Part 2

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

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.

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

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

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,

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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,

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.’”

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

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.