Chapter II: Part 2

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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

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

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

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

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,

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.

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

before the church a cross. And ahead of us, over its acres of plum and pear orchards, the fine tower of Pershore rises.

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.

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.

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

which we leaned for a quiet half-hour before going on our way.

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

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

his pride to inherit a land of immemorial towns--a land made fertile by tillage and watered by “rivers stealing under hoary walls.”

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.”

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,

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:

“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

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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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