Part 3
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:
“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.
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
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.
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,
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
“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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
“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.
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