Transcriber’s Note: Illustrations have been moved so as not to fall in the middle of paragraphs (leaving them as close to the original position in the book as possible). A few minor printing errors were corrected.

Volume I is available as Project Gutenberg ebook #57365.

THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES

WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER

The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.

The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike.

The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.

The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.

The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”

Cycle Rides Round London.

A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.

Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.

The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”

The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.

The Dorset Coast.

The South Devon Coast.

The Old Inns of Old England. Two Vols.

Love in the Harbour: a Longshore Comedy.

Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).

Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural.

The Manchester and Glasgow Road. This way to Gretna Green. Two Vols.

The North Devon Coast.

Half Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols.

The Autocar Road Book. Four Vols.

The Tower Of London: Fortress, Palace, and Prison.

The Somerset Coast.

The Smugglers: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient Craft.

The Cornish Coast. North.

The Cornish Coast. South.

The Kentish Coast. [In the Press.

The Sussex Coast. [In the Press.

BISHAM CHURCH.

THAMES VALLEY
VILLAGES

BY
CHARLES G. HARPER

VOL. II

ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY W. S. CAMPBELL
AND FROM DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR

TAMESIS

London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
1910

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SEPARATE PLATES

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT.

THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES

CHAPTER I

SONNING—HURST, “IN THE COUNTY OF WILTS”—SHOTTESBROOKE—WARGRAVE

As Reading can by no means be styled a village, seeing that its population numbers over 72,000, the fact of its not being treated of in these pages will perhaps be excused. You cannot rusticate at Reading: the electric tramways, the great commercial premises, and the crowded state of its streets forbid; but Reading, taken frankly as a town and a manufacturing town at that, is not at all a place for censure. The Kennet, however, that flows through it, has here become a very different Kennet from that which sparkles in the Berkshire meads between Hungerford and Kintbury, and has a very dubious and deterrent look where it is received into the Thames.

The flat, open shores at Reading presently give place to the wooded banks approaching Sonning, where the fine trees of Holme Park are reflected in the waters of the lock—the lock that was tended for many years, until his death, about 1889, by a lock-keeper who also kept bees, made beehives, and wrote poetry. Sonning, and its Thames-side “Parade,” certainly invite to poetry.

To say there is no Thames-side village prettier, or in any way more delightful, than Sonning is vague praise and also in some ways understates its peculiar attractiveness, which, strange to say, seems to increase, rather than decrease, with the years. It might have been expected that a village but three miles from the great and increasing town of Reading would suffer many indignities from that proximity, and would be infested with such flagrant nuisances as wayside advertisement-hoardings and street-loafers, but these manifestations of the zeitgeist are, happily, entirely absent.

Let us, however, halt for a moment to give a testimonial of character to Reading itself, which is far above the average of great towns in these and many other matters. Loafers and street-hoardings are found there, without doubt—and can we find the modern town of its size where they are not?—but they do not obtrude; and, in short, Reading is, with all its bustle of business, a likeable place.

There are reasons for Sonning remaining unspoiled. They are not altogether sufficient reasons, for they obtain in other once delightful villages similarly situated, which have unhappily been ravaged by modern progress; but here they have by chance sufficed. They are found chiefly in the happy circumstances that Sonning lies three-quarters of a mile off the main-road—off that Bath road, oh! my brethren, that was once so delightful, with its memories of a bypast coaching-age; and is now little better than a race-track for motor-cars, and, by reason of their steel-studded tyres, cursed with a bumpy surface full of pot-holes. Time was when the surface of the Bath road was perfection. Nowadays, no ingenuity of mortal road-surveyors can keep it in repair, for the suction of air caused by pneumatic tyres travelling at great speed tears out the binding material and leaves only loose grit and stones. The Bath road on a fine summer’s day has become unendurable by reason of the dust raised in this manner. If you stand a distance away, in the fields, out of sight of the actual road, its course can yet be distinctly traced for a long way by the billows of dust, rising like smoke from it.

Happily, motor-cars do but rarely come into Sonning, although at the turning out of the high road a prominent advertisement of the Bull, the White Hart, or the French Horn—the three hostelries that Sonning can boast—invites them hither.

The other prominent reason for this village being allowed to remain quiet is found in the fact of Twyford, the nearest railway station, being two miles distant.

There are many branching streams of the Thames here, and the hamlet of Sonning Eye, on the Oxfordshire side, takes its name either from this abundance of water, or from the eyots, or islands, formed by these several channels, crossed by various bridges.

Sonning Bridge par excellence is a severely unornamented structure of red brick, obviously built by the very least imaginative of architects, in the eighteenth century. If it were new it would be an offence, but there is now a mellowness of colour in that old red brick, embroidered richly as it is in green and gold by the lichens of nearly two centuries, that gives the old bridge a charm by no means inherent in its originator’s design.

Trees, great, noble, upstanding woodland trees, lovingly enclasp Sonning village and form a background for its ancient cottages and fine old mansions, and against the dark green background of them you see on summer afternoons the blue smoke curling up lazily from rustic chimneys. In midst of this the embattled church-tower rises unobtrusively; and indeed the church is so hidden, although it is a large church, that strangers are generally directed to find it by way of the Bull Inn: a rambling old hostelry occupying two sides of a square, and covered in summer with a mantle of roses and creepers. And it must, by the way, not be forgotten that Sonning in general displays a very wealth of flowers for the delight of the stranger.

I would it were possible to be enthusiastic upon the church, but thorough “restoration,” and a marvellously hideous monument to Thomas Rich, Alderman of Gloucester, 1613, and his son, Sir Thomas Rich, Bart., 1667, forbid. There are brasses on the floor of the nave, to Laurence Fyton, 1434, steward of the manor of Sonning, and to William Barber, 1549, bailiff of the same manor; with others.

SONNING BRIDGE.

Here, too, is a monument of Canon Pearson, vicar for over forty years, and reverently spoken of—or is it the monument that is reverenced?—by the caretaker. I have sought greatly to discover something by which the Canon’s career may be illustrated in these pages, but, upon my soul, the most notable things available are precisely that he held this excellent living for that long period, and that he sometimes preached before Queen Victoria. These things do not in themselves form a title to reverence.

Something of the distinct stateliness of Sonning is due to the fact that anciently the Bishops of Salisbury were owners of the manor, and before them the Bishops of the Saxon diocese of Dorchester. Their manor-house was in the time of Leland “a fair old house of stone by the Tamise ripe”; but of this desirable residence nothing remains. The Deanery, too, has disappeared, but the fine old stone and brick enclosing-walls of its grounds remain, and there a picturesque modern residence has been built. Those walls, of an immense thickness and solidity, are indeed a sight to see, for the saxifrage and many beautiful flowering plants growing in and upon them.

HOUR-GLASS AND WROUGHT-IRON STAND, HURST.

Sonning itself, being a place so delightful, invites those to whom locality has interest to explore into the country that lies in the rear of it. In a work styled Thames Valley Villages we may go very much where we please, and here the valley broadens out considerably, for it includes, and insensibly merges with, that of the river Loddon, which flows down quite a long way, even from the heights of northern Hampshire. The Loddon, the loveliest tributary of the Thames, flows into it by three mouths, from one mile to two miles and a half below Sonning, and its various loops and channels make the four-mile stretch of country in the rear a particularly moist and water-logged district. Here, crossing the dusty Bath road at Twyford, which takes its name from the ancient double ford of the Loddon at this point, the secluded village of Hurst may be found. Its name of “Hurst,” i.e. a woodland, indicates its situation in what was once the widespreading Windsor Forest. The village lies along gravelly roads, scattered about fragments of village green and a large pond; its church, hidden three-quarters of a mile away, forming, with a country inn and some old almshouses, a curiously isolated group. To see the interesting Norman and Early English church, with red-brick tower, dated 1612, crowned with quaint cupola, is worth some effort; for it contains a very handsome chancel-screen, probably placed here circa 1500. The repainting of it in 1876, under the direction of J. D. Sedding, the architect who then restored the church, is, if indeed in accordance with the traces of the original decoration then found, certainly more curious than beautiful; but it should be seen, if only to show that our ancestors were, after all, not a little barbaric in their schemes of decoration. The hour-glass, with beautiful wrought-iron bracket dated 1636, should be noticed. Behind it, on the wall, is painted “As this Glasse runneth, so Man’s Life passeth.” A queer memorial brass to Alse Harison, representing the lady in a four-poster bed, is on the north wall. A large grey-and-white marble monument to others of the Harison family includes an epitaph on Philip Harison, who died in 1683. The sorrowing author of it ends ingeniously:

“A double dissolution there appears,

He into dust dissolves; she into tears.”

Surely a mind capable of such ingenious imagery on such a subject cannot have been wholly downcast.

The old almshouses by the church were founded, as appears on a tablet over the entrance, by one William Barker:

This Hospitall for the
Maintenance of eight poor persons,
Each at 6d. pr diem for euer, was
Erected and Founded in ye year 1664
At the Sole Charge of
William Barker
of Hurst, in the County of
Wilts, Esq.
Who dyed ye 25th of March, 1685
And lies buried in the South
Chancell of this Parish.

Note you that, gentle reader, “the county of Wilts,” we being in the midst of Berkshire? A considerable tract of surrounding country is in fact (or was until comparatively recent years) a detached portion of Wiltshire, and was invariably shown so on old maps. Examples of such isolated portions of counties, and even of detached fragments of parishes, are by no means rare: Worcestershire in England and Cromartyshire in Scotland, forming the most notable examples; but the reasons for these things are obscure, and all attempts at explaining them amount to little more than the unsatisfying conclusion that they are thus because—well, because they are, you know! That is the net result of repeated discussions upon the subject in Notes and Queries, in which publication of wholly honorary and unpaid contributions the majority of noters, querists, and writers of replies have during the space of some sixty years past been engaged in chasing their own tails, like so many puppies. The process is amusing enough, but as you end where you began, the net result is no great catch.

Apart from legends and traditions, it would seem that the explanation of the Berkshire districts of Hurst, Twyford, Ruscombe, Whistley Green, and a portion of Wokingham having been accounted in Wiltshire, may be found in the fact, already remarked, that Sonning was a manor of the Bishops of Salisbury. The question appears to have been largely an ecclesiastical affair. The anomaly of a portion of Wiltshire being islanded in Berkshire was, however, ended by Acts of Parliament during the reigns of William the Fourth and Queen Victoria, by which the area concerned was annexed to Berkshire.

Returning from Hurst to Twyford, expeditions to Ruscombe, St. Lawrence Waltham, and Shottesbrooke will amply repay the explorer in these wilds—for wilds they are in the matter of perplexing roads. They are good roads, in so far that they are level, but they would seem to have come into existence on no plan; or, if plan there ever were, a malicious plan, intended to utterly confound and mislead the stranger. But this is no unpleasant district in which to wander awhile.

ST. LAWRENCE WALTHAM.

Ruscombe is notable as the place where William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, died, in 1718. Its church stands solitary in the meadows—a red-brick, eighteenth-century building, as ruddy as a typical beef-eating and port-drinking farmer of Georgian days. The neighbouring St. Lawrence Waltham is entirely delightful. The fine church tower of St. Lawrence, the ancient brick and plaster and timbered Bell Inn, and the old village pound, with an aged elm at each corner of it, composing a rarely-beautiful picture.

The stone spire of Shottesbrooke church is seen, not far off, peering up from among the trees of Shottesbrooke Park, in which it is situated. When we see a stone church spire in Berkshire, where we do not commonly find ancient spires, we are apt to suspect at once a modern church, and our suspicions are generally well-founded; but here is a remarkably fine Decorated building of the mid-fourteenth century (it was built 1337). It stands finely in a noble park for many years belonging to the Vansittart family, and has been well described as “a cathedral in miniature.” Its origin appears by tradition to have been due to the unexpected recovery of Sir William Trussell, the then owner of the estate, who had been brought to the verge of death by a long-continued course of drunkenness. He built it by way of thankoffering, and as he would seem to have been intemperate in all he did, he not only built this very large and noble church, but founded a college for five priests. This establishment went the way of all such things, hundreds of years ago, and the great building, standing solitary in the park, except for the vicarage and the manor-house, now astonishes the stranger at its loneliness. He wonders where the village is, and may well continue to wonder, for village there is none.

SHOTTESBROOKE CHURCH.

A versifier in the Ingoldsby manner narrates the building of it by Trussell:

“An oath he sware

To his lady fair,

‘By the cross on my shield,

A church I’ll build,

And therefore the deuce a form

Is so fit as a cruciform;

And the patron saint that I find the aptest

Is that holiest water-saint—John the Baptist.’”

A legend of the building of the spire tells how the architect, completing it by fixing the weathercock, called for wine to drink a health to the King, and, drinking, fell to the ground and was dashed to pieces. The only sound he uttered, says the legend, was “O! O!” and that exclamation was the sole inscription carved upon his tomb, erected upon the spot where he fell. Many have been those pilgrims drawn to Shottesbrooke by this picturesque story, seeking that tomb. Tombstones of any kind are few in Shottesbrooke churchyard, and the only one that can possibly mark the architect’s grave is a coped stone on which an expectant and confiding person may indeed faintly trace “O, O”; but as the stone is probably not so old as the fourteenth century, and as it is extremely likely that an expectant person will, if in any way possible, find that which he expects, it would not be well to declare for the genuineness of it. But it is at any rate a very old and cracked and moss-grown stone.

Of a bygone Vansittart, who filled this family living for forty-four years, we read some highly eulogistic things upon a monument near by. Born 1779, he died 1847, “the faithful pastor of an attached flock. Meek, mild, benevolent. In domestic life tender, kind, considerate. In all relations revered, respected, beloved.” One is tempted to repeat the unfortunate architect’s exclamation, “O! O!”

The church, serving no village, and standing in a park close by the noble country seat of the Vansittarts, is for all practical purposes a manorial chapel. That it has long been used as such is very evident from the many tablets to Vansittarts which line its walls. The remains of the founder’s tomb are seen in the north transept, in a long stretch of delicate arcading along the north wall, beautifully wrought in chalk.

EAST WINDOW, SHOTTESBROOKE.

A singular effigy to William Throckmorton, Doctor of Laws, “warden of this church,” who died in 1535, is on the north side of the chancel. It is of diminutive size, and is what archæologists call an “interrupted effigy,” showing only head and breast and feet, the middle being occupied by a brass with Latin inscription.

There are several brasses in the church: the finest of them, a fourteenth-century example in the chancel, very deeply and beautifully cut, representing two men; one with forked beard, a long gown and a sword; the other an ecclesiastic. They stand side by side, and are reputed to represent the founder and his brother, but the inscription has been torn away, together with most of the canopy.

A brass in the north transept to Richard Gill, Sergeant of the “Backhouse”—i.e. the Bakehouse—to Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth, describes him as “Bailey of the Seaven Hundreds of Cookeham and Bray in the Forest Division.” Near by is a brass to “Thomas Noke, who for his great Age and vertuous Lyfe was reverenced of all Men, and was commonly called Father Noke, created Esquire by King Henry the Eight. He was of Stature high and comly; and for his excellency in Artilery made Yeoman of the Crowne of England which had in his Lyfe three Wives, and by every of them some Fruit and Off-spring, and deceased the 21 of August 1567 in the Yeare of his Age 87, leaving behind him Julyan his last Wife, two of his Brethren, one Sister, one only Son, and two Daughters living.”

Thomas Noke is represented with his three wives, while six daughters and four sons are grouped beneath.

Returning through Twyford to Sonning, the outlet of the Loddon,

“The Loddon slow, with verdant alders crowned,”

is found in that exquisite backwater, the Patrick Stream, where a picture of surpassing beauty is seen at every turn. By a long, winding course, fringed richly with rushes, and overhung with lovely trees, the Patrick Stream wanders through meadow lands and finally emerges into the Thames again, just below Shiplake Lock. By dint of making this long but delightful détour, and thus avoiding Shiplake Lock, it is possible to do the Thames Conservancy out of one of those many threepences for which it has so insatiable an appetite.

Shiplake, on the Oxfordshire bank, is the place where Tennyson was married, but the church has been largely rebuilt since then. The windows are mostly filled with ancient glass brought from the abbey of St. Bertin, at St. Omer. Shiplake Mill, once a picturesque feature, is now, at this time of writing, a squalid heap of ruins.

Wargrave, on the Berkshire side, is said to have once been a market-town, and it is now growing again so rapidly that a town it will soon be once more. Its houses crowd together on the banks, where the George and Dragon Inn stands, giving upon the slipway to the water: all looking out upon the spacious Oxfordshire meadows. The sign of the George and Dragon Inn—a double-sided one—painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A., and J. E. Hodgson, R.A., in 1874, shows St. George on one side, as we are accustomed to see him on the reverse of coins, engaged in slaying the dragon; and on the other, the monster duly slain, the saint is refreshing himself with a noble tankard of ale.

WARGRAVE CHURCH.

Wargrave church has been restored extensively, and its tower is of red brick, and not ancient; but it forms, for all that, a very charming picture. Here we may see a tablet to the memory of that remarkable prig, Thomas Day, the author of that egregious work for the manufacture of other prigs, Sandford and Merton. He was born about 1748, and died 1789. Of his good and highly moral life there can be no doubt; but moral philosophers are rarely personæ gratæ in a naughty and frivolous world. We fight shy of them, and of all instructive and improving persons, and make light of their works; and if nowadays we read Sandford and Merton at all, it is for the purpose of extracting some satirical amusement from the pompous verbiage of the Reverend Mr. Barlow, and from the respective “wickedness” and goodness of Tommy and the exemplary Harry.

Among Thomas Day’s peculiar views was that by a proper method of education (i.e. a method invented by himself) there was scarcely anything that could not be accomplished. He certainly began courageously, about the age of twenty-one, by choosing two girls, each about twelve years of age, whom he proposed to educate after his formula, and then to marry the most suitable of them. He, however, did not carry this plan so far as the marrying of either. It is not clear whom we should congratulate: the girls or their eccentric guardian, who at last met his death from the kick of a horse which resented the entirely novel philosophical principles on which he was training it.

In the churchyard is the grave of Madame Tussaud, of the famous waxworks, and here lies Sir Morell Mackenzie, the surgeon who attended the Emperor Frederick. He died in 1892. Near by is a quite new columbarium for containing the ashes of cremated persons.

A singular bequest left to Wargrave by one Mrs. Sarah Hill is that by which, every year at Easter, the sum of £1 is to be equally divided, in new crown pieces, between two boys and two girls, who qualify for this reward by conduct that must needs meet with the approval of all. The five-shilling pieces are not forthcoming unless the candidates are known never to have been undutiful to their parents, never to swear, never to tell untruths, or steal, break windows, or do “any kind of mischief.” The good lady would appear either to have been bent upon finding the Perfectly Good Child, or to have been a saturnine humorist, with a cynical disbelief in these annual distributions ever being made. But they are made; and we can only suppose that the vicar and churchwardens allow themselves just a little charitable latitude in the annual judging. And, you know, after all, is it worth while being so monumentally good for the poor reward of five shillings a year? Consider how much delightful mischief you forgo.

Hennerton backwater, below Wargrave, is another of the delightful side-streams that are plentiful here, and is now, after a good deal of litigation, pronounced free. The wooded road between Wargrave and Henley skirts it, and is carried over a lovely valley in the grounds of Park Place by a very fine arch of forty-three feet span, built of gigantic rough stones.

UNDER THE WILLOWS: A BACKWATER NEAR WARGRAVE.

CHAPTER II

HENLEY—THE BRIDGE AND ITS KEYSTONE-MASKS—REMENHAM—HAMBLEDEN—MEDMENHAM ABBEY AND THE “HELL FIRE CLUB”—HURLEY—BISHAM

Passing Marsh Lock, the town of Henley comes into view, heralded by its tall church tower, with four equal-sized battlemented turrets; a quite unmistakable church tower. The noble five-arched stone bridge here crossing the Thames, built in 1789, at a cost of £10,000, is one of the most completely satisfactory along the whole course of the river. The keystone-masks of the central arch show sculptured faces representing Isis and Thames. Isis appropriately faces up-river, and Thames looks down-stream. These conventionalised heads of a river-god and goddess are really admirable examples of the sculptor’s art. They adorn the title-pages of the present volumes, which display Isis with a woman’s head, and Father Thames, bearded, with little fishes peeping out of the matted hair, and bulrushes decoratively disposed about his temples. These masks were the work of that very accomplished lady, the Honourable Mrs. Anne Seymour Damer, who at the time when Henley bridge was a-building resided at Park Place. She was cousin to Horace Walpole, for whom she carved an eagle so exquisitely that he wrote under it—enthusiastic cousin as he was—Non Praxiteles sed Anna Damer me fecit. One terrible thing, however, stamps the lady irrevocably as a gifted amateur: she gave her work to the bridge authorities. Most reprehensible! The recipients were duly grateful, as witness the Bridge Minutes. True, they do but acknowledge one mask: “May 6, 1785. Ordered that the thanks of the Commissioners be given to the Honourable Mrs. Damer for the very elegant head of the River Thames which she has cut and presented to them for the Keystone of the centre arch of the bridge.”

This conventional head of Father Thames is that made familiar by the eighteenth-century poets, who personified everything possible. It is that Father Thames who

“From his oozy bed

… advanced his rev’rend head;

His tresses dropped with dews, and o’er the stream

His shining horns diffused a golden gleam.”

Only, as we see, bulrushes here take the place of his “shining horns.” The head of Isis was a portrait of Miss Freeman of Fawley Court.

ARCH CARRYING THE ROAD, PARK PLACE.

REMENHAM CHURCH.

Henley is, of course, famed, above all else, for its Regatta, established as an annual event since 1839, following upon an Oxford and Cambridge boat-race here in 1837. It is now pre-eminently the function of the river season, whether we consider it from the point of view of sport or fashion. Here every June the best oarsmanship in the world is displayed over this course of one-and-a-quarter miles: indisputably the best for anything up to that distance, for the regatta is now attended by the best oarsmen of the New World as well as of the Old. The regatta is, from a social and hospitable point of view, very much what the Derby is among horseraces; and the house-boat parties and riverside house-parties for the Henley Week dispense much hospitality and champagne. There is yet another side to the regatta: it is, almost equally with Ascot and Goodwood, recognised as an opportunity for the display of fine dresses. The Oxfordshire bank is at such times the most exclusive, and to the Berkshire shores are principally relegated the pushing, struggling crowds of humbler sportsmen and sightseers. But here, where every point is legally open to all, except where private lawns reach down to the river, the real exclusiveness of Goodwood or Ascot is, of course, impossible. Henley town is at such times anything but exclusive, and is thronged to excess. In these later times of motor-cars it is also apt to be a great deal more dusty than ever it used to be. To see Henley in Regatta Week, and again Henley in any other week, affords an astonishing contrast; for at all other times it is, as a town, among the dullest of the dull, and its broad High Street a synonym for emptiness.

I do not propose in this place to enlarge further upon Henley, but to mention Henley at all and not its famous old coaching-inn by the bridge, the Red Lion, has never yet been done; and shall I be the first to make the omission? No! It is a famous old inn, and of enormous size. Every one knows it as the hostelry where Shenstone the poet, about 1750, scratched with a diamond upon a window the celebrated stanza about “the warmest welcome at an inn,” but that window-pane has long been lost; and it is really doubtful if the inscription was not rather at another Henley: i.e. Henley-in-Arden. I have fully discussed that question elsewhere,[1] and so will not repeat it in this place.

Mr. Ashby-Sterry is quite right in his description of the Red Lion, standing red-brickily by the bridge:

“’Tis a finely-toned, picturesque, sunshiny place,

Recalling a dozen old stories;

With a rare British, good-natured, ruddy-hued face,

Suggesting old wines and old Tories.”

Remenham, a mile or so along the Berkshire shore, is typically Berkshire, but with a church still looking starkly new, as the result of “thorough restoration” in 1870. Its semicircular apse, really ancient, does not look it. The tower is of the Henley type, though smaller. Henley church tower, in fact, seems to have set a local fashion in such, for that of Hambleden conforms to the same design. Regatta Island, with its effective temple, marks the old starting-point of the races.

HENLEY-ON-THAMES.

Hambleden is on the Buckinghamshire side; a pretty village situated about one mile distant from the river along the lovely and retired valley of the Hamble. From it the widow of W. H. Smith, of the newspaper and library and bookstall business of W. H. Smith & Son, and of Greenlands, near Henley, takes her title of Viscountess Hambleden. Liberal, Radical, and Separatist journals were never tired of satirically referring to W. H. Smith, when a member of a Unionist Government, as “Old Morality,” deriving that term from the stand he took in the House of Commons upon his “duty to Queen and country.” His idea of his duty in those respects was exactly that of an average responsible business man. He had no axe to grind, no job to perpetrate; and that being so, the nickname of “Old Morality” was in effect a great deal more honourable than those satirists ever suspected. They, indeed, conferred upon him a brevet of which any one might well be proud, and incidentally covered themselves with shame, as men to whom a sense of rightness and of duty towards one’s sovereign and one’s native land was a subject for mirth. But of course these quips and cranks derived from the party notoriously friends of every country save their own.

In the very much restored church of Hambleden, among various tombs, is one in the chancel to Henry, son of the second Lord Sandys, with a quaint inscription, owning some nobility of thought:

“Nature cryeth on me so sore,

I cannot, Christ, be too fervent,

Sith he is gone, I have no more,

And yt, O God, I am content.

I believe in the Resurection of Life

To see you again at the last day,

And now, farewell, Elizabeth my wife,

Teach mye children God to obey

But now let us rejoyce in heart

To trymphe never cease

Sith in this life wee only part

To joyce agen in heavenly peace.

Parted to God’s mercy, 1540.”

The elaborate oak screen under the tower, carved with Renascence designs, is said to have once been part of Cardinal Wolsey’s bedstead. It bears the arms of Christ Church and of Corpus Christi, Oxford; and those of Castile, with the rose badge of York.

At some little distance downstream is Medmenham Abbey. The building, that looks so entirely reverend and worshipful from the opposite shore, is really, in the existing buildings, little enough of the original Abbey that was founded towards the close of the twelfth century by one Hugh de Bolebec. It was never very much of a place, and seems to have been something of a dependency of Bisham Abbey. Just prior to its suppression, Henry the Eighth’s commissioners reported that it had merely two monks, with no servants, and little property, but no debts; but, on the other hand, no goods worth more than £1 3s. 8d., “and the house wholly ruinous.”

REGATTA ISLAND.

Nothing remains of whatever church there may have been, and the only ancient portions are some fragments of the Abbot’s lodgings. The “ruined” tower, the cloisters, and much else are the work of those blasphemous “Franciscans” of the Hell Fire Club who, under the presidency of Francis Dashwood, Lord le Despencer, established themselves here about 1758. There were twelve of these reckless “monks,” who, having built the “cloisters,” reared the now ivy-mantled tower, and painted their licentious motto, “Fay ce que voudras,” over one of the doors, sat down to a series of orgies and debaucheries whose excesses have been perhaps exaggerated by the mystery with which these “monks of Medmenham” chose to veil their doings. Among them were Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, Sir John Dashwood King, John Wilkes, the poet Churchill, and Sir William Stanhope. Paul Whitehead was “secretary” to this precious gang of debauchees.

MEDMENHAM.

Devil-worship was said to have been among the impious rites celebrated here; and one of the party seems to have played a particularly horrifying practical joke upon his fellows during the progress of these celebrations. He procured an exceptionally large and hideous monkey and, dressing it in character, let it down the chimney into the room among his friends, who fled in terror, and were for long afterwards convinced that their patron had really come for them. This incident is said to have broken up the fraternity.

The explorer by Thames-side could, until quite recent years, do very much as he liked at Medmenham, and the more or less authentic ruins were open to him; but now they are enclosed within the grounds of a private residence, and a hotel stands beside the ferry. The very small village at the back is to be noted for the highly picturesque grouping of some ancient gabled houses (restored of late) with the little church and a remarkable hill crested by an old red-brick and flint house that looks as though it owned, or ought to own, some romantic story. The hilltop is said to be encircled with the remains of a prehistoric encampment. It is with sorrow that here also one notes the builder’s prejudicial activities. Directly in front of the church, and entirely blocking out the view of it, there has been built a recent red-brick villa, with the result that the effective composition illustrated here is almost wholly destroyed.

MEDMENHAM ABBEY.

The lovely grass-lands over against Medmenham are glorious in June, before the hay-harvest. One may walk by them, beside the river, all the way to Hurley. On the left, or Buckinghamshire, bank, the ground rises into chalk-cliffs, surmounted by the great unoccupied house of Danesfield, staringly white, popularly said to contain as many windows as there are days in the year. This is the handiwork of Mr. R. W. Hudson, of “Hudson’s Soap.”

Hurley, to which we now come, is a historic spot. Here, by the waterside, was founded in 1087, by Geoffrey de Mandeville, the Benedictine Priory of Our Lady of Hurley, which remained until 1535, when, in common with other religious houses, it was suppressed by Henry the Eighth. To the Lovelace family came the lands and buildings of this establishment, and here, on the site of it, Sir Richard Lovelace built, with “money gotten with Francis Drake,” a splendid mansion which he called Lady Place. His descendant, Richard, Lord Lovelace, was in 1688 one of the somewhat timorous nobles who met secretly to plot the deposition of James the Second. They had not the courage, these pusillanimous wretches, to take the field in arms, as Monmouth and his brave peasants had done, three years earlier, and must needs find cellars to grope in, and then invite over that cold, disliked Dutchman, William of Orange, to do for them what they dared not do for themselves. Macaulay, in his richly-picturesque language, refers to these meetings, but it will be observed that he calls those who met here “daring.” They were anything but that.

“This mansion,” he says, “built by his ancestors out of the spoils of Spanish galleons from the Indies, rose on the ruins of a house of our Lady in this beautiful valley, through which the Thames, not yet defiled by the precincts of a great capital, rolls under woods of beech, and round the gentle hills of Berks. Beneath the stately saloon, adorned by Italian pencils, was a subterranean vault, in which the bones of ancient monks had sometimes been found. In this dark chamber some zealous and daring opponents of the Government held many midnight conferences during that anxious time when England was impatiently expecting the Protestant wind.”

This Lady Place no longer exists, for the great house was demolished in 1836, and the house so-called is of modern build. But the old-time gardens remain, and the refectory; and here is the old circular pigeon-house, with the initials on it, “C.R.,” and the date, 1642.

A curious story tells how one of the last occupants of Lady Place was a brother of Admiral Kempenfelt, and that he and the Admiral planted two thorn-trees in the garden, in which he took great pride. One day, returning home, he found that the tree planted by the Admiral had withered away, and he exclaimed: “I feel sure this is an omen that my brother is dead.” That evening, August 29, 1782, he received news of the loss of the Royal George.

Hurley church is a long, low building, of nave without aisles, of Norman, or some say earlier, origin. “It was probably ravaged by the Danes towards the close of the ninth century,” say the guide-books. This may have been so, but it could hardly have been worse ravaged by them than it was by those who “restored” it in 1852 “at a cost of £1,500,” and incidentally also at the cost of all its real interest.

THE BELL INN, HURLEY.

The village of Hurley straggles a long way back from the river, in one scattered, disjointed line of cottages, past the picturesque old Bell Inn, apparently of fifteenth-century date, heavily framed with stout oaken timbers.

Below Hurley, leaving behind the ancient red-brick piers of the old-world gardens of Lady Place, the river opens out to Marlow reach, with Bisham on the right hand, and the tall crocketed spire of Marlow church closing the distant view.

“Bisham” is said to have been originally “Bustleham,” but the present form will be preferred by every one. Strangers call it “Bish-am,” but for the natives and the people of Marlow the only way is by the elision of the letter h—“Bis-am”; and thus shall you, being duly informed of this shibboleth, infallibly detect the stranger in these parts.

Bisham village is quite invisible from the river, nor need we trouble to seek it, unless it be for climbing up into the lovely and precipitous Quarry Woods, in the rear. To those who knew Bisham when Fred Walker painted his delightful pictures, and among them, some studies of this village street, there comes, when they think of the Bisham that was and the Bisham that is, a fierce but impotent anger. The humble old red-brick cottages remain, it is true, and their gardens bloom as of yore, but what was once the sweet-smelling gravelly street is now a tarred abomination, smelling evilly, and wearing a squalid and disreputable look. This is the result of the coming of the motor-car, for Bisham is on the well-travelled road between High Wycombe, Great Marlow, Twyford, and Reading, and the village has now the unwelcome choice of two evils: to be half-choked with billows of dust, or to coat its roads with tar compositions.

Of what was originally a Preceptory of the Knights Templars, and then an Augustine Priory, and finally a Benedictine Abbey, nothing is left but the Prior’s lodgings, now the mansion of the Vansittart-Neales, called “the Abbey.” The parish church stands finely by the waterside, encircled by the trees of the park, and there remains a monastic barn. Such are the few relics of the proud home of monks and priors, enriched during hundreds of years by the benefactions of the wicked, endeavouring by means of such gifts to atone sufficiently for their evil lives, and so escape the damnation that surely awaited them.

Such complete destruction is melancholy indeed, when we consider the great historic personages who were buried here: among them the great Nevill, “Warwick the Kingmaker,” slain at last in the course of his tortuous ambitions, in the Battle of Barnet, fought on Easter Day, 1471, and laid at Bisham, hard by his own manor of Marlow.

When the Abbey was finally dissolved, it was granted by Henry the Eighth to Anne of Cleves, his divorced fourth wife, who exchanged it with the Hoby family for a property of theirs in Kent. Here the Princess Elizabeth was resident for three years, during the reign of her half-sister, Mary, really under surveillance; and to that period the greater part of the “Abbey,” as we see it now, is to be referred.

BISHAM ABBEY.

“TOP O’ THE TOWN,” GREAT MARLOW.

Bisham Abbey is, of course, famed above all other things for the story of the wicked Lady Hoby, who so thrashed her son for spoiling his copy-books with blots that he died. A portrait of her, in the dress of a widow, is still in the house, and her ghost is yet said to haunt the place.[2] She was wife of Sir Thomas Hoby, Ambassador to France, who died in 1566, aged 36. The elaborate altar-tomb in Bisham church to him, and to his half-brother, Sir Philip, with effigies of the two knights, is worth seeing; and the rhymed epitaph written by her worth reading. The early death of the Ambassador, in Paris, was not without suspicion of poison. The sculptured figures of hawks at the feet of the brothers are “hobby”-hawks, a punning allusion to the family name.

Lady Hoby was a grief-stricken widow, and supplicated Heaven, rather quaintly, to “give me back my husband, Thomas,” or that being beyond possibility, to “give me another like Thomas.” She captured another, eight years later, when she married John, Lord Russell; but whether Heaven had thus given her one up to sample we are only left idly to conjecture. At any rate she outlived him too, by many years, and elected to be buried beside her Thomas. An elaborate monument to this fearsome lady discloses her in a wonderful coif, surmounted by a coronet. Before and behind her kneeling figure are the praying effigies of her children. It is recorded that she was particularly interested in mortuary observances, and that she even found it possible to be absorbed, as she lay dying, at the age of 81, in her own funeral rites; corresponding with Sir William Dethick as to precisely the number of mourners and heralds that were her due.

A little monument to two children in Bisham church is the subject of a very old legend to the effect that Queen Elizabeth was their mother! More scandal about Queen Elizabeth!

Bisham passed from the Hobys in 1768 to a family of Mills, who assumed the name; but in 1780 it again changed hands and was sold to the Vansittarts, of whom Sir H. J. Vansittart-Neale is the present representative. The old belief in disaster befalling families who hold property taken from the Church has been curiously warranted here from time to time, in the untimely death of eldest sons or direct heirs, and here indeed, upon entering Bisham church, the stranger is startled by the white marble life-size effigy confronting him of a kneeling boy, in a Norfolk jacket-suit; an inscription declaring it to represent George Kenneth Vansittart-Neale, who died in 1904, aged fourteen.

[1] The Old Inns of Old England, vol. ii., pp. 299-303.

[2] More fully discussed in Haunted Houses, pp. 36-42.

CHAPTER III

GREAT MARLOW—COOKHAM—CLIVEDEN AND ITS OWNERS—MAIDENHEAD

Marlow town is well within sight from Bisham. It is very much more picturesque at a distance than it is found to be when arrived near at hand; and the graceful stone spire of its church is found to be really a portion of a very clumsy would-be Gothic building erected in the Batty-Langley style, about 1835. A fine old Norman and later building was destroyed to make way for this; and now the present church is in course of being replaced, in sections, by another, as the funds to that end come in. An interesting monument in the draughty lobby of the present building commemorates Sir Myles Hobart, of Harleyford, who, when Member of Parliament for Marlow, in 1628, distinguished himself by his sturdy opposition to the King’s illegal demands; and with his own hands, on a memorable occasion, locked the door of the House of Commons, to secure the debate on tonnage and poundage from interruption. For this he suffered three years’ imprisonment.

The monument, shamefully “skied” on the wall of this lobby, was removed from the old church. Hobart met his death in 1652 by accident, the four horses in his carriage running away down Holborn Hill, and upsetting it. A curious little sculpture on the lower part of the monument represents this happening, and shows one of the wheels broken. The monument is further interesting as having been erected by Parliament; the first to be voted of any of a now lengthy series.

FROM THE MONUMENT TO SIR MYLES HOBART, GREAT MARLOW.

A THAMES REGATTA.

In the vestry, leading out of this lobby, among a number of old prints hung round the walls, is an old painting of a naked boy, with bow and arrow, his skin spotted all over, leopard-like, with brown spots. This represents the once-famous “Spotted Negro Boy,” a supposed native of the Caribbean Islands, who formed a very attractive feature of Richardson’s Show in the first decade of the nineteenth century. We shall probably not be far wrong in suspecting Mr. William Richardson of a Barnum-like piece of showman humbug in putting this child forward as a “Negro Boy.” The boy, one cannot help thinking, was sufficiently English, but was a freak, suffering from that dreadful skin disease, ichthyosis serpentina. He lies buried in the churchyard.

There are a few literary associations in Marlow town, and by journeying from the riverside and along the lengthy High Street, to where that curious building, the old Crown Hotel, stands, facing down the long thoroughfare, you may come presently to the houses that enshrine them. Turning here to the left you are in West Street, otherwise the Henley road, and passing the oddly named “Quoiting Square,” there in the quaintly pretty old Albion House next door to the old Grammar School, lived Shelley in 1817. A tablet on the coping, like a tombstone, records the fact. He divided his time between writing the Revolt of Islam, and in visiting the then degraded, poverty-stricken lower orders of the town and talking nonsense to them. As no report of his conversations survives, we can only wonder if they were as bad as the turgid nonsense of that poem. Does any one nowadays ever read the Revolt of Islam, or know why Islam did it, or if, in so doing, it succeeded? In short, it will take a great deal of argument to convince the world that Shelley was not the Complete Prig of his age, and in truth the house is much more delightful and interesting for itself than for this association. In Shelley’s time it was very much larger than now, and comprised the two or three other small houses which have been divided from it.

At “Beechwood” lived Smedley, author of Frank Fairleigh and Valentine Vox, and on the Oxford road resided G. P. R. James, romantic novelist, whose romances were said, by the satirists of his methods, generally to commence with some such formula as—

“As the shades of evening were falling upon Deadman’s Heath, three horsemen might have been observed,” etc.

Marlow Weir is, to oarsmen not intimately acquainted with this stretch of the river, the most dangerous on the Thames, so it behoves all to give the weir-stream a wide berth in setting out again from Marlow Bridge; that suspension-bridge, built in 1831, which, like the neighbouring church, looks its best at a considerable distance. River-gossipers will never let die that old satirical query, “Who ate puppy-pie under Marlow Bridge?” the taunt being directed, according to tradition, against the bargees of long ago, who, accustomed to raid the larder of a waterside hotel at Marlow, were punished admirably by the landlord, who, having drowned a litter of puppies, caused them to be baked in a large pie, and the pie to be placed where it could not fail to attract the attention of the raiders, who stole it, and consumed it with much satisfaction, under the bridge.

COOKHAM LOCK.

Two miles below Marlow, past Spade Oak ferry, is Bourne End, on the Buckinghamshire side; a modern collection of villas clustered around a delightful backwater known as Abbotsbrook, and by the outlet of the river Wye—the “bourne” which ends here and gives rise to the place-name. It comes down from Wycombe, to which also it gives a name, and Loudwater.

Cookham now comes into view, on the Berkshire shore. Here the village is grouped around a village green; rather a sophisticated green in these days, and combed down and brushed up smartly since those times when Fred Walker began his career. Then the geese and ducks roamed about that open space, and in the unspoiled village; and old gaffers in smock-frocks and wonderful beaver-hats with naps on them as thick as Turkey carpets sat about on benches in front of old inns, and smoked extravagantly long churchwarden-pipes. The old gaffers have long since gone, and the Bel and the Dragon Inn has become a hotel, and Walker is dead and already an Old Master. You may see his grave in the churchyard, and read there how he died, aged thirty-five, in 1875. There is, in addition, a portrait-medallion within the church itself, which gives him a half-drunken, half-idiotic expression that one hopes did not really belong to him.

Behind the organ a curious mural monument to Sir Isaac Pocock, Bart., dated 1810, represents the baronet “suddenly called from this world to a better state, whilst on the Thames near his own house.” He is seen in a punt, being caught while falling by a personage intended to represent an angel, in tempestuous petticoats, while a puntsman engaged in poling the craft looks on, in very natural surprise.

From Cookham, where the lock is set amid wooded scenery, the transition to Cliveden is easy.

Clieveden, Cliefden, Cliveden—you may suit individual taste and fancy in the manner of spelling—looks grandly from the Buckinghamshire heights down on to the Berkshire levels of Cookham and Ray Mead. Perhaps the most beautiful view of all is from Cookham Lock. Ray Mead, that was until twenty years ago just a mead—a beautiful stretch of grass-meadows—is now the name of a long line of villas with pretty frontages and gardens, but deplorable names—“Frou-Frou,” “Sans Souci,” and the like—and inhabited, often enough, as one might suppose by the Frou-frous of musical comedy and their admirers.

COOKHAM CHURCH.

BRAY CHURCH.

Cliveden, sometime “bower of wanton Shrewsbury and of love,” and now residence of the highly respectable and remarkably wealthy Mr. William Waldorf Astor, looks in lordly fashion upon such. With the proceeds of his New York rent-roll that Europeanised American in 1890 purchased the historic place from the first Duke of Westminster, and has resided here and at other of his English seats ever since. Those who are conversant with American newspapers are familiar with the scream every now and again raised against this and other examples of American money being taken and spent abroad. The spectacle of that bird of prey raging because of the dollars riven from it is amusing, but the situation may become internationally serious yet, for when some great financial crisis arises in the United States and money is scarce, it is quite to be expected that the question of the absentee landlords will become acute, and talk of super-taxing and expropriation be heard. I believe this particular Astor is now a naturalised Englishman, and I don’t suppose him to be the only one. Suppose, then, that the Government of the United States at some future time seized the property of such, how would the international situation shape?

Cliveden, when it was thus sold, had not been long in the hands of the Grosvenor family; having been, a generation earlier, the property of the Duke of Sutherland, for whom the present Italianate mansion was built by Sir Charles Barry in 1851, following upon a fire which had destroyed the older house, for the second time in the history of the place. The original fire was in 1795. In the mansion then destroyed the air of “Rule, Britannia,” had first been played in 1740, as an incidental song in Thomson’s masque of Alfred, the music composed by Dr. Arne.

Boulter’s Lock, the water-approach to Maidenhead, is the busiest lock on the Thames, and now busier on Sundays than on any other day. How astonishingly times have changed on the river may be judged from an experience of the late Mr. Albert Ricardo, who died at the close of 1908, aged eighty-eight. He lived at Ray Mead all his long life, and was ever keen on boating. When he was a comparatively young man, he brought his skiff round to the lock one Sunday. His was the only boat there, and he was addressed in no measured terms by a man who indignantly asked him if he knew what day it was, and telling him, in very plain language, his opinion of a person who used the river on Sunday. Since then a wave of High Churchism and irreligion (the two things are really the same) has submerged the observance of the Sabbath, and aforetime respectable persons play golf on the Lord’s Day.

A quaint incident, one, doubtless, of many, comes to me here, in considering Boulter’s Lock, out of the dim recesses of bygone reading.

Says Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., in his entertaining book, Our River: “I came through the lock once simultaneously with H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge. He was steering the boat he was in, and I am sorry to say I incurred his displeasure by accidentally touching his rudder with my punt’s nose.”

Oh dear!

He does not tell us what H.R.H. said on this historic occasion; but a knowledge of the Royal Duke’s fiery temper and of his ready and picturesque way of expressing it leads the present writer to imagine that his remarks were of a nature likely to have been hurtful to the self-respect of the Royal Academician. But it is something—is it not?—to be able to record, thus delicately, by implication, that one has been vigorously cursed by a Royal Duke. Not to all of us has come such an honour!

COOKHAM WEIR.

And now we come to Maidenhead town, a town of 12,980 persons, and yet a place that was, not so very long ago, merely in the parishes of Cookham and Bray. (It was created a separate civil parish only in 1894.) Its growth, originally due to its situation on that old coaching highway, the Bath road (which is here carried across the river by that fine stone structure, Maidenhead Bridge, built in 1772, to replace an ancient building of timber), has been further brought about by the modern vogue of the river, and by the convenience of a railway station close at hand.

“Maidenhead” is, according to some views, the “mydden hythe,” the “middle wharf” between Windsor and Marlow. Camden assures us that the name derived from “St. Ursula,” one of the eleven thousand virgins murdered at Cologne. But St. Ursula and the eleven thousand maiden martyrs, who are said to have been shot to death with arrows, A.D. 451, are as entirely mythical as Sarah Gamp’s “Mrs. Harris.”

But there is plenty choice in the origin of this place-name. There are those who plump for “magh-dun-hythe,” the wharf under the great hill (of Cliveden). The place is found under quite another name in Domesday Book. There it is “Elenstone,” or “Ellington.” It is first styled “Maydehuth” in 1248; and it has been thought that the name is equivalent to “new wharf”; the wharf, or its successor, mentioned by Leland in 1538 as the “grete warfeage of tymbre and fierwood.”

We need not, perhaps, expend further space upon the town of Maidenhead, for it is almost entirely modern. Its fine stone bridge has already been mentioned, and another, and a very different, type of bridge, a quarter of a mile below it, now demands attention.

Maidenhead Railway Bridge, completed in 1839, one of those greatly daring works for which the Great Western Railway’s original engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was famous, is the astonishment of all who behold it. Crossing the river in two spans, each of 128 feet, the great elliptical brick arches are the largest brickwork arches in the world, and of such flatness that it seems scarcely possible they can sustain their own weight, even without the heavy burden of trains running across. Maidenhead Railway Bridge astonishes me infinitely more than the great bridge across the Forth, or any other engineering feats. Yet sixty years have passed, and the bridge not only stands as firmly as ever, but nowadays sustains the weight of trains and engines more than twice as heavy as those originally in vogue. Moreover, in the doubling of the line, found necessary in 1892, the confidence of the Company was shown by their building an exact replica of Brunel’s existing bridge, side by side with it. Yet the original contractor had been so alarmed that he earnestly begged Brunel to allow him to relinquish the contract, and although the engineer proved to him, scientifically, that it must stand, he went in fear that when the wooden centreing was removed the arches would collapse. A great storm actually blew down the centreing before it was proposed to remove it, but the bridge stood, and has stood ever since, quite safely. It cost, in 1839, £37,000 to build.

CHAPTER IV

BRAY AND ITS FAMOUS VICAR—JESUS HOSPITAL

Beyond this astonishing achievement comes the delightful village of Bray, whose name is thought to be a corruption of Bibracte, an obscure Roman station. Bray is scenically associated with the eight—or are they ten?—tall poplars that stand in a formal row, all of one size, and each equidistant from the other, and form a prominent feature in the view as you approach, upstream or down; and with the weird shapes of the eel-bucks that occupy a position by the Berkshire bank. Composing a pretty view with them comes the square, embattled church-tower, together with some feathery waterside trees—and always those stark sentinel poplars in the background. You see them from almost every quarter, a long way off; and even from the railway, as the Great Western trains sweep onwards, towards Maidenhead Bridge, they come rushing into sight, and you say—and you observe that the glances of other passengers say also—“There’s Bray!”

Bray is, of course traditionally, the home of that famous accommodating vicar who, reproached with his readiness to change his principles, replied: “Not so; my principle is unaltered: to live and die Vicar of Bray.”

Every one knows the rollicking song that sets forth, with a musical economy of some five notes, the determination of that notorious person, despite all changes and chances, to keep his comfortable living, but not every one knows the facts about him and that familiar ballad.

Fuller says: “He had seen some martyrs burnt (two miles off) at Windsor, and found this fire too hot for his tender temper”; and further says, respecting his guiding principle in life—to remain Vicar of Bray—“Such are many nowadays, who, though they cannot turn the wind, will turn their mills and set them so that wheresoever it bloweth, their grist shall certainly be grinded.”

The reputation of being that vicar has been flung upon Simon Alleyn, or Aleyn, which were, no doubt, the contemporary ways of trying to spell “Allen,” who appears to have derived from a family settled at Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and, graduating at Oxford in 1539, to have been instituted to the living of Bray in 1551, upon the death of William Staverton, vicar before him. Two years later he became also vicar of Cookham. In 1559 he was made Canon of Windsor, and held all three offices until his death in June 1565.

LYCHGATE, BRAY.

If we inquire into the history of Church and State between 1551 and 1565, we shall not find that the period covered by those fifteen years was remarkable for so many great religious changes. The changes were great, indeed, but not numerous. Edward the Sixth was living, and the Reformed Church established, when Aleyn first became vicar, who, when the young King died and the reactionary reign of Mary began, doubtless “became a Roman”; but there is no doubt that many others did the like at that time.

When Queen Mary died, in 1558, Aleyn naturally conformed to the Protestant religion, then re-established: and, as we see, died comparatively early in the reign of Elizabeth, while that religion was yet undisputed. There was thus, supposing him to have been originally instituted as a Protestant, only one violation of conscience necessary to his retaining his post: a small matter! As he could scarcely have been more than about twenty years of age when he graduated, it is seen at once that when he died, in 1565, he was comparatively young—some forty-six years of age. By his will, he directed that he should be buried in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor; and as there is no reason to suppose that his wishes in that respect were wantonly disregarded, it follows that the small monumental brass, now without an inscription, here, in the church of Bray, cannot mark his resting-place. It has, indeed, been identified as to the memory of Thomas Little, his successor, who died so soon afterwards as 1567.

The injustice, therefore, done to Simon Aleyn by identifying him with the song, the “Vicar of Bray,” is obvious; for there were very many men, born at an earlier date than he, and living to a much greater age, who certainly did change their official beliefs, for professional purposes, several times, between 1534, when the Reformation was accomplished, and the reign of Elizabeth. There would have been more scope for such a tergiversating person in the reigns of Charles the Second, James the Second, William the Third, Queen Anne, and George the First—in all of which it would have been easily possible for a not very long-lived clergyman to flourish—than in Aleyn’s time; and the ballad in its present form distinctly specifies that period, long after Aleyn was dead. But the ascription to Bray at all can clearly be proved a late one, for the original words, traced back to 1712, when one Edward Ward published a collection of miscellaneous works in prose and verse, make no mention of any particular place. The verses, eighteen in number, are there entitled, “The Religious Turncoat; or, the Trimming Parson.” Among them we find a reference to the troubles under Charles the First, by which it appears that the trimmer’s constitutional, as well as religious, opinions were moderated according to circumstances: