHARLCOTE]

    “Farewell, proud, vain, false, treacherous world,
             we have seen enough of thee;
     We value not what thou canst say of we.”

One marvels how in this sheltered corner John Gibbs found the world’s
breath so rude.

[Illustration: MEADOWSWEET]

On the other hand, upon Sir Thomas Lucy the world has been hard indeed,
identifying him with Justice Shallow. His portrait hangs in the hall
where Shakespeare was not tried for deer-stealing. Isaac Oliver painted
it; and though men have forgotten Isaac Oliver, yet will we never, for
he was a master. The knight’s embroidered robe is right Holbein; but the
knight’s subtle, beautiful face is more. It teaches with convincing
sincerity what manner of being a gentleman was in “the spacious days of
great Elizabeth;” and the lesson is the more humiliating because men
have during three centuries accepted the coarse mask of Justice Shallow
for the truth.

The house holds many fine paintings; notably a Titian, “Samson and the
Lion,” that rests against the yellow silk hangings of the drawing-room,
and is worth a far pilgrimage to see; and a Velasquez, set (immoderately
high) above the library book-shelves. So that too soon we were out in
the sunlight again and paddling down to Alveston.

We floated by flat meadows, islands of sedge, long lines of willows; by
“the high bank called Old Town, where, perhaps, men and women, with
their joys and sorrows, once abided;” but now the rabbits only colonize
it, under the quiet alders; by Alveston, where we found boats, and a
boat-house covered with “snowball” berries; by the mill and its
weeping-willows; and below, by devious loops, to Hatton Rock, that the
picnickers from Stratford know--a steep bank of marl covered with
hawthorn, hazel, elder, and trailing knots of brambles. In June this is
a very flowery spot. The slope is clothed with creamy elder blossoms,
and on the river’s bank opposite are wild rose-bushes dropping their
petals, pink and white, on forget-me-nots, wild blue geranium, and
meadow-rue. Over its stony bed the current, in omne volubilis ævum,
keeps for our dull ears the music that it made for Shakespeare, if we
could but hear. For somewhere along these banks the Stratford boy spied
the Muse’s naked feet moving.

    “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
     O stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
        That can sing both high and low.”

And somewhere he came on her, and coaxed the secret of

[Illustration: UNDER THE WILLOWS]

her woodland music. But when that meeting was, and how that secret was
given, like a true lover, he will never tell.

    “Others abide our questions; thou art free:
     We ask and ask; thou smilest and art still.”

As we paddled down past Tiddington the willows grew closer. Between
their stems we could see, far away on our left, the blue Edge Hills; and
to the right, above the Warwick road, a hill surmounted by an obelisk.
This is Welcome, and behind it lies Clopton House, a former owner of
which, Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London, built in the reign of
Henry VII. the long stone bridge of fourteen Gothic arches just above
Stratford. In a minute or two we had passed under this bridge and were
floating down beside the Memorial Theatre, the new Gardens, and the
brink of Shakespeare’s town.

[Illustration: THE CLOPTON BRIDGE, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON]

A man may take pen and ink and write of a place as he will, and the
page will, likely enough, be a pretty honest index to his own
temperament. But never will it do for another man’s reliance. So let it
be confessed that for a day we searched Stratford streets, and found
nothing of the Shakespeare that we sought. Neither in the famous
birthplace in Henley Street--restored “out of all whooping,” crammed
with worthless mementos, and pencilled over with inconsiderable names;
nor in the fussy, inept Memorial Theatre; nor in the New Place, where
certain holes, protected with wire gratings, mark what may have been the
foundations of Shakespeare’s house: in none of these could we find him.
His name echoed in the market-place, on the lips of guide and sightseer,
and shone on monuments, shops, inns, and banking-houses. His effigies
were everywhere--in photographs, in statuettes; now doing duty as a
tobacco-box (with the bald scalp removable), now as a trade-mark for
beer. And even while we despised these things the fault was ours. All
the while the colossus stood high above, while we “walked under his huge
legs and peep’d about,” too near to see.

Nor until we strolled over the meadows to Ann Hathaway’s cottage at
Shottery did understanding come with the quiet falling of the day.
Rarely enough, and never, perhaps, but in the while between sunset and
twilight, may a man hear the sky and earth breathing together, and,
drawing his own small breath ambitiously in tune with them, “feel that
he is greater than he knows.” But here and at this hour it happened to
us that, our hearts being uplifted, we could measure Shakespeare for a
moment; could know him for the puissant intelligence that held communion
with all earth and sky, and all mortal aspirations that rise between
them; and knew him also for the Stratford youth treading this very
foot-path beside this sweet-smelling hedge towards those elms a mile
away, where the red light lingers,

[Illustration: STRATFORD CHURCH]

and the cottage below them, where already in the window Ann Hathaway
trims her lamp. You are to believe that our feet trod airily across
those meadows. And at the cottage, old Mrs. Baker, last living
descendant of the Hathaways, was pleased with our reverent behavior, and
picked for each of us at parting a sprig of rosemary from her garden for
remembrance. May her memory be as green and as fragrant!

[Illustration: ANN HATHAWAY’S COTTAGE]

It was easy now to forgive all that before had seemed unworthy in
Stratford--easy next morning, standing before Shakespeare’s monument,
while the sunshine, colored by the eastern window, fell on one
particular slab within the chancel rails, to live back for a moment to
that April morning when a Shakespeare had passed from the earth, and
earth “must mourn therefor;” to follow his coffin on its short journey
from the New Place, between the blossoming limes of the Church Walk, out
of the sunlight into the lasting shadow, up the dim nave to this spot;
and easy to divine, in the rugged epitaph so often quoted, the man’s
passionate dread lest his bones might be flung in time to the common
charnel-house, the passionate longing to lie here always in this dusky
corner, close to his friends and kin and the familiar voices that meant
home--the talk of birds in the near elms, the chant of Holy Trinity
choir, and, night and day, but a stone’s-throw from his resting-place,
the whisper of Avon running perpetually.

[Illustration: THE MOUTH OF THE STOUR]

For even the wayfarer finds Stratford a hard place to part from. And
looking back as we left her, so kindly, so full of memories, giving her
haunted streets, her elms, and river-side to the sunshine, but guarding
always as a mother the shrine of her great son, I know she will pardon
my light words.

The river runs beneath the elms of the church-yard to Lucy’s Mill and
the first locks. On the mill wall are marked the heights of various
great floods. The highest is dated at the beginning of this century:
just below is the high-water mark of October 25, 1882. Take the level of
this with your eye, and you will wonder that any of Stratford

[Illustration: THE LOCK AND CHURCH]

is left standing; and lower down the river the floods are very serious
matters to all who live within their reach. If you disbelieve me, read
“John Halifax.” “We don’t mind them,” an old lady told us at Barton,
“till the water turns red. Then we know the Stour water is coming down,
and begin to shift our furniture.” The Arrow, too, that joins the Avon
below Bidford, is a great helper of the floods, but rushes down its
valley more rapidly than the Stour, and so its flooding is sooner over.

[Illustration: WEIR BRAKE]

The lock at Stratford is now choked with grass and weed, and the town no
longer (to quote the Rev. Richard Jago)

    “Hails the freighted Barge from Western Shores,
     Rich with the Tribute of a thousand Climes.”

The Avon, from Tewkesbury to Stratford, was made navigable in 1637 by
Mr. William Sandys, of Fladbury, “at his own proper cost.” But the
railways have ruined the waterways for a time, and Mr. Sandys’s
handiwork lies in sore decay. Till Evesham be passed we shall meet with
no barges, but with shallows, dismantled locks, broken-down weirs to be
shot, and sound ones to be pulled over that will give us excitement
enough, and toil too.

Below the lock we drifted under a hanging copse, the Weir Brake, where a
pretty foot-path runs for Stratford lovers. Below it, by a cluster of
willows, the Stour comes down; and a little farther yet stands
Luddington, where Shakespeare is said to have been married; but the
church and its records have been destroyed by fire. From Luddington you
spy Weston-upon-Avon, in Gloucestershire, across the river, the tower of
its sturdy perpendicular church peering above the elms that hide it from
the river-side throughout the summer.

[Illustration: WESTON-UPON-AVON]

By Weston our remembrance keeps a picture--a broken lock and weir, an
islet or two heavy with purple loosestrife, a swan bathing in the
channel between. These were of the foreground. Beyond them, a line of
willows hid the flat fields on our right; but on the left rose a steep
green slope, topped with poplars and dotted with red cattle; and ahead
the red roof of Binton church showed out prettily from the hill-side. As
we saw the picture we broke into it, shooting the weir, scaring the
swan, and driving her before us to Binton Bridges. By Binton Bridges
stands an inn, the Four Alls. On its sign-board, in gay colors, are
depicted four figures--the King, the Priest, the Soldier, and the
Yeoman; and around them runs this chiming legend:

    “Rule all,
     Pray all,
     Fight all,
     Pay all.”

We could not remember a place so utterly God-forsaken as this inn beside
the bridge, nor a woman so weary of face as its once handsome landlady.
She spoke of the inn and its custom in a low, musical voice that caused
Q. to rush out into the yard to hide his pity; and there he found a gig,
and, sitting down before it, wondered.

Change and decay fill our literature; but we have not explained either.
For instance, here was a gig--a soundly built, gayly painted gig. A
glance told that it had not been driven a dozen times, that nothing was
broken, and that it had been backed into this heap of nettles years ago
to rot. It had been rotting ever since. The paint on its sides had
blistered, the nettles climbed above its wheels and flourished over its
back seat. Still it was a good gig, and the most inexplicable sight that
met us on our voyage. Only less desolate than Binton Bridges is Black
Cliff, below--a bank covered with crab-trees and thorns and hummocks of
sombre grass. It was here that one Palmer, a wife-murderer, drowned his
good woman in Avon at the beginning of the century; and the oldest man
in Bidford, not far below, remembers seeing a gibbet on the hill-side,
with chains and a few bones and rags dangling--all that was left of him.
A gate post at the top of the hill on the Evesham road is made of this
gibbet, and still groans at night, to the horror of the passing native.

Soon we reach Welford, the second and more beautiful Welford on the
river. It stands behind a stiff slope, where now the chestnuts are
turning yellow, and the village street is worth following. It winds by
queer old cottages set down in plum and apple orchards; by a modern
Maypole; by a little church of stained buff sandstone, with oaken
lych-gate and church-yard wall scarcely containing the dead, who already
are piled level with its coping; by more queer crazy cottages--and then
suddenly melts, ends, disappears in grass. It is as if the end of the
world were reached. Of course we wanted to settle down and spend our
lives here, but were growing used to the desire by this time, and
dragged each other away without serious resistance down to the old mill,
where our canoe lay waiting.

[Illustration: WELFORD WEIR AND CHURCH]

Passing the weir and mill, the river runs under a grassy hill-side,
where the trimmed elms give a French look to the landscape. Within
sight, in winter, lie the roofs and dove-cotes of Hillborough--“haunted
Hillbro’,” as Shakespeare called it, but nothing definite is known of
the ghost. The local tale says that the poet and some boon companions
walked over once to a Whitsun ale at the Falcon Inn, Bidford (just below
us), to try their prowess in drinking against the Bidford men. They
drank so deeply that night that

[Illustration: ELMS BY BIDFORD GRANGE]

sleep overtook them before they had staggered a mile on their homeward
way, and, lying down under a crab-tree beside the road, they slept till
morning, when they were awakened by some laborers trudging to their
work. His companions were for returning and renewing the carouse, but
Shakespeare declined.

[Illustration: HILLBOROUGH]

“No,” said he; “I have had enough; I have drinked with

    “Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
     Haunted Hillbro’, hungry Grafton,
     Dudging Exhall, papist Wixford,
     Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.”

“Of the truth of this story,” says Mr. Samuel Ireland, “I have little
doubt.”

“Of its entire falsehood,” says Mr. James Thorne, “I have less. A more
absurd tale to father upon Shakespeare was never invented, even by Mr.
Ireland or his son.”

The reader may decide.

Close by is Bidford Grange, once an important manorhouse; and on the
left bank of Avon--you may know it by the gray stone dove-cotes--stands
Barton, where once dwelt another famous drinker, “Christophero Sly, old
Sly’s son of Burton heath: by birth a peddler, by education a cardmaker,
by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker.
Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if
she say I am not fourteen-pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up
for the lyingest knave in Christendom.” And from Barton hamlet a
foot-path leads across the meadows over the old bridge into Bidford.

[Illustration: BIDFORD BRIDGE]

You are to notice this bridge, not only because the monks of Alcester
built it in 1482, to supersede the ford on the old Roman road which
crosses the river here, but for a certain stone in its parapet, near the
inn window. This stone is worn hollow by thousands of pocket knives that
generations of Bidford men have sharpened upon it. For four centuries it
has supplied in these parts the small excuse that men

[Illustration: OLD THORNS, MARCLEEVE HILL]

need to club and lounge together; and of an evening you may see a score,
perhaps, hanging by this end of the bridge and waiting their turn, while
the clink, clink of the sharpening knife fills the pauses of talk. When
at last the stone shall wear all away there will be restlessness and
possibly social convulsions in Bidford, unless its place be quickly
supplied.

[Illustration: CLEEVE MILL--AN AUTUMN FLOOD]

We lingered only to look at the building that in Shakespeare’s time was
the old Falcon Inn, and soon were paddling due south from Bidford
Bridge. The Avon now runs straight through big flat meadows towards a
steep hill-side, with the hamlet of Marcleeve (or Marlcliff) at its
foot. This line of hill borders the river on the south for some miles,
and is the edge of a plateau which begins the ascent towards the
Cotswold Hills. Seen from the river below, this escarpment is full of
varying beauty, here showing a bare scar of green and red marl, here
covered with long

[Illustration: THE YEW HEDGE--CLEEVE PRIOR MANOR-HOUSE]

gray grass and dotted with old thorn and crab trees, here clothed with
hanging woods of maple, ash, and other trees, straggled over and
smothered with ivy, wild rose, and clematis. By Cleeve Mill, where
clouds of sweet-smelling flour issued from the doorway, we disembarked
and climbed up between the thorn-trees until upon the ridge we could
look back upon the green vale of Evesham, and southward across ploughed
fields, and cottages among orchards and elms, to the gray line of the
Cotswolds, over which a patch of silver hung, as the day fought hard to
regain its morning sunshine. The narrow footway took us on to Cleeve
Priors and through its street--a village all sober, gray, and beautiful.
The garden walls, coated with lichen and topped with yellow quinces or a
flaming branch of barberry; the tall church tower; the

[Illustration: MEADOWS BY THE AVON]

quaintly elaborate grave-stones below it, their scrolls and cherubim
overgrown with moss; the clipped yew-trees that abounded in all
fantastic shapes; the pigeons wheeling round their dove-cote, and the
tall poplar by the manor farm--all these were good; but best of all was
the manor farm itself, and the arched yew hedge leading to its Jacobean
porch, a marvel to behold. We hung long about the entrance and stared at
it. But no living man or woman approached us. The village was given up
to peace or sleep or death.

Returning, we paused on the brow of the slope above Avon for a longer
look. At our feet was spread the vale of Evesham; the river, bordered
with meadows as green and flat as billiard-tables; the stream of Arrow
to northward, which rises in the Lickey Hills, and comes down through
Alcester to join the Avon here; the villages of Salford Priors and
Salford Abbots; farther to the west, among its apple-trees, the roofs
and gables of Salford Nunnery, the village of Harvington. And all down
the stream, and round the meadows, and in and out of these

        “low farms,
    Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,”

are willows innumerable--some polled last year, and looking like green
mops, others with long curved branches ready to be lopped and turned
into fence poles next winter, until they are lost in the hills round
Evesham, where the dim towers stand up and the bold outline of Bredon
Hill shuts out the view of the Severn Valley.

The mound on which we are standing is surmounted by the stone socket of
an old cross, and beneath the cross are said to lie many of those who
fell on Evesham battle-field; for the vale below was on August 4th,
1265, the scene of one of the bloodiest and most decisive conflicts in
English history. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, victor of Lewes,
and champion of the people’s rights, was hastening back by forced
marches from Wales, having King Henry III. in his train, a virtual
hostage. He was hurrying to meet his son, the young Simon, with
reinforcements from the southeast; but young Simon’s troops had been
surprised by Prince Edward at Kenilworth in the early morning and
massacred in their beds, their leader himself escaping with difficulty,
almost naked, in a boat across the lake of Kenilworth Castle.
Unconscious of their fate, the old earl reached Evesham on Monday,
August 3d, and, crossing the bridge into the town, sealed his own doom.
For Evesham is a trap. The Avon forms a loop around it, shutting off
escape on three sides, while the fourth is blocked by an eminence called
the Green Hill. And while yet Simon and his king were feasting and
making merry in Evesham Abbey, Edward’s troops were crossing the river
here at Cleeve Ford in the darkness, and moving on their sure prey.

[Illustration: HARVINGTON WEIR]

A strange and horrible darkness lay over the land on that fatal Tuesday
morning, shrouding the sun, and hiding their books from the monks of
Evesham as they sang in the choir. The soldiers at their breakfast could
scarcely

[Illustration: WILLOW POLLARDING]

see the meats on the board before them. They were ready to start again;
but before the march began, banners and lances and moving troops were
spied on the crest of the Green Hill, coming towards the town.

“It is my son,” cried Simon; “fear not. But nevertheless look out, lest
we be deceived.”

Nicholas, the earl’s barber, being expert in the cognizance of arms,
ascended the bell-tower of the abbey, and soon detected among the
friendly banners, that were, in fact, but trophies of the raid at
Kenilworth, the “three lions” of Prince Edward and the royalists. The
alarm was given, but it was quickly seen that Simon’s army would be
utterly outnumbered.

[Illustration: NEAR OFFENHAM]

“By the arm of St. James,” cried the old warrior, “they come on well!
But it was from me,” he added, with a touch of soldierly pride--“it was
from me they learned it.” A glance showed the hopelessness of resisting
this array with a handful of horse and a mob of wild Welshmen. “Let us
commend our souls to God,” he said to his followers, “for our bodies are
the foe’s.”

And so he went forth; and while the Welsh fled like sheep at the first
onset, cut down in standing corn and flowery garden, the old warrior of
sixty-five hewed his way “like an impregnable tower” to the top of the
Green Hill, until one by one his friends had dropped beside him; then at
the summit his horse fell too, and disdaining surrender, hemmed in by
twelve knights, he was struck down by a lance wound. “It is God’s will,”
he said, and died. And whilst the butchery went on, and the Welshmen
fled homeward through Pershore to Tewkesbury, where the citizens cut
them down in the streets, and whilst the darkness broke in drenching
rain and blinding lightning, Simon’s head was lopped off, and carried on
a pole in triumph to Wigmore.

“Such was the murder of Evesham, for battle none it was,” sings Robert
of Gloucester. And as the sun breaks through and turns the gray day to
silver, we pass on either hand memorials of that massacre. By Harvington
mill and weir, where the sand-pipers flit before us, and by the spot
where now stand the Fish and Anchor Inn and a row of anglers, Edward’s
soldiery marched down through the night.

[Illustration: EVESHAM, FROM THE RIVER]

At Offenham, where now is a Bridge Inn, and where tradition says a
bridge once stood, they crossed the river again. On the opposite bank
the slaughter was heaviest, and Dead Man Eyot, a small willowy island
here, won its

[Illustration: From Offenham to Tewkesbury]

name on that day. The sheep are feeding now in that “odd angle of the
isle” that then was piled high with corpses. And so we come to a high
railway embankment, and thence to a bridge, and the beautiful bell-tower
leaps into view, soaring above the mills and roofs of Evesham.

[Illustration: THE AVON FROM EVESHAM TO TEWKESBURY]

To remember Evesham is to call up a broad and smiling vale; a river
looped about a green hill and returning almost on itself, on the lower
slope of the hill, beside the river, a little town; and above its mills
and roofs, two spires and one pre-eminent tower, all set in the same
church-yard.

The vale itself, as we dropped down towards Evesham, was insensibly
changing. Unawares we left the pastures behind, and drifted into a land
of orchards and marketgardens--no Devonshire orchards, with carpets of
vivid grass, but stiff regiments of plum-trees, and between their files
asparagus growing, and sage and winter lettuce under hand-glasses, and
cabbages splashed with mauve and crimson. We had crossed, in fact, the
frontier of a fruit-growing country that in England has no rival but
Kent. The beginnings of this prosperous gardening are sometimes ascribed
to one Signor Bernardi, a Genoese gentleman who settled at Evesham in
the middle of the seventeenth century. But more probably these orchards
grow for the same reason that the meadows above are fat and a bell-tower
stands in Evesham. There is a legend to that effect which is worth
telling.

[Illustration: A MARKET-GARDEN NEAR EVESHAM]

Egwin, Bishop of Worcester in the year 700 or thereabouts, was a saint
of shining piety, but unpopular in his diocese, which had not long been
converted from paganism, and retained many “ethnic and uncomely
customs.” Against these the bishop thundered, till the people seized and
haled him before Ethelred, then King of Mercia, charging him with
tyranny and many bitter things. The matter was referred to the Holy
Father at Rome, who commanded Egwin to appear before him and answer the
charges. So to Rome he went; but before starting, to show how lowly he
accounted himself, he ordered a pair of iron horse-fetters, and having
put his feet into them, caused them to be locked and the key tossed into
the Avon. Thus shackled, he went forward to Dover, took ship, and came
to the Holy City; when, lo, a miracle! His attendants had gone down to
the Tiber to catch a fish for supper. Scarcely was the line cast when a
fine salmon took it and leaped ashore, without a struggle to escape.
They hurried home with their prize, opened him, and found inside the key
of the bishop’s fetters.

It is needless to say that the pope, after this, made short work of the
charges against Egwin. The accused was loaded with honors, and sent home
with particular recommendations to King Ethelred, who lost no time in
restoring the bishop to his see and appointing him tutor to his own
sons. Among other marks of friendship the king gave Egwin a large tract
of land. It was savage, inhospitable, horrid with thickets and forest
trees. Yet Egwin liked it; for he kept pigs, which found abundance of
food there. So, dividing the wilderness into four quarters, he appointed
a swine-herd over each, whose names were Eoves and Ympa, two brothers;
and Trottuc and Carnuc, brothers also. Eoves (with whom alone we are
concerned) had charge over the eastern portion, and it happened to him
one day that a favorite sow strayed off into the thickest of the woods.
Eoves spent weeks in searching after her, and at length wandered so far
that he too lost his way. He shouted for succor, but none came. Growing
appalled, he began to run headlong through the undergrowth, when
suddenly he stumbled on the lost sow, having three young ones with her.
She came gladly to his call, grunting and muzzling at his legs; then
turned, and began to hurry into the deeper forest, the young pigs
trotting beside her. Eoves followed, and soon, to his wonder, reached a
glade, open and somewhat steep, where was a virgin standing, lovelier
than the noonday, and two others beside her, celestially robed, having
psalteries in their hands and singing holy songs. The swine-herd
understood nothing of the vision; but hurrying back, was lucky enough to
find an egress from the woods, and returned to his home.

[Illustration: REED-CUTTERS]

This matter was reported to Egwin; and he, being eager to see the place
with his own eyes, was led thither by Eoves. There it was vouchsafed to
him to see the same vision, and, as it faded, to hear a voice from the
chief virgin saying, “This place have I chosen.” Whereupon he understood
that he, like Æneas, had been guided by a sow to the spot where he must
build; and soon the Abbey of Evesham, or Eovesham, began to rise where
the virgins had stood. This was in 703, and the building was finished in
six years.

Such is the legend. A town sprang up around the monastery; the thickets
were cleared and became pasture-lands and orchards; the country smiled,
and the abbey waxed rich. It housed sixty-seven monks, five matrons,
three poor brothers, three clerks, and sixty-five servants to work in
brew-house, bake-house, kitchen, cellar, infirmary; to make clothes and
boots; to open the great gate; to till the gardens, vineyards, and
orchards; and to fish for eels in the Avon below. When William de
Beauchamp, whose castle stood at Bengeworth, on the opposite bank, broke
into the abbey church and plundered it, about 1150 A.D., the abbot
excommunicated him and his retainers, razed his castle, and made a
burial-ground of the site. In 1530, under the rule of Clement Lichfield,
the abbey possessed fifteen manors in the county of Worcester alone, in
Gloucestershire six, in Warwickshire three, in Northamptonshire two,
with lands, rents, and advowsons far and wide. Out of Oxford and
Cambridge there was no such assemblage of religious buildings in
England. Then Clement Lichfield reared “a right sumptuous and high
square tower of stone;” and almost at once King Henry VIII. made his
swoop on the monasteries.

[Illustration: EVESHAM BELL-TOWER AND OLD ABBEY GATEWAY]

The country still smiles; but to-day of all the conventual buildings
there survive but a few stones--a sculptured arch leading to a
kitchen-garden, and this “high square tower” of Lichfield’s building.
This last was designed to be at once the abbey’s gateway, horologe, and
belfry; but before the day of its completion all these uses were
nullified. Its service since has been monumental merely--to stand over
the razed foundations and obliterated fish-ponds of Egwin’s house, and
speak to the vale of famous men and the hands that made it fertile.

[Illustration: HAMPTON FERRY]

There are many old houses in Evesham, and especially in Bridge Street;
but the bridge at the foot of this street is modern, and ascribed “to
the public spirit and perseverance of Henry Workman, Esq.” To him also
are due the “Workman Gardens,” a strip of pleasure-ground on the river’s
left bank, facing the abbey grounds; but local sapience has imposed the
usual restrictions on their use, and nine times out of ten you will find
them deserted.

The day was almost spent as we took to the canoe once more, and paddled
around the long bend that girdles the town. We thought to have left the
bell-tower far behind, when, a little past Hampton Ferry, its pinnacles
reappeared, and the twin spires of St. Lawrence and All-Saints, peering
above a plum orchard almost ahead of us. On our left the sun sank in a
broad yellow haze; the hill where Simon fell, and where stands the Abbey
Manor-house, was soaked in it; and soon, as the channel brought our
faces westward again, and we drew near Chadbury mill and Chadbury lock
and weir, the vale was filled with this yellow light, pale and
pervasive.

[Illustration: CHADBURY MILL]

    “Great Evesham’s fertile glebe what tongue hath not extolled?
     As though to her alone belonged the garb of gold,”

sings Drayton; and certainly she wore the garb that evening. As she
donned it, the chorus of the birds ceased, and with the sudden hush we
became aware that their voices had been following in our ears all the
day through. Above and below Evesham every furlong of the river-bank is
populous, with larks especially, whose song you may hear shivering from
every point of the sky. In early winter the number of nests that the
falling leaves disclose is astonishing. Some, no doubt, have lasted, and
will last, for years, such as the mud-plastered houses of the blackbird
and thrush, and the fagot pile which the magpie constructs in the top of
a tree. But the flimsy nests of the warblers and

[Illustration: CHADBURY WEIR]

other late-breeding birds, built of a few dried grasses and bound
together with cobwebs and horse-hair, date from last spring, and will
disappear before the next. They were not made until the leaves were out,
and upon the leaves their builders relied for concealment, so that in
winter they hang betrayed. Yet even in winter the banks teem with life
and color and interest. P., who rowed down here one bright December
morning when the scarlet hips were out, and dark-red haws, and the
silver-gray seed of “old man’s beard,” tells of a big meadow from which
the flood had just subsided, and of birds innumerable feeding
there--rooks, starlings, pewits in flocks, little white-rumped
sandpipers darting to and fro and uttering their sharp note, a dozen
herons solemnly but suspiciously observant of the passing boat, and
watching for its effect on a cluster of wild-duck out on the ruffled
stream. You cannot, indeed, pass down Avon without receiving the
wide-eyed attention of its fauna; and politeness calls on you to return
it.

Chadbury is twenty miles below Stratford, and here we meet the first
lock that is kept in repair; so that for twenty miles Mr. William
Sandys’s work of making Avon navigable has gone for nothing. He lived at
Fladbury, just below, and the money he threw away on his hobby “cannot
be reckoned at less than twenty thousand pounds.” “As soon,” writes Dr.
Nash, in his “Worcestershire,” “as he had finished his work to Stratford
(and, as I have heard, spent all his fortune), he immediately delivered
up all to Parliament, to do what they thought fit therein.” And this was
precisely nothing.

Consequently there is to-day but little human stir beside the Avon. The
“freighted barge from distant shores” travels this way no longer, or but
rarely. Unless by the towns--Emscote, Stratford, Evesham, and
Tewkesbury--a pleasure-boat is hardly to be met, and all the villages
seem

[Illustration: FLADBURY MILL]

to turn their backs on the stream. At the mills we see a few men,
whitened with flour; in summer the mowers and haymakers appear for a few
days upon the meadows, and are soon gone; in winter a few may return to
poll the willows, tying their twigs into fagots, and leaving the stems
standing, with white scarred heads; occasionally a man and a boy will
come in one of the native high-prowed punts to cut and bind the dark
rushes that, when dried, are used for matting, chair seats, and calking
beer barrels; or the tops of a withy bed will sway erratically as we
pass, and tell of somebody at work there; or in autumn flood-time a
professional fisherman, with his eel nets, is busy at the weirs. These
represent the industries of Avon. Other human forms there are, which
angle with rod and line--strange, infinitely patient men, fishing for
eels and other succulent fish, catching (it may be) one dace between
sunrise and sundown. Their ancestors must have had better sport, for
Dugdale

[Illustration: THE GIG SEAT]

constantly speaks of valuable fishing rights on the river, and many a
farmer paid his rent to the Church in eels. To this day every cottage
has its punt, and sometimes a seat rigged up in some likely spot over
the stream. One such we marked with particular interest. It was, in
fact, the body of an old gig; and therein sat an angler, and a glutton
of his kind, for he had no less than seven lines baited, and the rods
radiated from him like the spokes of a wheel. Perhaps it was his one
holiday for the week, and he had hit on this device for cramming the
seven days’ sport into one.

Much might be written of Chadbury mill and weir as we saw them in

              “the twilight of such day
    As after sunset fadeth in the west.”

But, again, it is hard to improve upon Ireland, who calls it “so rich a
landscape that nature seems not to require the assistance of art, in the
language of modern refinement, either to correct her coarse expression
by removing a hill or docking a tree, or to supply her careless and
tasteless omissions for the purpose of rendering her more completely
picturesque.”

In gathering darkness we dropped down beneath a hill-side partly wooded,
partly set out in young plum orchards, partly turfed, and dotted with
old thorns. Here is Cracombe House, and beyond it lie two
villages--Fladbury on the right and Cropthorne on the left, each with
its own mill. A ford used to join them, but this was superseded by a
bridge to commemorate the Queen’s Jubilee. We did not come to it that
night, for at Fladbury there stands a parsonage, with a lawn sloping
between trees to the river, and on this lawn we heard the voices and
laughter of friends in the dusk. Turning our canoe shore-ward, we hailed
them.

If Kenilworth Castle and Evesham Abbey, structures so

[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.



INDEX TO ILLUSTRATIONS


Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, 73.
Arrow-heads, near Tewkesbury, 131.
Ashow, 41.
Avon from Nasebyfield to Wolston, The, facing 10.
Avon Inn, Rugby, 22.

Barford Bridge, 54.
Bidford Bridge, 84.
Blakedown Mill, 44.
Bowling-green, Tewkesbury, The, 137.
Bredon, 125.
Bretford, 29.
Bubbenhall, 37.

Cæsar’s Tower, Warwick Castle, 50.
Catthorpe Church, 19.
Chadbury Mill, 104.
Chadbury Weir, 105.
Charlcote, 63.
Chesford Bridge, 43.
Church Lawford, 27.
Cleeve Mill--An Autumn Flood, 87.
Clopton Bridge, Stratford-upon-Avon, 69.
Cropthorne Mill, 112.

Dove-cote, Wasperton, 60.
Dow Bridge on Watling Street, 20.

Eckington Bridge, 122.
Eckington, Near, 127.
Elms by Bidford Grange, 81.
Evesham Bell-tower and Old Abbey Gateway, 102.
Evesham, from the River, 96.

Fladbury Mill, 108.

Gig Seat, The, 109.
Gleaners, 33.
Great Comberton, 121.
Guy’s Cliffe, 47.
Guy’s Cliffe Mill, 45.

Hampton Ferry, 103.
Hampton Lucy, from the Meadows, 61.
Hampton Lucy to Harvington, From, facing 60.
Harvington Weir, 92.
Hillborough, 83.
Holbrook Court, 24.
Hospital of Robert Earl of Leycester in Warwick, 51.

Lawford Mill, 25.
Lock and Church, The, 75.

Market-garden near Evesham, A, 99.
Meadows by the Avon, 89.
Meadowsweet, 65.
Mill Street, Tewkesbury, 139.
Mouth of the Stour, The, 74.
Mythe Bridge, Tewkesbury, 134.

Nafford Mill, 122.
Naseby Monument, 10.
Nets Drying at Wyre, 117.
Newbold-upon-Avon, 24.

Offenham, Near, 95.
Offenham to Tewkesbury, From, facing 96.
Old Bridge, Warwick, 49.
Old House, Tewkesbury, 141.
Old Pear-Trees at Pershore, 115.
Old Thorns, Marcleeve Hill, 85.

Pershore Bridge, 119.
Pershore Water-gate, 123.

Reed-cutters, 101.
Roman Camp, Lilburne, 15.
Rugby, from Brownsover Mill, 21.
Ruins of Newnham Regis Church, 28.
Ryton-on-Dunsmore, 32.

Sherborne, 58.
Site of Brandon Castle, 31.
Standford Church, 17.
Standford Hall, 14.
Stoneleigh Abbey, Oct. 15, 1884, 40.
Stoneleigh Deer Park, In, 36.
Stratford Church, 71.
Strensham Church, 129.
Strensham Mill, 130.
Sulby Abbey, 11.
Summer-house on Bredon Hill, The, 118.
Swing-Bridge near Welford, 13.

Tewkesbury, from the Severn, 138.
Tithe Barn, Bredon, 126.
Twining Ferry, 135.

Under the Willows, 67.

Warwick Castle, from the Park, 55.
Wasperton, At, 59.
Weir Brake, 77.
Welford Canal House, 12.
Welford Weir and Church, 80.
Weston-upon-Avon, 78.
Willows by Cropthorne, 113.
Willow Pollarding, 93.
Wolston Priory, 32.
Wolston to Wasperton, From, facing 28.
Wyre, At, 114.
Wyre Lock, 117.

Yew Hedge, The--Cleeve Prior Manor-house, 83.

                                THE END

                   *       *       *       *       *

                            HANDSOME BOOKS

                            ILLUSTRATED BY

                  EDWIN A. ABBEY AND ALFRED PARSONS.

     A SELECTION FROM THE SONNETS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. With Numerous
     Illustrations by ALFRED PARSONS. 4to, Full Leather, Gilt Edges, $5
     00. (_In a Box, with Portrait on Cover._)

     “THE QUIET LIFE.” Certain Verses by Various Hands; Adorned with
     Numerous Drawings by EDWIN A. ABBEY and ALFRED PARSONS. 4to,
     Ornamental Leather, $7 50. (_In a Box._)

     OLD SONGS. With Drawings by EDWIN A. ABBEY and ALFRED PARSONS. 4to,
     Ornamental Leather Cover, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (_In a Box._)

     SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER; or, the Mistakes of a Night. With
     Photogravure and Process Reproductions from Drawings by EDWIN A.
     ABBEY. Decorations by ALFRED PARSONS. Folio, Leather, Illuminated,
     Gilt Edges, $20 00. (_In a Box._)

     SELECTIONS FROM THE POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK. With Drawings by EDWIN
     A. ABBEY. 4to, Cloth, Illuminated, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (_In a Box._)

     SKETCHING RAMBLES IN HOLLAND. By GEORGE H. BOUGHTON, A.R.A.
     Illustrated with Drawings by the Author and EDWIN A. ABBEY. 8vo.
     Cloth. Illuminated, $5 00; Gilt Edges. $5 25.

               Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.

☞ HARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the above works by mail, postage
prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt
                            of the price_.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Warsickshire Avon" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.