Chapter II: The Upper or Warwickshire Avon

The Watershed of Central England--Naseby--Rugby--The
Swift--Lutterworth and Wiclif--Stoneleigh Abbey and
Kenilworth Castle--Guy's Cliff--The Leam--Warwick and
its Castle--Stratford-on-Avon and its Shakespeare
Associations--Evesham--Pershore--Tewkesbury.

The Avon is a typical river of the English lowlands, and it is surpassed by few in the quiet beauty of its scenery or in the places of interest on its banks. It rises in the northern part of Northamptonshire, on an elevated plateau, the highest spot on which is nearly 700 feet above sea-level. This forms the watershed of Central England, for on it also the Welland and the Nen begin their courses to the Wash. But it is not only the source of an historic stream, it is also the scene of an historic event. Almost on the highest ground is Naseby Church, and to the north of that, quite in the corner of the county, is the fatal "field" where the forces of Charles and of Cromwell met in a death-grip and the King's cause was hopelessly lost. It was more than a defeat, it was an utter rout. Henceforth Charles was "like a hunted partridge, flitting from one castle to another."

From this upland country--pleasantly varied by cornfield, pasture, and copses--the Avon makes its way to the northern margin of the county, and then, working round to the south-west, forms for a while the boundary between it and Leicestershire. Entering Warwickshire, the Avon passes near Rugby. All know the great railway junction, immortalised by Charles Dickens, and the famous school, with its memories of old Laurence Sheriffe the founder, and Dr. Arnold, its great headmaster. Then the river is joined by the tributary Swift, which, while hardly more than a brook, has rippled by the little town of Lutterworth. There, higher up the slope, is the church where Wiclif ministered, the pulpit from which he preached. There, spanning the stream, is a little bridge, the successor of that from which the ashes, after his bones had been dug up and burnt by order of the Council of Constance, were flung into the water. So the Swift bore them to the Avon, and the Avon to the Severn, and that to the sea, to be dispersed abroad into all lands--"which things are an allegory."

The Avon flows on through the pretty, restful scenery of Warwickshire, which has been rendered classic by the authoress of "Adam Bede," twisting in great curves gradually more and more to the south. It leaves, some three miles away from its right bank, the spires and ancient mansions of Coventry--once noted for its ribbons, now busy in making cycles; it sweeps round Stoneleigh Abbey, with its beautiful park and fine old oaks, where a comparatively modern mansion has replaced a Cistercian monastery. On the opposite side, half a league away, are the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, with their memories of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth. It glides beneath Guy's Cliff, where the famous Earl, the slayer of the Dun Cow, after his return from the Holy Land, dwelt in a cave as a hermit, unrecognised, till the hour of his death, by his own wife, though she daily gave him alms. A little further, and a short distance away on the left, on the tributary Leam, is the modern town of Leamington, which began a career of prosperity just a century ago on the discovery of sundry mineral springs. Then the Avon sweeps by the foot of the hill on which stands the old town of Warwick. The site is an ideal one--a hill for a fortress, a river for a moat--and has thus been occupied from a distant antiquity. Briton, Roman, Saxon--all are said to have held in turn the settlement, till the Norman came and built a castle. The town retains two of its gates and several old timbered houses, one of which, the Leicester Hospital, founded in 1571, is perhaps the finest in the Midlands; and on the top of the hill, set so that "it cannot be hid," is the great church of St. Mary. It is in the Perpendicular style, more or less, for the tower and nave were rebuilt after a great fire in 1694, the choir escaping with little injury. Two fine tombs of the Earls of Warwick are in this part, but the glory of the church is the Beauchamp Chapel, with its far-famed altar-tomb and effigy of Richard Beauchamp, the founder. He died in 1439; and near him lie the Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favourite, and other members of the house of Dudley.

Warwick Castle is one of the most picturesquely situated mansions in England. It stands on a rocky headland, which descends almost precipitously to the Avon. One of our illustrations (p. 111) may give some notion of the beauty of the view over the rich river-plain; the other (p. 109) indicates the aspect of the castle itself. A mediæval fortress has been gradually transformed into a modern mansion, yet it retains an air of antiquity and not a little of the original structure. It incorporates portions of almost all dates, from the Norman Conquest to the present day. The oldest part is the lofty tower, called Cæsar's tower, which must have been erected not many years after the victory at Hastings. The residential part mostly belongs to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though alterations and additions have been made, especially during the restoration, which was rendered necessary by a lamentable fire in 1871. We must leave it to the guide-books to describe the pictures, antiquities, and curiosities which the castle contains--relics of the Civil War, when it was in vain besieged by the king's forces, the sword and porridge-pot of the legendary Guy, and the famous Warwick Vase, dug up near Tivoli at Hadrian's Villa. But the view from the windows is so beautiful that the visitor will often find a difficulty in looking at pictures on the walls; he will be well rewarded if afterwards he stroll down towards the old mill by the riverside.

After leaving Warwick the Avon keeps winding towards the south-western boundary of the county till, before reaching this, it arrives at another and yet more noted town. Stratford-on-Avon is a household word wherever the English tongue is spoken. No American thinks his visit to the country of his ancestors is complete till he has made a pilgrimage to the birthplace and the grave of Shakespeare--nay, even our distant kinsmen in Germany are not seldom drawn thither by the same magnetic force. The town, till the days of railways, was a quietly prosperous, old-fashioned place, in harmony with the scenery of the neighbourhood. This is thoroughly characteristic of the Midlands, and exhibits one of their most attractive types. "The Avon, a fairly broad bright stream, sweeps silently along on its way to the Severn, through level meadows, where the grass grows green and deep. The higher ground on either side rolls gently down, descending sometimes to the margin of the stream, but elsewhere parted from it by broad stretches of level valley. The slopes are dotted with cornfields, and varied by clumps of trees and lines of hedgerow timber. It is a peaceful, unexciting land, where hurry would seem out of place."[4] The little house where Shakespeare was born--in 1564, on the 23rd of April, as they say--after many vicissitudes has been saved to the nation, and perhaps a little over-restored. It is a parcel-timbered dwelling without enrichment--one of those common in the Midlands--such as would be inhabited by an ordinary burgess of a country town.

When Shakespeare returned, a prosperous man, to his birthplace, he lived in a much better house near the church, which he purchased in 1597. This, however, was pulled down by an ill-tempered clerical vandal in the middle of the last century. Shottery, where we can still see the cottage of Anne Hathaway, whom Shakespeare loved not wisely but too well, is a mile away; and about four times that distance is the picturesque old brick and stone mansion of Charlecote, with its beautiful park. Here dwelt Sir Thomas Lucy, with whose deer the youth made too free, and on account of whose anger he ran away to London. The dramatist, it is said, took his revenge on the knight in the portrait of Justice Shallow, but when he looked back on the ultimate results of his flight from Stratford he might have justly said, "All's well that ends well!"

In the month of his birth, 1616, Stratford Church received the body of William Shakespeare. "Church and churchyard are worthy of being connected with so great a memory. The former is a fine cruciform structure, crowned with a central spire; the latter a spacious tract, planted with aged trees. An avenue of limes leads up to the church porch, between which, perhaps, the poet often passed to worship, and whose quivering shadows may one sad day have fallen upon his coffin. But there is a part of the God's acre where, perhaps, more than any other, we may think of him, for it is one which can hardly have failed to tempt him to musing. The Avon bounds the churchyard, and by its brink is a terraced walk, beneath a row of fine old elms. On the one hand, through the green screens of summer foliage, or through the chequered lattice-work of winter boughs, we see the grey stones of the church--here the tracery of a window, there a weather-beaten pinnacle--then, through some wider gap, the spire itself. On the other hand, beneath the terrace wall, the Avon slowly and silently glides along by bridge and town, by water-meadows, bright with celandine in spring and thick with lush grass in June."[5]

The church, once collegiate, is an unusually fine one, partly Early English, partly Decorated, but mostly Perpendicular in style. To the last belongs the chancel, where Shakespeare is buried, with his wife, daughter, and other relations. His monument, with the bust, is on the north wall, and his grave with the quaint inscription is near at hand, both too well known to need description; but though this one great memory pervades the place, almost to the exclusion of all beside, there are other tombs of interest, and the church of itself is well worth a visit.

About a league below Stratford, the Avon becomes a county boundary, separating Warwickshire from the north of Gloucestershire. Then it returns to the former county, and lastly enters Worcestershire. Its valley becomes more and more definitely marked as the river cuts its way through the upland, which forms the eastern limit of the broad Vale of Severn. On a peninsula of Worcestershire made by a southward sweep of the stream, near the boundary of the two other counties, stands an historic town, Evesham, which gives its name to the beautiful vale. A ruined archway and a noble tower are the sole relics of its once famous abbey. This was founded early in the eighth century, on a spot where they said both a swineherd and a bishop had seen a vision of the Virgin. Ultimately it was attached to the Benedictine order, became one of the most wealthy monasteries, with one of the grandest churches in the West. It was exceptionally rich in relics and ornaments. The shrine of the founder was a superb specimen of the goldsmith's work; the forms of worship were unusually sumptuous. But at last the crash came, and the spoiler's hand fell with exceptional weight on the abbey of Evesham. "The estates were confiscated and parcelled out, and the abbey was dismantled and given away to Sir Philip Hoby, a gentleman of Worcestershire, who shortly afterwards seems to have leased out the magnificent buildings of abbey and monastery as a quarry for stone, and thus it continued to be for many a day." So now "it can hardly be called a ruin";[6] but the beautiful tower still remains, which stood at the entrance of the cemetery, and was meant for clock and bells. This was only completed just before the surrender of the abbey. Near it are two churches, each of fair size, each with its own steeple, chapels founded by the monks for the use of the townsfolk. The three, as shown in our illustration (p. 117), form a very striking group.

But this quiet town in a peaceful valley was once disturbed by the noise of battle, and witnessed a crisis in English history. Prince Edward, son of Henry III., had contrived by masterly generalship to prevent the junction of the armies of Simon de Montfort and his son. The former was encamped at Evesham. The Prince's army blocked his one outlet by land; a detachment of it had cut off a retreat by the bridges over the river. The fight from the first was hopeless; De Montfort's troops were inferior: "The Welsh fled at the first onset like sheep, and were cut ruthlessly down in the cornfields and gardens where they had sought refuge. The little group of knights around Simon fought desperately, falling one by one till the Earl was left alone. So terrible were his sword-strokes that he had all but gained the hill-top when a lance-thrust brought his horse to the ground; but Simon still rejected the summons to yield, till a blow from behind felled him, mortally wounded, to the ground. Then with a last cry of 'It is God's grace,' the soul of the great patriot passed away."[7]

The beauty and richness of the Vale of Evesham are proverbial; it is a land of corn and orchards, and it widens out as the Avon winds on in rounding the northern extremity of the Cotswolds. After a time the stream makes a great undulating sweep to the northward, as if to avoid the outlying mass of Dundry Hill, and brings us to another country town and another fragment of a grand church of olden time. Pershore was founded in the tenth century, as was Evesham, and only a few years afterwards; it too passed under the rule of the Benedictines, and was richly endowed by a pious Saxon noble, not only with lands, but also with relics. Pershore, however, was less uniformly prosperous than Evesham. Edward the Confessor gave of its lands to his new abbey at Westminster. William the Conqueror took of them for himself or his courtiers. For all that, money was found for rebuilding, and for rearing a glorious structure, resembling those at Gloucester and Tewkesbury, in the latter part of the eleventh century. The choir was again re-built in the thirteenth; the central tower dates from the middle of the fourteenth. The Reformation here, as elsewhere, was a time of plunder and destruction--nave, lady-chapel, and monastic buildings were pulled down; the people of Pershore, to their honour, purchased the rest of the church, and thus saved it from annihilation. The north transept fell down at a later date; but what is left has been carefully repaired and restored, and this fragment has been justly called one of the noblest specimens of Norman and Early English work that our country possesses.

Though the foreground scenery, as the two valleys merge, becomes less striking, the more distant views are always attractive; for the scarp bounding the limestone uplands of the Cotswolds forms a pleasant feature, and the range of the Malverns is beautiful in its outline. At last, just before its confluence with the Severn, the Avon brings us to another interesting town--Tewkesbury, on the left bank of the latter river, and within half a mile of the former one. Tewkesbury has an abbey church, not so magnificent, but hardly less interesting than that of Worcester, while it is not less rich than Shrewsbury in black-timbered houses. Here the course of the Severn is interrupted by a weir and a lock, constructed in order to make the river navigable to Worcester for vessels of larger tonnage, and is crossed by a fine bridge of iron. It receives the Avon, by the side of which the town is built, and this stream is spanned by another and ancient bridge of stone. The streets, with their old timbered houses, are a delight to the antiquary: they usually have bay windows carried the whole height of the front, the "Wheatsheaf Inn" being one of the best specimens. The abbey, however, is the glory of the town, and in ancient days, before Tewkesbury mustard became a proverb, made its name known all over England. It claims as its founder two kings of Mercia, rather more than eleven and a half centuries ago, and in any case appears to carry back its history almost to this time. But the greater part of the present church was erected early in the twelfth century, though the choir was re-constructed about two centuries afterwards. Yet this, though graceful Decorated work in the upper part, maintains the massive Norman piers below, the combination producing a rather unusual effect. But not only so, the choir terminates in an apse, a feature not very common in our English churches, and certainly not the least among the attractions of Tewkesbury. Central tower, transept, and nave are mainly Norman; and the west end is peculiar, for it terminates in a huge arch, which occupies almost the whole of the façade, and in which a great Perpendicular window has been inserted. It has a curiously incomplete look, so, possibly, the architect contemplated the addition of a façade with towers. The church also is unusually rich in chantries and ancient monuments, secular and ecclesiastical.

THE AVON AT STRATFORD (_p. 110_).]

EVESHAM (_p. 114_).]

Tewkesbury, too, has a place in English history, for on the meadows south of the abbey was fought the last battle between the houses of Lancaster and York, and the Red Rose was trampled in the mire. Margaret of Anjou was taken prisoner; her only son, Edward, was stabbed by the Yorkists--it is said after the Duke of York had struck him in the face with his gauntlet; and a large number of the chief men on the losing side were killed or were executed after the battle. Some of them fled to the abbey for sanctuary. Edward and his soldiers came in hot pursuit, but a priest, bearing the Host, confronted them on the threshold, nor would he move until the victor promised to spare the lives of the fugitives. But on the third day afterwards a troop of soldiers broke into the building, dragged out the refugees, and promptly struck off their heads. Revenge proved stronger than religion!

The young prince lies in a nameless grave beneath the central tower of the abbey; and other illustrious victims of the battle were buried within its walls. The building itself has had more than one narrow escape from destruction: it was seriously injured by a fire in the later part of the twelfth century; at the suppression of the monasteries it was placed on the list of "superfluous" buildings and doomed to be pulled down by the greedy vandals of that age. But the good folk of Tewkesbury bought it for themselves, and thus preserved one of the finest and most interesting ecclesiastical buildings in the West Country. They have well earned the gratitude of posterity. The monastic buildings, however, to a great extent have disappeared. The cloisters, which seem to have resembled those at Gloucester, are unfortunately gone, but the monks' infirmary, with some adjacent buildings, has been incorporated into a mansion called Abbey House, and the principal gateway still remains. Tewkesbury, in short, is to the lover of architecture far the most interesting town of its size in the valley of the Severn.

THE SEVERN.