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RIVERS OF GREAT BRITAIN:
The Thames, from Source to Sea.

C. L. SEYMOUR. PINXT

C. O. MURRAY. SCULPT

CLIEFDEN WOODS.

RIVERS OF GREAT BRITAIN.
The Thames, from Source to Sea.

DESCRIPTIVE, HISTORICAL, PICTORIAL.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:

LONDON, PARIS & MELBOURNE.

1891.

[ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.]

[CONTENTS.]

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.]

[RIVERS OF GREAT BRITAIN.]

THE SEVEN SPRINGS.

THE THAMES.

[CHAPTER I.]

ABOVE OXFORD.

The Source of the Thames—Early Names of the River—Seven Springs—Thames Head—The Churn and its Course—Thames and Severn Canal—Cricklade—Castle Eaton—Inglesham—Fairford and the Coln—Lechlade—The First Lock—Some Thames Flowers—Old Buscot—Hart’s Weir—Bird Life—Radcot Bridge—Eddying Pools and Golden Shallows—Canal-like Reaches—Tadpole Bridge—Bampton—Duxford Ferry—Canute’s Country—The Windrush—The Oldest Bridge—Old Father Thames—Disused Weir-pools—Bablock Hythe, Stanton Harcourt, and Cumnor—Skinner’s Weir and Pinkhill Lock—Eynsham Weir, Bridge, and Cross—The Evenlode—Witham Hill—Thames Angling—Godstow—King’s Weir—Port Meadow—Folly Bridge.

THE birds, flowers, and bees around are, doubtless, in their several ways, rejoicing with me in the balmy May morning radiant with warm sunshine. Down the unsullied emerald of the little slope yonder, carpeted with nodding cowslips, daisies, and buttercups, and faintly azured in sheltered spaces with wild hyacinths, I have descended into a rustic glade, not, at its widest, more than fifty yards across, and running, roughly reckoning, north and south. The slope is easy, springing as it does from a verdant bottom to the foot of a low wall; this, pushing aside the glossy sycamore branches, I have leaped from the Canal path, at a gap where the village children, on their recent half-holiday, wastefully cast aside the surplus of their cowslip harvest to wither and die. But from my present standpoint the low wall is nearly hidden in undergrowth, and by a plentiful intermixture of hawthorn, holly, and ash flourishing on the bank top. The sweet-smelling grass is spangled with daisies and buttercups, though not so profusely as in the field adjacent, which is destined for a crop of hay; and the grove resounds with bird-music set in the rapturous key of the bridal season. And there, a few paces athwart the sward, under the shadow of trembling foliage, is the spot which for centuries was said to be the birthplace of the River Thames. We are at Thames Head, in Trewsbury Mead, in the parish of Cotes, in the county of Gloucestershire, three miles south-west of Cirencester.

The mossy trunk, lying prostrate under the wall on the side of the glade opposite the sylvan slope by which entrance has been effected, invites the opportunity of a more minute observation. Seated thereupon, far from the noisy world, we may make a fair and leisurely start upon that long and interesting voyage from Source to Sea, upon which, in this and succeeding chapters, the reader is invited to embark with confidence and hope. Here, probably, is the identical spot which Peacock, author of the “Genius of the Thames,” had in his mind when he wrote—

“Let fancy lead from Trewsbury mead,

With hazel fringed, and copsewood deep;

Where, scarcely seen, through brilliant green,

Thy infant waters softly creep.”

The friendly branches of a wild rose hustle my elbow, or, rather, would do so, but that a sturdier bramble bough interposes. On the other side of me there is a charming tangle of hazel and blackberry bushes. There is also a more than commonly bushy hawthorn overspreading the wall at a portion where thick ivy covers it. A spreading wild rose is established in the very middle of the glade, which is graced with quite an unusual quantity of large and old hawthorn trees. A strong west wind soughs and sighs in the trees; blackbirds and thrushes, by their liquid notes, blithe and merry, seem to protest against the melancholy undertone, as does a grand humble bee, in magnificent orange-velvet smallclothes, who contributes a sympathetic bass solo as he drones by. But the object to be chiefly noticed at this moment is the aged ash-tree yonder. It is of medium size and no particular shape, though the ivy covering its bole and lower limbs gives it an air of picturesque importance. Ragged hawthorns and brambles surround it. The importance of the tree lies in the circumstance that it marks the spot which the old writers, and many modern authorities following in their footsteps, have pronounced to be the source of the Thames. The supposition is that in former times a perennial spring of water issued forth here, forming Thames Head. The well, however, out of which the water might once have gushed, and miscellaneously overspread the pasturage on its way to form a brook, has in these days lost potency. For a long time past it has ceased to yield water, and, as a matter of prosaic fact, from one end of the glade to the other there is no sign of water in any shape or form. The inhabitants of the countryside say that in the winter-time the waters, provoked by long rains, still well forth in copious flood; but, even granting this, we may not conclude that a spring so uncertain as this in Trewsbury Mead is the source of the Thames. The obvious reflection is that before the erection of the ugly pump-house which disfigures the locality, and before the neighbouring springs began to be drained for the service of the Canal, the supply of water was permanent and strong, albeit there is ground for supposing that Thames Head was never thoroughly to be relied upon. I have thus pictured for the reader the source which appears to be favoured by topographers and antiquaries; but there are other springs besides. Half a mile lower down there is, near the Roman way, a basin—another Thames Head—which is sometimes filled by a spring, and which is pictured on the next page in the precise condition in which it appeared to our artist during the rains of early spring. Yet another rill issues from a hill-side; and a fourth, lower still, is perhaps the most clearly defined and strongest of the group, and best entitled to the honour claimed on behalf of the dried-up well in the green glade just described. The Thames Head district seems, indeed, to abound in springs, and in wet weather the level ground is probably freely intersected by brooklets, forming the stream which is the undoubted head of Isis, and which has been called the Thames from time immemorial.

On the very threshold of our task we are confronted, indeed, with two sometime-disputed points which it will be necessary to clear away, or come to terms with, if we would proceed upon our voyage of some two hundred miles from source to Nore with a clear conscience. They relate, first, to the name of the river; and second, to the precise spot in the Cotswold country where it starts upon its wanderings. Neither of these controversial subjects shall, however, detain us long from an intimate acquaintance with the “mighty king of all the British rivers, superior to most in beauty, and to all in importance,” setting forth on its career in humble smallness, gathering tranquil volume as it flows in succession through the fertile counties of Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Middlesex, Kent, and Essex, and finally delivering its full tribute to the Northern Ocean. What rare historical memories it evokes, what varieties of landscape it touches and creates, let the following lines describe:—

“The blood-stain’d scourge no tyrants wield,

No groaning slaves enrich the field,

But Health and Labour’s willing train

Crowns all thy banks with waving grain;

With beauty decks thy sylvan shades,

With livelier green invests thy glades;

And grace, and bloom, and plenty pours

On thy sweet meads and willowy shores.

The field where herds unnumber’d rove,

The laurell’d path, the beechen grove,

The oak, in lonely grandeur free,

Lord of the forest and the sea;

The spreading plain, the cultured hill,

The tranquil cot, the restless mill,

The lonely hamlet, calm and still;

The village spire, the busy town,

The shelving bank, the rising down,

The fisher’s punt, the peasant’s home,

The woodland seat, the regal dome,

In quick succession rise to charm

The mind, with virtuous feelings warm;

Till where thy widening current glides,

To mingle with the turbid tides,

Thy spacious breast displays unfurl’d

The ensigns of th’ assembled world.”

“THAMES HEAD.”

THE SOURCES OF THE THAMES.

It is now generally accepted that, from times as remote as those which preceded the Conquest, the highest portion of the river was called the Thames. The Saxon Chronicles so refer to it, and there is no reason to suppose that the river crossed by the armies of Ethelwold and Canute on their expeditions into the land of Mercia was ever known by other name. How, and when, the river from Cricklade to Oxford acquired the local name of Isis is not clear; but the idea was probably fairly started, though not invented, by Camden, who had pretty visions of the “marriage of the Tame and Isis.” “This,” wrote he, “is that Isis which afterwards joining with Tame, by adding the names together, is called Tamisis, chief of the British rivers, of which we may truly say, as ancient writers did of Euphrates in the East, that it both plants and waters Britain.” It is sufficient for us now to recognise the fact that above Oxford the river is impartially spoken of, now as the Thames, and now as the Isis; and it is rather as a matter of convenience than of dogmatic purpose that I shall elect henceforth to use the older and more reasonable name—the Tameses of the Romans, the Temese of the Saxons, and the Thames of modern days.

Equally fruitful of controversy has been the source of the Thames. It has long been a question whether this grassy retreat, in which we are supposed to be lingering, to wit, Thames Head, in the parish of Cotes, near Cirencester, in the county of Gloucestershire, or Seven Springs, near Cheltenham, should be regarded as the actual starting-point of the river. Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, and different portions of each, have occasionally contended for the honour. Many pages might be filled with rehearsals of learned argument, and quotations from ancient authorities, to support conflicting contentions; but I shall presently invite the reader to follow the course suggested in regard to the name, and make an arbitrary law unto himself. It is not to be denied that the balance of acceptation by topographers of olden times pointed to Thames Head as the generally received source. Leland, sometimes called the Father of English Antiquaries, settles it thus:—“Isis riseth at 3 myles from Cirencestre, not far from a village cawlled Kemble, within half a mile of the Fosse-way, wher the very hed of Isis ys. In a great somer drought there appereth very little or no water, yet is the stream servid with many of springes resorting to one botom.”

Ill, therefore, will fare the visitor to Thames Head, who seeks it, as I have done, full of poetical fancies and pretty conceits about the source of rivers in general, and the birthplace of the famous English stream in particular. However charming he may find the place to be, and charming it certainly is, he will be doomed to disappointment if he thinks he has reached the source of our royal stream. I was bound for the identical spot, as I congratulated myself, where

“From his oozy bed

Old Father Thames advanced his rev’rend head,

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

His shining horns diffused a golden gleam.”

As we have seen, the explorer will, at first, experience failure in his endeavour to find, with any satisfactory clearness, either old Father Thames or his oozy bed. Arrived at the ancient Akeman Street, or Fosse-way, “3 myles” from Cirencester, a choice of no fewer than four springs is presented. The village of Cotes, the Roman mound known as Trewsbury Castle, Trewsbury Mead, and the unromantic chimney of the Thames and Severn Canal Engine-house are plain enough, here and there—landmarks, all of them, for the industrious searcher; but there is no sign of flowing water, or, indeed, of water in repose. You will look in vain for semblance of a bed which might be that of a river. It was only after considerable trouble that I obtained any information, and was guided to this well, named by tradition as the original and primary source of the Thames, and reached by proceeding for a quarter of a mile from the high road (where it crosses the railway) along the walk bordering the Canal.

The reader, however, is hereby invited to regard, not Thames Head, but Seven Springs, near Cheltenham, as the natural and common-sense source of the River Thames. Some three miles south of the town, in the parish of Cubberley, or Coberley, to quote the words of Professor Ramsay, “the Thames rises not far from the crest of the oolitic escarpment of the Cotswold Hills that overlook the Severn.”

After pausing on the shoulder of Charlton Hill, and admiring—as who can fail to do?—the magnificent panorama of hill and valley receding into the mist of distance north and north-east, you proceed from Cheltenham along the Cirencester road to the crossways. A short divergence to the right, and a dip in the road brings you to a piece of wayside turf, with, beyond, a corner shaped like an irregular triangle. One side of this might be, perhaps, seven yards in length, another four yards, and the third something between the two. The triangular depression is reached by one of those little green hillocks so often to be found on English waysides. The bottom is covered with water, which, in spite of the place being no-man’s-land, is clear as crystal, and in its deepest part there was not, at the time of my visit, more than six inches of water. The bed of this open shallow reservoir is not paved with marble, or even concrete, but is liberally provided with such unconsidered trifles as the weather or playful children would cast there. When the wind sets that way a good deal of scum will gather in the farther corner, formed by two walls. The turf near the water’s edge is worn away, and the green hillock has been trodden into a mere clay bank by the feet of cattle and men, for it is, as I have said, a patch of common land abutting upon the road. Overhead, stretched from the telegraph posts, you may count nine unmistakable wires parallel with the wall which forms the base of our triangle. On the side farthest from the road the bank is high. A venerable hawthorn has become wedded apparently to an equally venerable ash, whose topmost boughs coquette at close quarters with the telegraph wires. Another ash-tree, at the outer point of the triangle, leans over the water. Between the trees a little sloe bush keeps sturdy foothold. You may mark, moreover, a few straggling briars, bits of silver-weed, a root or two of the meadow cranesbill, a clump of poverty-stricken meadow-sweet, some fool’s parsley, wild strawberry plants, and a good deal of bold and always flourishing dandelion. This is the environment of the true source of the great River Thames. We are at Seven Springs.

Hence multitudinous initials are rudely carved upon the old trees and on the stone walls; hence strangers, during summer, drive hither and pay homage. Clear away the scum from the water at the foot of the wall and a small iron grating explains how the waters, always bubbling clear and cool from the Seven Springs, pass away. On the other side of the wall the inflow forms a pond in private grounds. Thence it descends by a homely fall into a smaller pond, and by yet another insignificant fall into what for some distance is sometimes little better than a stagnant ditch. A lower fall, however, of more determined character than the others, sets in motion a clear rill, which, though tiny in volume and unpretentious in present aims, sets off upon its gravelly course as if it knew that by-and-by it would form an estuary upon which the navies of the world might ride in safety. Just now a child might leap across. It is a mere thread of water, yet the streamlet begins at once to proceed in a business-like way under the solid hedgerows separating the fields, and soon becomes a decided brook. This is a tangible beginning, at all events. The Seven Springs are on evidence in a convenient enclosure; they may be recognised as, silently sparkling, they gush from the bank which gives roothold to the hawthorn and ash; and the infant river is always in sight from the moment it assumes the form of a tiny streamlet.

It is difficult to conceive how it has come about that Thames Head on the one part and Seven Springs on the other have been considered rival claimants for the honour of being the cradle of the Thames. It is true that both streams (for Thames Head eventually, by sundry means, becomes a stream) rise from the eastern slopes of the Cotswolds; but they are many miles apart, and Thames Head is nearly fifteen miles nearer the sea than Seven Springs. The rivulet issuing from Seven Springs, and which presently becomes the River Churn is, in the present day at least, the distinct stream which continues its unbroken course to the Nore, and it is the source which is farthest from the mouth of the Thames.

Leland, nevertheless, writing at the time of Henry VIII., fixes, as we have seen, upon Thames Head as the source. Stow, with less detail, adopts the same locality; Camden does likewise; Atkins declares that the river riseth in the parish of Cotes; Rudder that it has been reputed “to rise in the parish of Cotes, out of a well.” Modern tourists regularly visit both places, and in great numbers, during the summer season, and in the case of Thames Head are probably taken now to the uppermost glade, which I have described, and now to the spring nearer the engine-house of the Thames and Severn Canal, represented by the illustration. The neglect of the alleged sources by the local authorities of both Cirencester and Cheltenham is to be explained, probably, on the old principle, that what is everybody’s is nobody’s business. Since, however, people go in full faith to both Seven Springs and Thames Head, some record, however simple, might surely be upraised at both for the enlightenment of the wayfaring man.

Dealing with this question at more length perhaps than the subject requires, I may be allowed to repeat that in these days there ought to be no manner of doubt that the natural and legitimate source of the Thames is that shallow, neglected, triangular pool formed by the Seven Springs. The Cotswold Hills are, in any case, above dispute as the cradle-ground of the river, and may be happy with either claimant.

“But Cotswold, be this spoke to th’ onely praise of thee,

That thou, of all the rest, the chosen soyle should bee,

Faire Isis to bring forth, the mother of great Tames,

With whose delicious brooks, by whose immortal streames

Her greatnesse is begun.”

Following the fortunes of the Seven Springs, you naturally enter with some degree of zeal into an expedition down the River Churn, and this you are able to do without losing sight of the excellent road between Cheltenham and Cirencester. The pretty little dancing trout stream runs hard by the highway, mostly through a succession of beautiful estates, and generally thickly overhung with alders and other bushes. Drayton hit off the character of the stream most accurately in calling it the “nimble-footed Churn;” and its picturesqueness, and musical flow between the wooded hills and through the fat meadows, as we near Cirencester, appeal to us, even on the score of sentiment. Surely it is more pleasant to identify this as the Thames than that commonplace current proceeding from the Thames Head series of springs. There is no necessity, however, to trace in detail the course of the beck-like Churn, by wooded uplands teeming with game, and through rustic villages and sequestered grounds. It runs through Rendcombe to North Cerney, down by Baunton, and through the once famous and still interesting town of Cirencester. The Fosse-way mentioned in connection with Thames Head was one of three great Roman roads which met here. Mentioned by Roman historians as Corinium and Cornovium, the strongly fortified city of Cirencester, the metropolis of a Roman province was, there is reason for believing, a considerable British town before it became a Roman centre. In the time of Henry VIII. the Roman wall surrounding the city might yet be traced, and, as the histories of Gloucestershire show, many Roman remains have from time to time been discovered here. The Churn sustains its brook-like character alongside the Cricklade road by Addington, South Cerney, and Hailstone Hill, and then within a mile of the town of Cricklade it unites with the other branch issuing from Thames Head, to which it is necessary briefly to return, in order to administer to it the justice already bestowed upon what we have agreed to regard as the rightful heir, namely, the Seven Springs stream, or River Churn.

The Thames and Severn Canal is so intimately associated with Thames Head, and so dominates that particular part of the country, that a few words respecting it may be spared. Indeed, it has dealings, directly or indirectly, with the Churn as well as with the Thames Head stream. Not far from Trewsbury Mead it gives a position to Thames Head Bridge, and the Canal lies within a few yards of the traditional spring. The first tributary is formed by a spring issuing from beneath the aqueduct, and not far from the Canal stands the single-arch watercourse, here illustrated as practically the first bridge over the Thames. The course of the Canal, however, almost immediately bears eastward, until it strikes the Churn, near which it keeps during the remainder of its independent career. The Thames and Severn Canal is an interesting fact which the present generation is in danger of forgetting. For many years the junction of “fair Sabrina” with “lordly Thames” was a burning question in the commercial worlds of London and Bristol. The merchants were much fascinated with the speculations in which they indulged. The Canal scheme was launched in a Bill in the reign of Charles II., and Mr. Hydrographer Moxon was engaged to survey the ground and prove to what extent the project was practicable. Pope, in the grandiloquent language of the time, in a famous letter written at Oakley, Lord Bathurst’s country house at Cirencester, said, “I could pass whole days in describing the future and as yet visionary beauties that are to rise in these scenes: the palace that is to be built, the pavilions that are to glitter, the colonnades that are to adorn them; nay, more, the meeting of the Thames and Severn, which, when the noble owner has finer dreams than ordinary, are to be led into each other’s embraces, through secret caverns of not above twelve to fifteen miles, till they rise and celebrate their marriage in the midst of an immense amphitheatre, which is to be the admiration of posterity a hundred years hence.”

THE FIRST BRIDGE OVER THE THAMES.

The Canal was completed sixty-eight years after this dream was indulged in, and in December, 1790, the first Canal boat, laden with coals, passed through. The Canal is a continuation of the Stroudwater system from the Severn to Wallbridge, near Stroud, and runs in a devious course from that point to Lechlade. It is thirty miles long, forty-two feet broad at the top, and thirty feet at the bottom. Between Stroud and Sapperton the water is raised 241 feet in less than eight miles, by means of locks.

Returning now to the lower spring of the Thames Head group, the course of this branch of the river may be traced from the expanded water giving growth to the ancient watercress bed, and receiving its first modest tributary rill from the spring proceeding from under the Canal aqueduct. Hence the brook meanders through meadows, and, near the railway, passes under the roadway. The village of Kemble lies half a mile back, and the stream passes under and alongside the road from Kemble to Ewen, beneath a considerable culvert, or trio of culverts. The first mill on the Thames was, in former times, at Ewen; but a cosy farmhouse now occupies the site, and the water which in former days set the drowsy wheel in motion is turned aside for sheep-washing purposes. The first mill now is Somerford Upper Mill, with its pretty setting of elm-trees, and charming rural surroundings. Somerford Keynes, on the elevated ground to the left, was bestowed as a marriage gift upon Ralph de Kaineto by Henry I., and an ancient charter granted to the Abbot Aldelm of Malmesbury contains the following incidental reference to the river as the Thames:—“Cujus vocabulum Temis juxta vadum qui appellatur Somerford.”

Throughout the varied and interesting voyage upon which we are embarked the spires and towers of churches will be ever present, graceful and welcome features of many a landscape, now set upon a hill like a city which cannot be hid, now half concealed by mantling ivies, and shunning observation amongst the rugged elms which shelter their roofs and windows. The square tower of venerable All Saints, Somerford Keynes, is one of the earliest to claim attention as a typical parish church of rural England, very dignified in its age, and in its maternal relation to the cottages around the churchyard. The stream not far below this point serves another rustic mill, and a noticeable object later on is a homely foot-bridge supported by upright slabs of stone. At Ashton Keynes there are sundry small bridges spanning the current, soon to be sensibly increased in depth and width by Swill Brook, whose proportions have for the last mile of its course been not inferior to those of the Thames Head stream. The young River Thames was once, as is supposed, navigable to Water Hay Bridge for boats of moderate size; but this must have been before the aqueduct of the North Wilts Canal crossed it, or West Mill was built.

The ancient town of Cricklade reconciles any differences, and effectually ends all disputes as to individual claimants, by affording the two branches an opportunity of uniting their forces a short distance below the bridge. Here the Churn, from its north-western source, merges into the stream which has been always apparently called by the name of Thames. In this district it formed the boundary of the forest of Braden in the time of Canute. James Thorne, in his accurately written “Rambles by Rivers,” does no injustice to the town of Cricklade when he speaks of it as dull to look at, dull to live in, and no less dull to talk about. There is, indeed, little about which to talk in connection with it, though we may, in passing, smile on recalling Drayton’s words in his “Polyolbion”—

“Greeklade whose great name yet vaunts that learned tongue

Where to Great Britain first the sacred Muses sung,

Who first were seated here at Isis’ bounteous head,

As telling that her fame should through the world be spread.”

It has been alleged by certain authorities that a college here, founded by a school of ancient philosophers, became famous for its Greek learning, and hence the name of the town. It has also been insisted that a few miles down the river a rival college, maintained with similar success in the Latin interests, gave a name to the community which lived under its learned shadow; or, as Fuller said, “The Muses swam down the stream of the River Isis to be twenty miles nearer to the rising sun.” In this manner fanciful writers have sought to explain the origin of the words Cricklade and Lechlade.

CRICKLADE.

Cricklade is important to lovers of the Thames as being the first definite station on its upper waters. From the southern watershed come, besides the Swill Brook, the Dance and the Rey. The last-named, a contribution from the range of hills around Swindon, has been thought worthy by a few enthusiasts of the distinction of contesting with Thames Head and Seven Springs the responsibilities of parentage. The Thames passes under a plank bridge at Cricklade, and becomes very shallow before receiving the tributaries above indicated. Thames tourists rarely push their explorations so high as Cricklade, which, other than two well-preserved specimens of fourteenth-century crosses (as is conjectured), and the prominent share in the landscape taken by St. Mary’s Church and churchyard, as seen from Eisey foot-bridge, offers few attractions to the visitor. The scenery of the river hereto, and in truth for many a mile to come, is of a pleasing order, yet on a small and unpretentious scale. Farmhouses, with their surroundings of rick-yard and orchard; hamlets and villages in sleepy remove from the noisy world; a country house set in blooming gardens at odd intervals; pasture land and grain-fields, separated by old-fashioned hedges that are gay with flowers in spring and summer, with deeply-hued berries in the mellow autumn;—on every hand and at every turn these form the landscape. The river itself, so far, claims no particular notice, calls for no warmth of admiration. It makes no noise, performs no astonishing feats, inspires no terrors, but steals tranquilly through the meadows, and silently flows by the plentiful rushes which, unmolested, protect its banks in these remote reaches.

Castle Eaton Bridge, over four miles below Cricklade town, is perhaps the centre of the best of the rural scenery of this district, but it demands no special pause. The church tower, which shows boldly above the meadow, two miles farther on, belongs to Kempsford. King Harold was once a property-owner here. William the Conqueror subsequently gave the manor to one of his Norman soldiers, and, as was not uncommon in early days, it ultimately fell into possession of Mother Church, by whom, at the time of dissolution, it was disgorged and granted to the Thynne family. The edifice upon the river-side was probably built in the fourteenth century. There was also a castle at Kempsford, of which a fragment of window and a bit of wall remain, and a portion of the tower known as the Gunners’ Room. The occupants of the Gunners’ Room, when the building was habitable, had the advantage of looking out upon the river. A horseshoe nailed to the church-door long sustained the legend that when powerful Henry, Duke of Lancaster, the builder of the church, was quitting the place for ever, his horse cast a shoe, which the inhabitants nailed up in proud remembrance of the honour. The traces of an old weir, as we proceed downwards with such speed as the thickets of reeds and weeds will allow, if we are attempting the passage in a boat, remind us that in days when even inconsiderable streams were valuable as highways for barge and boat traffic the channel of the Thames was not so neglected as it will in these days be found. In other respects also its character has doubtless changed, as indicated by the stepping-stones across the foundation of the weir-sill, upon which the passenger, during summer level, may step dryshod from bank to bank. Below Hannington Bridge (with Highworth Church in the distance), the rushy pool, almost choked up with aquatic growths, still bears the name of Ham Weir. A sharp northerly bend in the river opposite the village of Upper Inglesham marks the separating-point of Berks and Wilts. Born in Gloucestershire, the Thames has latterly diverged for a brief excursion into Wilts, but now returns again, and from Kempsford until, a few miles onward, Oxfordshire is entered, it is the boundary between Gloucestershire and the southern counties of Wilts and Berks. The River Cole joins the Thames on the eastern bank. The little stream, in a charming Berkshire valley lying south, has given a name to Lord Radnor’s mansion, Coleshill, famous as a perfect specimen of the style of Inigo Jones, and it arrives, accordingly, with some degree of repute on its own account.

INGLESHAM ROUND HOUSE.

For many years the highest weir upon the Thames was at Inglesham, known for the picturesque church, with its bell-turret overlooking the river, and the remarkable piece of carved stone in the porch wall, but of more interest to us as the meeting-place of the Coln, the Thames and Severn Canal, and the Thames.

The Canal we have already glanced at. The Coln is a trout stream of some value, but it receives its fame principally from association with the town of Fairford; and Fairford is famous because of the painted church windows supposed to have been designed by Albert Dürer. The Round House at Inglesham is the final lock-house of the Thames and Severn Canal, and it indicates the stage at which the Thames becomes a river of importance. It is broader and deeper than heretofore, and was once navigable for barges of from thirty to seventy tons burden, drawing four feet of water; but a channel of such proportions has not existed for many years, and the river threatens to lose all pretensions to a waterway before long, unless its guardians dredge to more purpose than they have done in recent years. Once upon a time, when the ports of Bristol and London were not connected by railway, there was constant traffic through Inglesham Lock, and the Round House was a conspicuous beacon for the bargees of the period; but the lock-keeper’s berth has, it is needless to explain, in modern days become a sinecure. The angler at this meeting of the waters is the gainer, and his practised eye will mark the juncture as a probable haunt of the voracious pike.

The Highworth road is carried by a substantial one-arch bridge (to the left of the compass of the illustration on the next page) over the river at Lechlade, and in the fields, half a mile below, we arrive at the first lock on the Thames. There are a lock-house and garden to rest in, Thames Conservancy notices to be read, and ancient lock-keeping folk to talk with. It is a very old lock. In the natural order of things it cannot last much longer, and at no distant date, no doubt, it will give place to one of the more useful, but infinitely more prosaic, affairs of iron, with modern improvements in the machinery, which the Conservancy supplies when it is necessary to replace the original structures. The partly-decayed boards, the hand-rail rising from their outer edge, the lock gates patched many a time, and thinned in regard to their outer casing by many a winter flood, have done their work, and stand in weather-worn picturesqueness, all awry, doing their remaining duty as best they may. Looking westward, the spire of Lechlade Church, and, indeed, its tower and the greater part of the body of the building, shaded with ivy, make a very harmonious object of middle distance. The village, neat, substantial, and mature, rallies round it, with woods extending on either hand, and at its left flank stands the well-built, arched structure, which may be said to be the first bridge worthy of the name upon the river. It will be, perhaps, half a mile from the lock to the bridge, as the crow flies, but the Thames winds among the flat meadows in serpentine twists. Still farther on the line of the horizon, as, seated on the lever-beam used for opening the lock, we look westward, is a little picket of six poplars, marking the whereabouts of the solitary Round House, which substantially marks the limit of the navigable part of the Thames. The scene, thus comprising woods, village, church, bridge, and the long line of low trees terminated by poplars, is peculiarly English, and of a character that we shall see reproduced in endless variety—every prospect pleasing—until the last lock is reached at Teddington. But this is the first lock, 144 miles from London Bridge, and 125 from Teddington weir. Between the two there are many subjects of interest; but there is only one first lock, and upon this we may bestow closer attention than common. In the meadow is a big hawthorn on which the hips are already forming, and on a hot summer day the dairy kine will find shelter, lazily flicking the flies from their hides. Haycocks are plentiful on all sides. Yonder the men are hoisting a load of sweet-smelling hay upon the rick. Farther in the distance a late crop is falling in regular swathes; and when the gurgle of the water escaping from the dilapidated lock-gates moderates for a moment we can hear the mower whetting his scythe. The meadow upon which the first Thames Conservancy notice board has been erected, opposite the neat lock cottage, has not, it seems, been laid down for hay this year, and so offers a variety for the satisfaction of the artistic eye—to wit, masses of newly-shorn sheep lying on the grass, and dappled kine steadily feeding, what time the swallows and swifts are hawking around, and small birds warble in the reeds.

LECHLADE—THE FIRST LOCK.

The Thames hereabouts, notwithstanding the prevailing officialism, is very modest. At the period of my last visit I found that there had been no floods for eighteen months; and the river, as our boatman put it, had long wanted washing out. In its widest part in the neighbourhood of the first lock it is not more than twenty yards from bank to bank, and on each side there are thick margins of bull-rush, sedge, and flag. The water is fairly deep, but cumbered with masses of weeds, out of which spring the tall rank stems of water-parsnip, while here and there small, compact, yellow water-lilies gleam like moidores on a silver plate. The river runs parallel with the lock channel under St. John’s Bridge, a comparatively new and good-looking structure of one arch. It is about a mile from the town of Lechlade, and near it is the old-fashioned “Trout” Inn, still maintaining all the homely characteristics of the English countryside inn. A great sycamore overshadows it; there is an old-fashioned garden at the rear, and its little orchard, with a noble walnut-tree in the centre, offers a pathway to the pool. There is something in the semblance of a weir at St. John’s Bridge, though it is of the most rudimentary kind, having fallen naturally into decay, and even into desuetude. Still, the small sluices are occasionally lifted, and serviceable streams are formed to keep the pool in motion, and prevent the patriarchal trout from giving notice to quit. At the end of St. John’s Bridge tradition placed the priory of Black Canons, but of this there is no more substantial record than that of ink and paper. A few yards beyond the garden, on the left bank, the River Lech creeps into the Thames.

The regulation towpath exists from this point downwards, but for miles to come it is, like the boundaries of counties, a generally invisible line. The path is never trampled by horses, since barge traffic is unknown. For the towage of pleasure boats it is occasionally used, though these upper regions are rarely indeed penetrated by tourists. This is a pity; for there are a quietude and utter rurality about the river from Lechlade till within the precincts of Oxford that will be looked for in vain upon the busier haunts. Farther down there are glimpses—samples, so to speak—of what we have here in the bulk. We shall here find none of those notable Thames scenes that have been written about and painted from the olden times to the present day. Progressing from Lechlade downwards you feel altogether removed from the haunts of men. A patient angler sitting in his home-made boat under the overhanging boughs of a tree you will occasionally pass, and the presence of labourers toiling in the meadows informs you that this is not wholly a sleepy hollow. But river traffic, in the common meaning of the term, there is none. For a whole day you will probably not meet a boat; and there is no necessity to sigh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of space, seeing that you have so excellent a substitute at hand. The solitude is, in truth, delightful. As you drop down between the banks you see drawn up in review order regiments of familiar friends—the dark glossy leaves of the water dock, bursting into seed in July; huge clumps of blue forget-me-nots that can only be plucked from a boat; ox-eyed daisies, well above high-water mark, gleaming as fixed stars in the floral firmament; the yellow-flowering great watercress, the purple loose-strife beginning to blossom, yellow iris, the white flowers of the common watercress, the pink persicaria, meadow-sweet, the comfreys, and sometimes a clump of arrowheads. From one to another flits the superb dragon-fly:—

“One almost fancies that such happy things,

With coloured hoods and richly-burnished wings,

Are fairy folk, in splendid masquerade

Disguised, as if of mortal folk afraid;

Keeping their joyous pranks a mystery still,

Lest glaring day should do their secrets ill.”

A mile and a half of winding and uniformly narrow river brings us to rare old Buscot. The days of its weather-stained lock and weir are numbered too, but so long as they remain they will be, in conjunction, an object such as the artist loves, and a reminder to us all of other days when the world was not so jaded as now, when things were not so new, and when the ways of men were more primitive. There is a very fine tumbling bay on the farther side of the weir, and a sharp sweep of swiftly-running water coursing over a gravelly shallow, upon which the trout come out to feed at eventide, and the silvery dace and bleak poise in happy security during the long summer days. One is tempted naturally to land at the little village. The square, solid, countryfied-looking church tower, surrounded by old trees, and approached through a flower-garden, suggests, as your boat pauses at the lock, that it will be better to spend a quarter of an hour afoot than in the tedious process of passing through. Buscot is not a large or a pretentious place, but it is pleasant to look at, and deserves mention in passing, as giving name to the first weir of goodly size. A particularly pretty bit of the river, winding, tree-lined, and narrow, is followed by a long unromantic stretch.

Quaint, time-honoured Hart’s Weir is so little a weir that the ordinary boat shoots the open half on the strength of a miniature rapid representing, at a summer level of the river, a fall of three or four inches only. The water there opens out into a wide bay that is purling rather than tumbling; and this is succeeded, in the ordinary course of nature, by a silted-up shallow, densely covered in their season with the white, yellow-eyed blossoms of the water crowfoot. Kelmscott on the north, and Eaton Hastings on the south, are the nearest villages. The banks of the Thames are now clearly defined by those trees which love to spread their branches to a river. The Thames does not, like the Loddon, encourage a monopoly of alder, but favours rather the familiar willow, the Lombardy poplar, and the plentiful hawthorn. Clumps of old elms, most picturesque of English trees when standing on village green, or as a rearguard to church or manor-house, vary the prospect. White and red wild roses are plentiful in the higher reaches of the river, and every turn of the narrow stream offers new combinations of wood and field:—

“No tree in all the grove but has its charms,

Though each its hue peculiar; paler some,

And of a wannish grey; the willow such,

And poplar, that with silver lines his leaf,

And ash far-stretching his umbrageous arm;

Of deeper green the elm; and deeper still,

Lord of the woods, the long surviving oak.”

After Hart’s Weir the Thames settles down to an interval of insignificance. There is an indescribably soothing influence exercised by a river in the soft mood which characterises the Thames throughout. How pleasant it is to be simply moving with the current, which does so much and is heard so little. Loud, even, by comparison with the murmur of the waters, is the sighing of the breezes amongst the shock heads of the willows, and the silver shiver of the poplars. Under the spell of this influence the prosaic features of a reach like that between Hart’s Weir and Radcot serve as a foil for the more lovely objects. Besides, occasional descents from the higher platforms of admiration, to which special points of interest are apt to summon you, give time for reflection and observation. Thus you will not be long in discovering that in these veritably upper reaches of the Thames what of animal life is still left may be seen without let or hindrance. The birds here are in no danger from the cockney fowler’s gun. Amongst the water-fowl the most frequent appearance is that of the common moor-hen, which breeds as freely as ever, and still maintains its character as amongst the tamest of our wild birds. The coot is less often seen, but the heron will be often disturbed from its busy occupation on the shallows. Even in much-frequented reaches of the Thames the heron may still be descried at a distance, shy, watchful, and wary. On both of the days occupied by my voyage from Lechlade to Oxford I saw herons. They may have travelled twenty miles from the heronry for their nightly or early-morning forage, but you rarely can approach them within gunshot. The bird is most artful and shy at all times; but I have always fancied that the herons of the Thames Valley are the most wideawake of all. They hear the thump, thump of the rowlocks half a mile off, rise from their depredations, and wing their way slowly into the centre of a field; or perchance you may see one doing sentry on the upper boughs of a tall tree.

Between Hart’s Weir and Radcot Bridge I descry three “herns” in one meadow that had been so disturbed by our gliding boat. As they stand motionless and lank in the fields, on a fence, or in the tree-tops, only a practised eye can identify them. In summer-time, though rarely, you put up a couple of wild ducks from the main river. The boating man, as may be supposed, meets with less bird life than the pedestrian, who, stealthily walking on the grass, will often obtain a passing flash of a kingfisher, or witness the alarmed flight of rarer birds. My July voyage brings me into constant companionship with troops of the wanton lapwing, in glorious plumage and full of noisy life; rooks, as a matter of course, busy, self-satisfied, and radiant in their blue-black vesture; swallows, swifts, sand martins, and reed warblers. The common sandpiper is about upon the shallows where the streams run swiftly, and the elegant water wagtails abound. At intervals throughout the day, near shrubby undergrowths and open meadows, the music of skylark, thrush, or blackbird charms the ear, though the eye seeks in vain the whereabouts of the performer. Four-footed creatures are few. The merry vole is an exception, and in some of the woods the cautious searcher may find squirrels in active play. The otter, seldom seen by the human eye in broad daylight, is plentiful enough in the earlier stages of the Thames, and of them, as of other wild creatures, it may be generally said that they are not so harried and wantonly destroyed as in the middle and lower parts of the river.

Radcot Bridge, of which we catch sight three miles from Hart’s Weir, is understood to be one of the oldest bridges on the Thames, and its appearance is quite in character with this theory; moreover, it is an interesting piece of stonework, apart from its age, its three Gothic arches being curiously ribbed underneath. There is a very steep ascent to the crown, and over the centre arch is still preserved the socket in which, on the crest of bridges, the sacred cross was wont to be uplifted. There are, in point of fact, two bridges at Radcot, but the “real original” is the antique three-arched affair to the right, as we drop down. The river is here divided, a short cut to facilitate navigation and deepen the channel forming a new departure. The old stream wanders round, when the weeds will allow it, under the ribbed arches, leaving the channel of the new cut, like a newly-come tradesman who has a contempt for the old-fogeyish methods of the ancient inhabitants, to transact its business merrily, with promptness and despatch. For a couple of miles or so the Thames has now all the essential characteristics of a trout stream, with eddying pools and golden shallows, over which the water ripples at a moderate depth and at sparkling pace. In the hands of patient fish culturists and preservers this portion of the river might be made, no doubt, a trout stream; but salmo fario is as yet the least abundant of Thames fishes. What are called the coarse fish, or summer spawners, are on the contrary abundant, and most plentiful of all, under the willowy banks of the meadows, are the chub, which, for want of better game, afford passable sport to the fly-fisher, who, from the towpath, ought to be able to command any portion of the Thames at this stage of its course. In the wide deep pools marking the sites of old weirs, of which little trace but the piers remain, there should be, and as a matter of fact is, excellent angling for perch and pike.

RADCOT BRIDGE.

Because the Thames has been so much praised, and so much the subject of picture and poem, it does not follow that it is all pleasing to the eye. After leaving Radcot Bridge, and with the exception of these pools, once foaming and noisy with the action of the descending water, some indifferently furnished reaches have to be passed—reaches that are almost canal-like in the straightness of their course and in the uninteresting character of the low-lying land on either side. The country immediately bordering on the river is sparsely populated, and the world must revolve somewhat slowly for those who live there. Some indication of this may be gathered from the fact that at Rushy Lock, where there is a fine weir and pool, we had the pleasure of being our own lock keeper, opening the heavy gates, letting in the water, and releasing ourselves. The labour accomplished, a small urchin of six years of age was sharp enough to put in an appearance in time to take the toll; it was evident, however, that traffic was so unexpected that he alone had been left in charge, Indeed, during one whole day’s progress we met but two boats.

Tadpole Bridge, a substantial structure of one span, between four and five miles below Radcot, carries the road from Bampton, where Phillips, the author of an almost forgotten work, “The Splendid Shilling,” was born. The singular spire of Bampton Church is seen from Radcot Bridge, the view from which also includes Faringdon Hill, and some effective wooded heights around. The few tourists who make a pilgrimage from the source to the mouth of the Thames, or those who visit these stations for a sojourn of greater or lesser duration, turn aside from the river and visit both Faringdon and Bampton. At Faringdon any traces of the houses which withstood the hard knocks of the Cromwellian period are gone; nothing but the site remains, and that only as a vague tradition, of the castle built by the supporters of Queen Matilda, and pulled down by the supporters of King Stephen. Sir Edward Unton, who was Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador at the French Court, is buried in the church.

Bampton, on the Oxfordshire side, is half town and half village, and it has an indirect connection with the Thames, although it is some distance from its banks, because the steeple, to which I have already referred, is a striking mark upon the landscape. Not without reason has the character of singularity been applied to it. From a square tower rises an octagon steeple, with belfry windows; pinnacles at each corner form basements of statues, and these are supported by slabs resting at right angles against the steeple. Skelton says that the church contains examples of almost every period of architecture, from the Conquest to the reign of George III. It has a fine Norman porch, an inner arch that is much admired, brasses, and a series of sculptures, probably work of the fifteenth century.

There is not much material for description in the next few miles. The river seems occasionally to lessen rather than increase in size, and right and left you look in vain for anything worthy of inquiry or admiration, save the comfortable old farmhouses and homesteads, environed by the usual clump of characteristic elms; and, at farther distance from the river, here and there a country mansion, secure in the privacy of its trim park, suggesting always the happy language of the poetess:—

“The stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand,

Amid their tall ancestral trees o’er all the pleasant land.”

It is not till you have passed below Tadpole Bridge that the first beds of white lilies challenge attention. The lilies hitherto have been of the small yellow description; but now, in sheltered bays, thick beds of the gorgeous white variety shine gloriously from between the large glossy leaves. They are, fortunately, out of the line of every-day Thames traffic, and are so spared to develop to maturity in waters to which the steam-launch has not yet penetrated. About two miles below Tadpole one’s attention cannot fail to be arrested by the high, skeleton-like, weather-worn bridge called Tenfoot Weir. This is another site of a weir long fallen into disuse. The wooden bridge consists of a central arch, or compartment, of staging set twenty feet high, with steep flights of steps on either side, the central division marking the outline of the old weir. A thatched cottage and thickly clustering willows in the bend which is here formed by the course of the river present an extremely picturesque variety to the monotonous character of the previous mile of the Thames. Another object of interest will be found a little lower down, at Duxford Ferry. Alongside a clump of willows lies a “sheer hulk,” representing one of the long, narrow canal boats used when barges regularly plied where there is no water to float them now. Close to the blackened, slimy timbers of the wreck a promising family of calves cluster, as if pondering in bovine fancy over the former glories of the defunct craft and the industry it typified. A comfortable group of farm-buildings, thatched and tiled, nestles at the head of the ferry, which is not furnished with the usual horse-boat, for the simple reason that it may be crossed without any such assistance. A child might walk across on the hard gravelly shallow at ordinary times without being more than knee deep. It is, however, more than twenty yards wide, and the stream concentrates immediately afterwards to a width of not more than twenty feet; but it remains shallow.

THE FERRY, BABLOCK HYTHE.

There are two or three fords in the course of the next few miles, all of the same character. A rather notable one is that at Shifford. The legend runs that in the locality Alfred the Great held one of his earliest Parliaments, and there and then gathered “many thanes, many bishops, and many learned men, proud earls, and awful knights.” This was to a great extent Canute’s country. A mile or two on the Berkshire side of the river, near Bucklands, is kept the Pusey horn, given to the family by that king. The inscription upon it is, “I, King Knoude, give William Pewse this horne to holde by thy londe.” There are some doubts, however, as to whether these letters are not of later date than the time of Canute. At Longworth, another village, there are the remains of an ancient encampment, Cherbury Camp, and here, it is said, a palace of Canute’s once stood.

The River Windrush, a more considerable tributary than any previously received by the Thames, flows into the parent river from the north at Newbridge. The point of debouchment might, by reason of the weeds and rushes in the water and overhanging bushes of the banks, be easily overlooked by a casual observer, and the Windrush, in this peculiarity, closely resembles other feeders of the Thames, in looking its meanest where it offers its volume to the parent river. The Windrush is one of the Cotswold brood, and at Bourton-on-the-Water it becomes a valuable trout stream. Great Barrington, whose freestone quarry furnished the stone for Christopher Wren’s restoration of Westminster Abbey, is opposite the village of Windrush; the river afterwards enters Oxfordshire, and by the peculiar quality of its waters gives to the town of Witney a special pre-eminence in the whiteness of the blankets produced by its fulling mills. The river is thirty-five miles long from source to inlet to the Thames.

CUMNOR CHURCHYARD.

The oldest, and in truth the oldest looking, stone bridge on the Thames is called Newbridge, and this we approach below the place where Alfred held his Parliament. The bridge is an excellent sample of old English masonry. It has been Newbridge for at least 600 years now, yet its groined arches and projecting piers seem as strong to-day as ever they have been. A public-house accommodates the traveller on either side of the bridge, one of them replacing a mill that perished for lack of customers. Strange to say, the river seems immediately to change its character when we have passed through these ancient arches. Not only is the presence of a couple of working barges, with gaily-painted posts of primary colours and vivid figure-subjects painted upon the panelling of the deck cabin aft, evidence that another era in the commercial character of the river is beginning, but the Thames, almost without warning, becomes wider and deeper, and altogether more like the Thames as we know it at the popular stations above the City boundaries, though of course it is still the Thames in miniature. The barges come in these days no farther than this station, and their business is mostly one not unconnected with coal. These boats, moored near the old bridge, seem to remind us that although heretofore we might have cherished the fancy that the Thames was almost an idyllic trout stream, lending grace to a rural district, it must henceforth be considered as being a recognised water highway with a mission that becomes more and more important as the distance to London Bridge is lessened. It is quite a remarkable change, and in a few moments your estimate of the river changes also. It is a thing now of laws and regulations. The very foliage on the banks seems to be of a more permanent character. Hitherto the Thames has been struggling with an indefinite career before it, winding through the meadows, streaming over the shallows, not quite certain whether it was to have a respectable position or not. But after Newbridge it has set up a substantial establishment, wherefore—Isis though it still may be and is called by the good Oxford people—it is to all intents and purposes Old Father Thames. We have seen the Seven Springs rill in its infancy and the Thames in its boyhood and lusty youth; here, however, it enters upon its early manhood.

Opposite Harrowden Hill, and to the west of Newbridge, Standlake Common may be explored by whosoever would benefit by its attractions, which, truth to tell, are very scanty. Snipe undoubtedly enjoy its boggy virtues during the winter; but the common is a marshy tract at best, and those who pass on to the village for the sake of its church of Early English architecture, and the farmhouse said to be built by John o’Gaunt and Joan his wife, do not care to linger there.

We shall pass two weir-pools, long disused, between Newbridge and Bablock Hythe, namely, Langley, or Ridge’s Weir, and Ark, or Noah’s Ark Weir. These and previous weirs referred to are of the very simplest kind, and, except in the two instances mentioned, perform their service independently of a lock. The object of this simple form of weir is to dam the river to the required height for such purposes as mill heads or navigation. The business is accomplished by the working of flood gates or paddles in grooves, and between rymers, to the sill at the bottom. In winter there may be a swift stream through the weirs, but, the weir paddles being withdrawn, there is very little fall. Shooting the weir stream—one of the adventurous feats of the upper navigation—is an amusement unknown below Oxford, and at times it is not without its risks.

STANTON HARCOURT CHURCH.

Although Bablock Hythe by road is not much more than five miles from Oxford, the circuitous voyage by Thames is twelve miles. Bablock Hythe is a well-known station on the Upper Thames, albeit it does not boast the rank of hamlet or village, and has for the accommodation of man and beast only one of the small old-fashioned inns of the humblest sort, where the rooms are low, the beams big and solid, the floors flagged, and the apartments fitted up with all manner of three-corner cupboards and antique settles. The great ferry-boat, however, gives it a decided position of importance, and it is known to Thames tourists principally as the starting-point for visiting either Cumnor or Stanton Harcourt. Most people probably go to Cumnor from Oxford, the distance being only about three miles; but many are glad to make it an excuse for halting on the somewhat monotonous ascent of the river. The reader needs scarcely to be reminded that Cumnor Place has been made immortal by the pages of Sir Walter Scott, and that the sorrows of Amy Robsart have been wept over by the English-speaking race in all parts of the world. There is an inn at Cumnor still called after that hostelry over which Giles Gosling firmly ruled, and in the church there is a monument sacred to the virtues of Tony Fire-the-fagot and his family, who are thus handed down to posterity in a far different character from that suggested by Sir Walter as pertaining to the tool of the villain Varney. Cumnor is on the Berkshire side, and on the Oxford side is Stanton Harcourt, visited for the sake of the remains of its ancient mansion, and its fine church. Visitors, probably, would not make the journey exclusively in the interests of either one or the other, nor of the two large upright stones called the Devil’s Quoits, which one historian conjectures were erected to commemorate the battle fought in 614 between the Saxons and the Britons.

EYNSHAM WEIR.

The real attraction of Stanton Harcourt is historical, and historical in several degrees. It was one of the vast estates which fell as loot to the half-brother of William the Conqueror, and was evidently a considerable possession. For more than 600 years the manor continued in the Harcourt family. Little is left of the grand mansion in which the lords of Stanton Harcourt dwelt. The Harcourt family gave it up as a place of residence towards the close of the seventeenth century, and it fell forthwith to decay. With the exception of the porter’s lodge, the arms on each side of the gate, showing that it was erected by Sir Simon Harcourt, who died in 1547, and some upper rooms in the small remaining part of the house adjoining the kitchen, are all that remain. But there is a more recent historical interest attaching to Stanton Harcourt; in a habitable suite of rooms in the deserted mansion Pope passed the greater part of two summers, and to this day the principal apartment bears the name of Pope’s study. The little man required quiet and retirement during his translation of the Fifth Book of Homer, and upon one of the panes of glass he wrote, in the year 1718, “Alexander Pope finished here the fifth volume of Homer.” The Harcourts, however, removed this pane to Nuneham Courtney, where it is preserved—a piece of red stained glass, six inches by two. The old Stanton Harcourt kitchen, converted to modern uses, was always a curiosity, and Dr. Plott, the Oxford historian, says of it, “It is so strangely unusual that, by way of riddle, one may truly call it either a kitchen within a chimney or a kitchen without one, for below it is nothing but a large square, and octangular above, ascending like a tower, the fires being made against the walls, and the smoke climbing up them without any tunnels or disturbance to the cooks, which, being stopped by a large conical roof at the top, goes out at loopholes on every side, according as how the wind sets, the loopholes at the side next the wind being shut by folding doors, and the adverse side open.”

The visitor at Stanton Harcourt should certainly not neglect an inspection of the beautiful church, said to be the finest in the country. It is cruciform in shape, and has a massive tower. The nave is Norman, of about the twelfth century, and according to “a custom established there time immemorial” the men entered through a large, and the women through a small, doorway. A wooden roof to the nave is understood to have been added in the fourteenth century, while the chancel, transepts, and tower arches are of the thirteenth. The oaken rood screen is reputed to be the oldest wooden partition of the kind in the country. The Harcourt aisle or chapel, erected about the same time as the mansion, is an example of the enriched Perpendicular style of Henry VII., and it is still the burial-place of the ancient Harcourt family. In the chapel, as in the body of the church, are several interesting monuments, and one of them is famous. In Gough’s sepulchral monuments, where it is engraved, the following description is given:—

CROSS AT EYNSHAM.

“This monument of Sir Robert Harcourt of that place, Knight of the Garter, ancestor of the Earl of Harcourt; and Margaret his wife, daughter of Sir John Byron, of Clayton, Lancashire, Knight, ancestor of Lord Byron. He was Sheriff of Lancashire and Warwickshire, 1445, elected Knight of the Garter 1463, commissioned with Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and others, to treat of a peace between Edward IV. and Louis XI. of France, 1467, and was slain on the part of the House of York, by the Staffords, of the Lancastrian party, November 14th, 1472. His figure represents him in his hair, gorget of mail, plated armour, strapped at the elbows and wrists, large hilted sword at left side, dagger at right, his belt charged with oak leaves, hands bare, a kind of ruffle turned back at his wrists, shoes of scaled armour, order of Garter on left leg, and over all the mantle of the Garter, with a rich cape and cordon; his head reclines on a helmet, with his crest, a swan; at his feet a lion. His lady, habited in a veil head-dress falling back, has a mantle and surcoat and cordon, and a kind of short apron, long sleeves fastened in a singular manner at the waist, and the Order of the Garter round her left arm; her feet are partly wrapped up in her mantle.”

The Thames takes a northerly course from Bablock Hythe, and winds and doubles in such contortions that in one part a strip of not more than twelve yards of meadow separates two reaches of considerable length.

A high, wide wooden bridge, bearing the name of Skinner’s Weir, now crosses our course, and soon we come to Pinkhill Lock, so called from a farm of that name in the neighbourhood. The weir is a new one, a great contrast in its severe and formal cut to the weather-worn structures to which we have been accustomed. The lock-house is quite a dainty cottage, and the garden one of the prettiest to be found along the Thames. The lock garden is generally a winsome little preserve, with its kitchen garden, flower-beds, sometimes a beehive, its stack of fagots, and a general air of rusticity; but the lock-keeper, or probably his wife, at Pinkhill Weir has devoted special care and attention to a flower-bed running the whole length of the lock, which I found to be bordered by a blaze of summer flowers, prominent amongst which were white and blue cornflowers. From the lock bridge a commanding view is obtained of the hilly country to the right, and the woods and copses around its base, and straggling to the top.

The telegraph wires along Eynsham Road detract considerably from the rural flavour of the surroundings, and Eynsham Bridge itself does not look so old as it really is. It is a very conspicuous, and, indeed, handsome structure, with eight arches and a liberal amount of balustrading in the central divisions of the parapets. Eynsham, Ensham, Eynesham, or Emsham, has a history which goes beyond the Conquest, and it is by right, therefore, that the bridge is named after the village, though its real name, as decided by the Ordnance Map, is Swinford Bridge. Early in the eleventh century an abbey was founded here by the then Earl of Cornwall, and Ethelred, the reigning king, signed the privilege of liberty with the sign of the holy cross. At the Dissolution the abbey and its site passed into the ownership of the Stanley family, but no ruins have been preserved. Ensham, or Eynsham Cross, stands in the market-place of the village, opposite the church. The bridge, as we now see it, was built about sixty years ago. The village is pleasantly situated on rising ground.

A little below the bridge the picturesque materials of the weir are stored when not in use, and the rymers are piled in a stack close to the spot where they sometimes even now do effective service. Your boat passes through, however, generally without let or hindrance. A little farther on the Evenlode enters the Thames. Like its predecessors, it seems a poor insignificant stream as it delivers its waters through a reedy mouth to the Thames; but it has itself received the River Glyme, which passes through Woodstock and Blenheim Park, and feeds the large lake, now choked with weeds. The Evenlode is the last of the Cotswold offerings thus embodied in verse by Drayton:—

“Clear Colne and lively Leech have down from Cotswold’s plain,

At Lechlade linking hands, come likewise to support

The mother of great Thames. When, seeing the resort,

From Cotswold Windrush scrowers; and with herself doth cast

The train to overtake; and therefore hies her fast

Through the Oxfordian fields; when (as the last of all

Those floods that into Thames out of our Cotswold fall,

And farthest unto the north) bright Elnlode forth doth beare.”

Woodstock is not more than four miles from Eynsham, but it is generally reached from Oxford. The river winds now round the foot of Witham Hill, and we are on close terms with the outskirts of the immense wood through which one could walk for eight miles before losing its shade. The portion that comes to within a few yards of the Thames consists of oak-trees, with an occasional ash, and as we halt to sit a while under the umbrageous canopy we receive as a salute the cooing of doves, agreeable contrast to the reception, a few miles higher up, conveyed in the harsh squawk of a couple of herons. Longfellow might have sat amongst these identical brackens when he wrote:—

“But when sultry suns are high,

Underneath the oak I lie,

As it shades the water’s edge,

And I mark my line, away

In the wheeling eddy play,

Tangling with the river sedge.”

The Thames describes a sharp horseshoe curve round the base of the hill. From the bank a fine view across the flat is obtained of Cassington Church spire, and of the last mill on the River Evenlode, making for the Thames midway between the bridge and Hagley Pool. The paucity of pleasure-boats on the river between Lechlade and Bablock Hythe may be attributed to the great weediness of the river, rendering it sometimes almost impassable; also to the prevalence of shallows, and the absence of anything particular to see, and the all-important consideration that there are few hotels to stop at. There is not a riverside house of call between the little cottage inn at Bablock Hythe and Godstow. An occasional steam-launch finds its way from Oxford up the Canal and into the Thames, by way of the Wolvercott Paper Mill; but this unpleasant type of vessel is very rarely seen so far up, since the forests of aquatic undergrowth are the reverse of favourable for the working of the screw.

OXFORD, FROM GODSTOW.

What the steam-launcher, however, loses is gained by the angler. This mild sportsman I found to be very much in evidence below Bablock Hythe. Here at any rate he was able to pursue his pastime in peace; and the frequency with which he appeared on the bank from Eynsham downwards gives me an opportunity of interjecting a few timely remarks upon the Thames as a resort of fishermen. The professional fisherman, as we know him at Richmond, Maidenhead, or Marlow, with his punt, Windsor chair, and ground-bait, is unknown in the upper reaches of the river; but the fish are there. Although anglers have multiplied a hundredfold within the last half-century, the angling in the River Thames at the present moment is better than it has been at any time during the present generation. It is not to be hoped, with any reasonable confidence, that the efforts now being made by the Thames Angling Preservation Society to convert the Thames once more into a salmon river will be successful; and any one who makes personal acquaintance with the source of the Thames, and marks the character of the contributory streams, will be prudent in entertaining a doubt as to whether there are now breeding-grounds suitable, even if fish could be induced once more to run up through the filth of the Pool from the sea. The alleged scarcity of Thames trout is very often put down to the excessive disturbance caused by steam-launches, and the traffic by pleasure-boats upon all the reaches of the Thames, from Teddington Lock to Oxford. It is somewhat strange, therefore, that the higher you ascend the Thames the fewer become the Thames trout. There are a few large fish in most of the deep wide pieces that were once weir-pools, or that still may be so, between Lechlade and Oxford; but the water is too sluggish to encourage them much, and trout, with the exception of truants from Lech, Coin, or Windrush, are, therefore, few and far between. Pike, on the other hand, are more numerous, if not of so large an average size as those caught lower down. The Thames, from the start, abounds in chub, bleak, barbel, gudgeon, roach, dace, and perch; bream, carp, and tench are partial in their haunts. But the river above Oxford is not so accessible as the great body of modern anglers would require, and hence it comes to pass that these remote waters are little visited except by the local disciples of Isaac Walton. The weeds are, after a fashion, annually cut by the Thames Conservancy where their growth would be a serious hindrance, but otherwise they are not kept down, save by the uncertain operations of winter frosts and floods. The right of fishing is generally, above Oxford, claimed by the riparian proprietors, or their tenants.

THE THAMES FROM LECHLADE TO OXFORD.

Soon after putting Bablock Hythe in our wake, the flat country, varied by only occasional uplands, which had been the rule since leaving Lechlade, is exchanged for a bolder type of scenery, as, for example, the fine wooded eminence rising before us. This is Witham, of which we shall see a good deal, now from one point, and now from another, as we near the City of Learning. It requires no guide or guide-book to inform us that from the summit a widespread view is obtained of the valley of the Thames. Hitherto we have looked in vain for the typical eyot. With the exception of one small islet below Hart’s Number Two, or Langley Weir, there has been nothing in the shape of an island until we arrive at Hagley Pool, where the first solitary island appears. The picture from here is exceptionally interesting. A rustic bridge spans a backwater trending towards Witham Mill, and in the direction of Oxford. The thickset woods stand out in prominent relief, and another farmhouse of the higher class, surrounded by ricks, appears to the left. Hagley Pool, which is merely a lake-like widening of the water at the bend, is covered with the yellow water-lilies. Three miles from Eynsham we are at Godstow Bridge. The spire of Cassington Church, a conspicuous landmark on the left hand throughout, is a pleasanter object by far than the tall chimneys on the right, which are not redeemed by the rows of poplars that would fain hide them. It is unfortunate, but true, that the first glimpses we get of the spires of Oxford are in conjunction with the tall red-brick chimney and not elegant University paper-mills. While following the bend at the broad part of the river the public buildings of beautiful Oxford open one by one into view, but again disappear temporarily at the next bend, at the head of which stands King’s Weir. This serves as much the purposes of a lock as a weir, its gates opening when necessary to admit the passage of larger craft than those which can be conveyed over the rollers supplied for pleasure-boats. The river from the pool for some distance is almost choked with weeds, very narrow, and of hardly sufficient depth at low water to admit the passage of an ordinary pleasure-boat.

Godstow at once suggests the story, often told and always interesting, of fair Rosamond. The lady gives a flavour also to Woodstock, some eight miles distant. The wrongs and the rights of Mistress Rosamond will never in this world be accurately known, but that she was poisoned by jealous Queen Eleanor at Woodstock, and that she was the mistress of Queen Eleanor’s husband, Henry II., are facts which no one dare deny. According to Lord Lyttleton, Henry II. met the frail daughter of Walter, Lord Clifford at Godstow, in 1149, on his return from Carlisle, the lady being at the time, in accordance with the custom of the age, placed amongst the nuns to be educated. The nunnery is still known by the ivy-clad walls which remain on its site. It was a nunnery of the Benedictines, consecrated in the presence of King Stephen and his Queen in the year 1138. The nunnery was dispossessed, and has crumbled to ruins, but the brave river passes by even as in the olden times before Henry VIII., the spoiler, gave the house to his physician, Dr. George Owen. There was another nunnery at the foot of Witham Hill, but that was an older establishment, which existed as early as 690, on the spot where the Earls of Abingdon have their seat, partly built, it is understood, by the stones of Godstow, even as the modern buildings at Stanton Harcourt are supposed to have been erected from the stones with which the original mansion was constructed. The ruins of Godstow Nunnery, such as they are, catch one’s eye first from the river. It may be that the pathetic romance touching the silken thread and the bowl of poison is not, as many hold, founded upon fact; but we cannot be equally sceptical with regard to Rosamond’s connection with Godstow. She retired to the nunnery to pass the remainder of her days, after the marriage of the king, in seclusion. She died, and was buried in the choir, opposite the high altar, and Henry raised a grand monument to her memory. The nuns forgot the frailty of the lady, remembering rather the manner in which she had enriched the establishment, and the tokens of favour they had received from the king on her account; and we read that her remains were treated with much honour by the sisters, who hung a pall of silk over her tomb, and set it about with lighted tapers. This chronic honour was put an end to by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, who, going to the nunnery and requesting to know why one particular tomb should be so much honoured, was informed that it was the tomb of Rosamond, sometime leman to Henry II. In order that the nuns might not be led astray by having her example constantly set before them, and that other women might beware, poor Rosamond’s bones were cast out of the church; but they were brought back again by the nuns, and wrapped in perfumed leather.

The farther arch of the old bridge at Godstow has been removed to admit of various improvements being carried out in one branch of the stream, which here divides, and in order to widen the structure; but the two arches of the ascent from the right-hand side remain as they were, and the well-known “Trout” Inn at Godstow retains all its characteristics of creepers, flowers, tiled roof, and pleasant waterside seats. A full view of Oxford, set back beyond the farthest confines of Port Meadow is obtained, while the smell of the roses in the pretty garden of the time-honoured “Trout” Inn still lingers about us. The village of Wolvercott lies to the left, and at the other end of the mill-stream, the entrance to which was noticed just above the King’s Weir. Close by the ivy-covered gable of the nunnery a new weir is being erected, and it may be added that in the excavations incidental to the work four old stone coffins were discovered in the summer of 1885.

Passing by the village of Binsey, where in 730 there was a chapel constructed with dark room for the most stubborn sort of sisters, and where the saints caused St. Margaret’s Well to be opened, in order that people coming there to ease their burdened souls might be rid of their diseases, one feels that the first stage of a voyage down the Thames is pleasantly terminated by the noble array of pinnacles, towers, and spires across Port Meadow, presented as a free common to the city by William the Conqueror, and so to this day preserved. The towers and spires have an imposing effect, with Shotover Hill behind. The most prominent objects are St. Philip’s and St. James’s Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Observatory, the Radcliff, the Sheldonian, St. Mary’s, All Saints’, Tom Tower and the Cathedral, and, nestling down among the trees, the square grey tower of Oxford Castle. To the right is the “Perch” Inn at Binsey, and as you pass this Binsey Common opens out in the same direction, and there are once more the wooded slopes of the Witham Hills, which we have had in view for the last eight miles. The River Thames round Port Meadow is more disgracefully weedy and neglected than any other portion of its course. Beyond Binsey is Medley Manor House, at one time an oratory attached to Godstow, a place where any of the devotees, in case they were detained from the city or on their journey to Abingdon, could rest for the night, without going on to the nunnery. The flocks of geese in hundreds, just now giving the signal of rain, on the edge of Port Meadow, opposite Binsey Common, may still lead us to think that we are in the rural parts described on previous pages; but down yonder, on the other side of the cut leading to Medley Weir, are a fleet of ugly house-boats. There is also a semicircular iron bridge across the cut, and we are brought face to face with the fact that the next mile and a half of river will be essentially townified and crowded.

The division of the river at Medley leaves the business of practical navigation to the straight cut, and the original Thames, once flowing by the site of Bewley Abbey, will probably be soon choked out of existence. In succession now follow in a prosy catalogue Medley Weir, the Four Streams, the Railway, the Canal, Seven Bridges Road, and Osney Loch and Mill. A hoary gateway and fragment of wall, with its Perpendicular window absorbed in the mill fabric, are all that remain of Osney Abbey, the powerful and magnificent, whose abbots were peers of Parliament. One hastens under the railway bridge, and looks aside from the gasworks, knowing that beyond Folly Bridge a new phase of Thames life will begin for the intelligent voyager.

W. SENIOR.

THE BARGES.

[CHAPTER II.]

OXFORD TO ABINGDON.

Oxford, from the Upper River; the New Town—The Courses of the River, from Medley Weir to Folly Bridge—The Houses of the Regulars and Friars—The University and Parish Churches—The Halls and Colleges of the Seculars, from the Thirteenth Century to the Reformation—Jacobean Oxford—Classic Oxford—Convenient Oxford—The Architectural Revival—The Undergraduate Revival—The River below Folly Bridge, and the Invention of Rowing—The Navigation Shape of the River—Floods—The Barges—Iffley—Littlemore—Kennington—Radley—Sandford—Nuneham.

THE traveller down stream, who looks for Oxford across the flats of Port Meadow, is aware of a large town, dusky red in colour, skirted by a canal and a railway, and dominated by the slim brick bell-tower of a church, one of the pangs of the architectural renaissance. There, beyond the dingy quarter called Jericho, one may stray through many streets of villas in the Middle Victorian taste, by flower-beds gay with the geranium and calceolaria. Little is wanting that would be found in St. John’s Wood or West Kensington. For this is, in late after-growth, that town of Oxford that meant to be like London, and was like London, before the University came to interfere. It had its Norman castle, its Gild Merchant, its charter, as good as those of London. It was a place where Parliaments met. It had a palace of the kings, and a rich Jewry, and a great mind to trade. But the University sprang up and choked these things. London never had a real University, but only colleges for students of Common Law, and so flourished. In Oxford the town went under, and the University was everything. The “nations” came, and after long war reduced the natives to servitude. But the wheel has turned. The down-trodden race is quickly hiding the University with its new towns of houses and churches, and the very University has lost the monastic rule that allowed its members to camp as an alien garrison in the place. Now they are surely being wrought into the fabric of the town.

For the University there exist two rivers; one, The River, below Folly Bridge, the other, The Upper River, above Medley Weir. Between the two there is not one stream, but many. The river goes out of itself and returns into itself again. And in this division it suffers various fortunes. It goes far afield and grows forget-me-nots. It turns mill-wheels, and is a servant of breweries. It is locked and sluiced for the passage of barges. It is constrained and laid away in low and discouraged quarters, where it keeps company with people out of repair, with philanthropic enterprises, with aimless smells, with exhausted dust, with retired hansom cabs. It is beguiled into obscure cuts for bathing. It is imprisoned under streets. And when it comes to itself again it is not allowed to have its name, but is called by the vain sound of Isis.

The two main branches of the stream enclose a space rather over a mile in length, and roughly of the shape of a slim ewer, with a handle broken off near the top, that is at Medley Weir. There is a minor junction of the streams by a cut across the narrowed neck of the ewer opposite Worcester Garden. The upper of the two islands thus formed is given up to meadows and the two railway lines. The lower island, Osney, holds the two railway stations, and the continuation southwards of the Great Western. South of the stations, and at right angles to the railway, the Seven Bridges Road runs out towards Botley. South of this again St. Thomas’s Church lies east, and St. Mary’s Cemetery and Osney Mill west of the railway havoc. The rest is meadow and garden land, scored with the streets of old and new settlements, and cracked by lesser dykes and courses of the stream.

The eastern branch, after defining the upper rim of the ewer, turns sharp southwards, and, keeping company with the canal, skirts red Oxford and Worcester Gardens. It is here that its interest begins. A little way above the first, or Hythe Bridge, a fresh division takes place, and a narrow irregular strip of low island is formed, running under three bridges to the Castle Mill, and below that occupied by breweries for some hundred yards. Now it is only on the upper stretch of this island down to the Castle Mill that any attempt is made by the town to come to public and pleasant terms with its river. The attempt is a shy one. The treatment is on a humbler scale than that of the River Witham at Lincoln. The Fishers Row of low houses—some new, some old, and one or two remarkable—straggles along a narrow quay, arched over by the bridges. In the doubled stream, where it fronts the houses, fleets of old punts lie moored to their poles among the choking weeds; not the varnished toys of the Cherwell, but the craft native to these shallow standing waters, as the gondola to the lagoons of Venice. At the back of the houses, their gardens abutting upon it in all variety of confusion and decay, moves a furtive and even feebler stream. There is a wealth of matter here for the artist to rescue from its odours; grey walls that have seen better days and other uses, bricks rough-cast and timber, willow leaves and fluttering clothes, the most old and various dirt. All this is only to be won by glimpses from the bridges, or from the hospitality of back pigsties and the like; and it is only just to add that the tenants of this picturesque quarter—people, pigs, and ducks—show to the curious visitor an unvarying courtesy. The best bit was till lately to be seen from Pacey’s Bridge, the second in order down stream. Just there a house is bracketed out over the water, with windows disposed in graceful bays. But the jealousy that keeps the stream secret has shut away that last easy view, on the one side with a shop astride the water, on the other with a mere wilful screen. Hythe Bridge is a poor new thing; Pacey’s Bridge is defaced with a new top. The next bridge brings us to the Castle and the Castle Mill, the very heart of the old town; the Castle older than the University, the Mill of older foundation than the Castle. Then follow breweries, not without charm, but reticent about the river. Just below the Swan Brewery the streams come together again at a point marked by a summer-house; but it is only for a fresh separation. From a garden in Chapel Place may be seen the point of division; but one branch is now built over. Its name is the Trill Mill Stream, and it runs behind Paradise Square, and round by way of Rose Place, across St. Aldate’s. Then it comes to light again behind the houses, and skirts Christ Church Meadows, to join the river near Folly Bridge. The other branch takes a stealthy course round the low quarter between Paradise Square and the gasworks. They are least ashamed of it in Abbey Place. From that point onward it shows at the end of poor little streets, with meadows and willows beyond. From one of these—Blackfriars Road—a bridge crosses to the bathing-cut, which rounds the base of our ewer, and leads into the navigation stream. At the tail of an island formed by the cut the navigation stream itself comes in, and the united water bends round the gasworks, and so to Folly Bridge, past some broken little gardens and backs of houses in Thames Street. Folly Bridge is as poor as the other Thames bridges in Oxford. It replaces the old Norman Grand Pont with its forty arches, and Friar Bacon’s Study over the further end. A top storey added to the “Study” was the “Folly.” There is another now almost in the same spot, built by a money-lender.

OXFORD, FROM HEADINGTON HILL.

Of the navigation stream in its course from Medley Weir there is less to say. At the neck of the ewer, at the point called Four Streams, it goes so far as to form a regular cross. One of the arms is the cut already mentioned running towards Worcester. The opposite arm is known as the Old Navigation Stream, and runs out in a great loop under the Binsey Road and the Seven Bridges Road at New Botley, and back to the present navigation stream at the base of the ewer. A smaller concentric loop leaves the stream at the first bridge beyond the station, throws off a branch to join the outer loop at the Binsey Road bridge, and returns at Osney Mill. Here, just by the mill, there is a lock on the navigation stream. The island formed by the mill-stream and the lock runs down a hundred yards or so, and on the face of the island, made by the loop above, there is a meaner repetition of the Fishers Row. It may clear the maze a little to think of the two mills and islands, and quays balancing on opposite sides of the ewer.

But this is not all. We have still to account for a stream that left the Thames at Hagley Pool, above Godstow. From that point it describes a yet wider loop, passing first by Witham, then under the Seven Bridges Road at Botley, and on by the two Hinkseys. At Clasper’s Boathouse under the Long Bridges it is reinforced by a fresh offset from the main stream, and does not return again till just above Rose Island by Kennington. The old men on the river have been heard to say that this branch from Clasper’s to Kennington used to be the main stream for barges, and it is quite possible, for the Long Bridges and new towpath only date from the end of last century. The Hinksey Stream is not navigable throughout, because of two mills on its lower reaches. The low Cumnor Heights behind make a limit to the wandering and division of the water; but the whole flat between this boundary on the west and that of the Oxford Canal on the east is an amphibious country, now lake, now labyrinth.

It will have been observed how little the obscure region of the river we have traversed has to do with the University of our time. One is invited to think how the river of Oxford has come to be treated so; why the colleges shun it and give it over to railways and slums. And again, if one regards the college quarter with any attention, one is forced to ask by what steps the plan of building and habit of life we know as a college came to be as it is out of the old Benedictine conventual schools. What were the links of building between St. Frideswide’s and Merton, and what has become of them?

The answer to the first question, and partly to the second, is that a more magnificent and more richly significant Oxford than the present once occupied the isle of Osney and the river quarter now so degraded;[1] but all that proper fortune of the river, all that beauty and history, has been incredibly blotted out, leaving only its first and last links in St. Frideswide’s and Worcester, together with a few names and inconsiderable fragments. The buildings of Oxford are a story whose mutilated preface is followed by a great gap where the opening chapters should be. A line here and there marks the interval, and when the tale is taken up again it is abruptly and in a changed temper. Quickly it runs to a fluent mannerism that makes a great bulk of the text. Then it proceeds in a classical version till the time when our own century began to spell and imitate the archaic forms.

The town before the University is better represented than the following period by its castle and parish churches. The ancient St. Frideswide’s remains as Christ Church. But greater churches than St. Frideswide’s, one of them, that of the Franciscans, twice as long, have been taken clean away, and not a stone remains to stand for the Dominican and Franciscan houses that moulded the early University. We must give a little space to this, and to another missing chapter, and then briefly read the rest of the story.

When the two great mendicant orders arrived early in the thirteenth century, there was already, besides the old foundation of St. Frideswide, at that time a house of Austin canons, the great monastic foundation of Osney, dating from early Norman times. In its church, over the tomb of the foundress Edith, English wife of the second lord of the Castle, was painted a tree full of chattering pies, whose voice assailed her in her walks. Her confessor knew them for souls in Purgatory, and the canons were installed to pray for them. By the time the friars came to Oxford the chattering souls were perhaps as much thought of as are the souls of those killed in the French wars of the fifteenth century by the Fellows of All Souls College now. At the Dissolution the great Abbey Church had a chance of safety. For a short time it was the cathedral church of the new diocese of Oxford. But that fortune passed to St. Frideswide’s, and no one translated Osney Abbey into a college. All that is left of it now is an archway and part of a barn among the buildings of the Mill.

The two great orders of friars settled finally near one another on opposite sides of the Trill Mill Stream. The Dominicans were first in the field, and for a time encamped near the schools and the Jewry, with designs on both. They built a hospital for converted Jews, which afterwards was used as the Town Hall, and it is on record that at one time they had two Jews in the Domus Conversorum, but one of them, an acolyte, afterwards suffered a relapse. Soon, however, the friars migrated to the damp riverside, as a place more favourable to rheumatism and ague, just as in London they went from Holborn to Blackfriars. It was the happiest fact that the mendicant orders coming to towns in their young and ascetic days settled in outcast and uninviting quarters, and covered them, as they grew in riches, with pleasant gardens and splendid buildings. But the Black Friars of Oxford, like those of London, are only remembered now by names of streets, and of that bend of the river by the gasworks still known as Preachers’ Pool.

The Grey Friars are even more completely gone. The Paradise given them by a pious lady has given its name to a square, but the groves and buildings of the Minorites have not even left a name to the streets that have replaced them. There must be many of the friars still below ground in their coffins; in the courtyards behind the dismal streets there are glimpses of provoking walls, but with no speaking stones; and in the wall that divides the garden of Trinity from Parks Street lie many old stones incognito, brought from the quarry of the Friars Preachers and the Friars Minor.

The White Friars, or Carmelites, had no better fate. Edward II., flying from Bannockburn with his Carmelite confessor, vowed a house to Our Lady of the White Friars if he should cross the Border in safety. To redeem the vow he gave over his palace of Beaumont to the Carmelites. Beaumont Street runs through the site. Some of the stones are in Laud’s new quad at St. John’s.

Of another great house a small witness remains. Above Hythe Bridge, the way by Fishers Row is continued from the tip of the eyot across a little bridge, and thence runs for a space alongside an ancient wall. This was a boundary wall of Rewley Abbey, the great house of the order of Citeaux. Almost covered by the wood stores of a wheelwright is a doorway with carved spandrils, and a label ending in sculptured heads. The wheelwrights, whose sheds lean against the old wall, show a wooden peak, the last vestige of a “summer-house” lately pulled down. Only the other day they came upon a well in the garden behind. The London and North-Western Station occupies the site of the chief buildings. Before it was put up the remains were considerable. Rewley and Osney Abbeys between them accounted for most of the Osney island.

But the most speaking memorial of this lost University is that side of Worcester that still remains of old Gloucester Hall. Benedictine novices, from the many houses of the order scattered over England, were numerous among the early students of Oxford. The Benedictines were rich, and there were few University endowments. Gloucester Hall was the house founded in 1283 for those of the novices who came from Gloucester Abbey. Then other Benedictine abbeys had houses built alongside the first for their own students, till twenty-five abbeys were represented. Others in the same way sent their men to Buckingham College, Cambridge. Over the doorways of the halls still standing at Worcester may be seen the escutcheons of their several abbeys; the griffin of Malmesbury, the cross of Norwich.

The house of the fourth great mendicant order, the Austin Friars, has disappeared as completely as the other three. On its site, in the reign of James I., Wadham College was built, but the phrase “doing Austins” long survived as a memory of the University exercises that took place in the Austin Schools.

The friars of the Order of the Redemption of Captives have left as little sign. Their property is part of the garden of New College.

But some of the houses of the Regular Orders, besides Gloucester Hall, remain in a translation. The College of the Novices from the Convent of Durham is the old part of Trinity. St. Mary’s College of the Regular Canons has left a gateway opposite New Inn Hall, and the latest-founded of the religious houses, that of St. Bernard for the Cistercians, still shows in the street with some changes as the front of St. John’s.

NEW COLLEGE, FROM THE GARDENS.

We have to think, then, of the Oxford of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as chiefly made up of the schools of the Regular and Mendicant Orders, afterwards suppressed. The Colleges of the third class, the Secular Clergy, were only beginning; the prevailing influence was that of the Dominican and Franciscan teachers, particularly the latter, with their Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus and Occam, to set off against the Aquinas and Albertus of the Parisian Dominicans. At the time of the Dissolution the numbers and spirit of the various religious houses had run very low. However, they made a push to extend their buildings, hoping so to ensure their wealth against the Royal Commission, just as the Colleges did in our own time. But Henry VIII. seems, in most cases, to have made for the lead from the roofs of the buildings as his own share of the spoil, and the later additions with their flat lead roofing would just meet his taste. The walls he sold or gave to others, who used them chiefly as quarries. A letter quoted by Mr. Fletcher, written to Thomas Cromwell by one of his agents, gives a good notion of the look of things at the time, and of the spirit of the reformers:-“The Black Fryers bathe in ther backsyde lykwise dyvers Ilonds well woddyd and conteyneth in lengith a great ground. There quere wasse lately new byldede and covered with ledde. It ys lykewisse a bigge Howse, and all coveryd with slatt, saving the queere. They have prety store of plate and juellys, and specially there ys a gudd chales of golde sett with stonys, and ys better than a C marks: and there ys also a gudd crosse with other things conteynyd in the bill. Ther ornaments be olde and of small valor. They have a very fayer Cundytt and ronnyth fresshelye. Ther be butt X. Fryers, being Prests besid the Anker, which is a well-disposyd man, and have 1. marks yerly of the King’s cofers.”

Now we turn to the reaction against all this; to the quarter of the University that remains, the quarter of the old town parishes in which the Halls and Colleges of the secular clergy grew.

And first we feel the Gothic pattern of the streets. We have left the water behind, but the streams had to do in determining the flow of the “stream-like” streets. They kept the forms they were pressed into by the castle and city walls; St. Giles’s bursting out wide from the point where the old north gate cramped it by St. Michael’s; Broad Street broad because just outside the circuit; the rest winding and twisting with the happiest effects for the jostling buildings.

ST. MARY’S, FROM THE HIGH STREET.

Then when we look closer at this large mass of Gothic work, of great establishments squeezed into the old shapes, and elbowing scanty strips and corners of the displaced houses, the notable point about most of the work is, not how old, but how new it is. The Gothic is late, even belated. Little of it is earlier than the Perpendicular Period; much of it is more recent still, and of a kind to which purists grudge even the name of Gothic. It is true that in Oxford buildings, when made of local stone not cunningly laid, become shabby and theatrically aged in the shortest time. They look not venerable, but battered and burned, the stone hanging in rags, and leaving where it falls raw yellow patches. Mouldings and carvings drop away; pinnacles, battlements, and gables, and all outstanding features, thaw like blackened snow; walls are suddenly found wasted and thin, the rooms and towers depending on the merest crust of stone. The heads about the Sheldonian Theatre shed their beards of a rainy night. But all this is a very sham antiquity. Some of the later buildings suffer from it most, and some of the oldest look, and are, newest because of sedulous restoration. One has to search diligently for hints of the older work, and to entrap it as it looks out of its new body in some favourable light.

It is the churches, the parish churches and the towers of St. Frideswide’s and St. Mary’s, that seem most to promise age in a distant prospect, and to strike a recurrent note of antiquity as one goes about the town. The old Town Church of St. Martin at Carfax, with its picturesque altered gables and clock and “penniless bench,” is much wanted; but it was pulled down inconsiderately and rebuilt in haste. But St. Peter’s, St. Michael’s, St. Mary Magdalen’s, and St. Giles’s, are rich in beauty and interest. The lovely spire of St. Mary’s, panelled with pomegranates for Queen Eleanor, stands almost alone of the old University Church. There is, indeed, on the north of the chancel, and set at a divergent angle, a yet older building—the two-storeyed Ancient House of Congregation. Its two storeys simulate on the outer side the appearance of one to conform with the new church, but the groined roof remains of the lower room, now half-buried and given to lumber. This and the old church were the real centre of the University. In the five chapels the regents of the five faculties assembled for the Act at which disputations were held and degrees given. Not only the Schools and Theatre and Convocation House, but the University Library, too, hived off from these buildings. The first books were kept in chests in the “soler,” or upper room, and there, too, those other chests were stored that were the earliest form of University endowment. In them the money left by benefactors was kept, and lent out to poor students, who in return pawned books and daggers and other articles of value.

The colleges began as a counterpoise to the schools of the regular and mendicant orders, more particularly the latter. The friars, learned and powerful, naturally drew to them great numbers of the poor unattached scholars. Statutes ineffectually made eighteen years the lowest age of consent. The University had a hard fight to keep even its degrees in its own hands. This third great body of scholars, unattached to monks or friars, consisted of the ordinary or secular clergy, men qualifying not merely for the work of parish priests, but for what are now the lay professions of lawyer and doctor. They had a bad time of it while the friars were still popular. They had few endowments, and were forced to labour for a living, or to beg their way. It was common for poor scholars to serve as scouts. They lived either in private lodgings or in the numerous private Halls, Inns, or Hostels that covered the sites of the present colleges. Those are the second obliterated chapter among university buildings. They were simply lodging-houses, rented from the owner by a Master of Arts, who was styled Principal. By an early statute, that marks the encroachment of the University on the town, the owner of the hall was bound to let it to the first applicant who deposited the needful caution with the Vice-Chancellor. The Principal was paid by the inmates for board and tuition. The first colleges were such halls, furnished with an endowment for poor scholars, and with a set of statutes to regulate its administration. At first the scholars went to service at the nearest parish church; but gradually, as funds allowed, chapel and hall and library were built, and the familiar front with its gate-tower screened the old and new buildings. The full-grown College, as it had taken shape before the times of the Reformation and rich lay undergraduates, was a society incorporated for the benefit of poor scholars of the secular order. Its buildings replaced the single Hall or group of Halls that had been converted from private to corporate use, or else the old tenements were recast in the new mould. That new mould followed with modifications the plan of the monastic houses.

Some of these Halls still remain. But the form of university life they represented, and to a great extent the buildings themselves, have gone as completely as the Oxford of the Religious. The colleges swallowed most of them. New College accounts for ten, Merton for eight. From old prints one can gain a notion of the splendid jumble of gables and chimneys of all degrees of dignity that enriched the streets; and one is tempted to regret that some of the colleges gave up the picturesque grouping and domestic style of the clustered halls for the more monotonous and pretentious manner of their latter shape. As Henry suppressed the religious houses, so Laud suppressed the private halls, leaving five only as academic halls. Of these, one—Magdalen Hall—has left its beautiful bell-tower to Magdalen College, and its second site to Hertford. Of the rest, three are now absorbed in colleges.

MAGDALEN TOWER, FROM THE CHERWELL.

The great date in college history is 1264, when Walter de Merton gave statutes to the college he had founded. University Hall, afterwards University College, had already been founded from a legacy administered by the University. But in Merton the idea of a great college was first clearly struck out, and its statutes were an exemplar for all succeeding societies both at Oxford and Cambridge. Merton, however was not built in one heat. The old quad and parts of the chapel are early work, but the tower and other parts are later. The chapel is so large, because it is not only chapel to the college, but church to the parish of St. John, a great part of which the college absorbs. The library is one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most ancient rooms in Oxford.

STONE PULPIT, MAGDALEN.

Balliol and Exeter, Oriel and Queen’s, are also early colleges, but they do not stand for so much historically. They group with Merton, and have all changed their first bodily shape. The next great moment in the college history, the beginning of a new group, comes about a hundred years after Merton. This was the foundation of the College of St. Mary Winton—called New from a sense of the importance of the event—by William Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. Several things are important about this great creation. To begin with, the foundation was of a new magnificence. It provided for seventy scholars, a term at that time synonymous with fellows. There was a stronger accent about it of opposition to the regular clergy. Its lands were bought from impoverished monastic bodies. It was made self-sufficient by its nursery and counterpart in architecture, the College of St. Mary at Winchester. It was saved from the jurisdiction of the University by the power granted it of giving degrees, and from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese Oxford then lay, by the appointment of the Bishop of Winchester as its Visitor. But above all, not only was the plan of its institution a great educational achievement, but the building itself was by the same author, the work of a man of genius, coherent and complete. The quadrangle has been altered out of all knowledge by the addition of the third storey with battlements, and the re-shaping of the windows, but even so it shares with the added wings of the garden front a wonderful dignity and purity. The original towers are so dominant everywhere that one reads their spirit into the encumbered translation.

The stroke told. Henry VI. echoed the idea in Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. In Oxford, the chapel and cloisters of Chichele’s All Souls’ were imitated from New College. But a richer reverberation followed. Waynflete’s Magdalen is another New more magnificent, and later by a hundred years. It is not more beautiful. Feature by feature is reproduced, with just that luxury of virtue and grace that one would expect from Mary the Magdalen walking in the footsteps of Mary the Virgin. The chapels are planned alike, and in either college set back to back with the hall. Magdalen has a cloister quad, a more spacious one; a higher and richer tower, wider and more lordly grounds. But one can turn from the baffling and haunting charm of Magdalen Tower to be satisfied with the simple fighting tower of New College; and it is dangerous to go from the blackened walls and gaunt arches, the austerely divided daylight of the cloistered walk at New College, to the coarser forms and less single purpose of the other. The older cloister is still the walk of a recluse, overlooked only by the tower and gable of the chapel, and interrupted by rare and funeral writing on the walls. The other is built in an easier temper. Staircases open upon it below, and many windows occupy it above. It is the covered thoroughfare of the College.

It should be remembered, however, that Magdalen cloisters have suffered much. They have been pulled down almost throughout and rebuilt. An upper storey has gone from the north side, ugly Westmorland slate has replaced the grey Stonesfield kind, and windows have been made bigger and more regular. Historically it is to be noted that Magdalen superseded a collegiate building of another kind, the old hospital or almshouse of St. John the Baptist. The stone pulpit in St. John’s Quad marks this. On the saint’s day a sermon used to be preached from the pulpit, and the quad was strewn with rushes and hung with boughs to represent a wilderness. At last a Principal caught his death of cold by going out into the wilderness, so they gave it up, and had the sermon in chapel instead. There was some grudging show made of keeping up the almshouse. A low vault under a chapel was given over to the poor. A report was drawn up for the year 1596 giving the following cheerful particulars:—“In sommer the resort is greater, in winter very smale, bycause of the coldnes and onwholesomenes of the vault; which is in verie deed so moyst and dampish that we have the last yeare removed the beddes into another house not far of, for that everie winter they are subject to rottennes.” However, they were going to repair the floor “as well for the safetie of our beddes as for the health and ease of the poore.”[2]

The building of the old quad of Lincoln went on by stages during this same fifteenth century, and Corpus followed early in the next. Neither of these has been rebuilt, but both have been defaced so as to lose almost all interest; but they stand for points in history. Lincoln was a college of priests, to make head against Lollardry; Corpus stood for Greek.

“TOM” GATEWAY.

Then follows the notable foundation of Wolsey’s Cardinal College, afterwards Christchurch. All Souls’ had been founded with the spoil of “alien” priories—cells, that is, of foreign monasteries in England. Magdalen had taken the place of a religious society; but the final step was taken when English religious houses were suppressed to form one great educational foundation. St. Frideswide’s was preserved to be its chapel. The huge ungainly quad was planned out and partly built. After the suppression of religious houses stone was cheap, so the building went on even after Wolsey’s fall. The Tom Tower was added much later. It is one of Wren’s essays in Gothic, masterful and striking in general design, but unfeeling in detail. The fan-vaulted roof of the hall staircase is a lovely piece of later work, but the staircase itself is badly managed. The cathedral is a rather disconcerted building; but there is plenty in it to study and enjoy. The story of the saint may be read in a window by Mr. Burne Jones. Other four windows by the same artist were executed by Mr. Morris, with the result that in colour as well as in design they rank with the best of old workmanship, and can be compared with nothing new, except those from the same hands in other places.

If New and Magdalen stand for the enriching sunset of Gothic in Oxford, the great group of buildings that follows the Reformation stands for a strange and prolonged after-glow of the art. It is this period that more than any other belongs to Oxford, gives it a peculiar character. Nowhere else is it so largely represented. The Renaissance, coming all this way, was too weak and distressed to create forms of architecture quite its own; but it passed as a principle of change into the veins of the old style, and broke out here and there in the strangest features. The main ideas of the Gothic structure held their own—the sloping roof, the traceried window; but a languor and a fever seized upon the mouldings and details of the old work. At any moment the sedate lines of the Perpendicular tracery might run wild into twirls of trivial scroll-work, or one whole side of a building speak a sleepy Gothic and another stammer the queerest Greek. But the whole seldom fails to please, because it is ordered throughout by the most sure and delicate sense of proportion. It is the work of men whose hand is well in, whose ideas are running few and thin, but are dealt out and recombined with the utmost freedom and familiarity. One is often blankly disappointed by the flatness, the poverty, the childishness of the decoration; but however meagre and thoughtless and alien the elements of the design may be, there never fails an artistic sense in the way they are set out, so that the most incongruous lendings of various styles meet and are subdued to perfect comfort in one another’s company. Perhaps the salt that saves the whole is the sense of humour that pervades it, just as it does the rich enjoyed sentences of the contemporary literature. The buildings do not expect to be taken quite seriously; the figures on the tombs are very much at play with death. Sometimes, indeed, the windows of grave buildings like the chapel of Wadham stiffen out into the older and more decorous manner; but it would be hard to match for rollicking irresponsibility the porch that Laud added to St. Mary’s Church.

Colour, too, was near the heart of the builders. They revelled in gilding, in paint, in marbles and alabaster. And in the weighty matters of architecture that go beyond the mere building, in the recognition of its neighbourhood, of its place as a mass in the streets or a kindly growth among fields and trees, they were very much at home. The presence of such buildings is one of comfort, of fun, of flexible tradition and generous possibilities. The style begins at Oxford under Elizabeth, and continues under Charles; but it centres under James, and hence is conveniently called Jacobean. Not only university and college buildings belong to it, but most of the beautiful domestic work of the streets, like Archbishop King’s house off St. Aldate’s, and the house off the High, used as a police-office.

It was in a building of the Jacobean time that the University idea first found adequate expression, gathered out of the scattered lodgings in which it had been housed. Already, by 1480, a noble room had been built for the Divinity school, with the library of Duke Humphrey above it. Sir Thomas Bodley’s first act was to give this library a new roof and fittings, and to add to it at right angles the building that forms above an extension of the library, below the Proscholium or ambulatory of the schools. It was the day after his funeral, in the year 1613, that the first stone was laid of his magnificent plan for completing the quadrangle, of which the Proscholium forms one side. This quadrangle is a plan or map of the University’s theory of knowledge. As one enters under the gateway tower the scholastic sciences announce themselves in gold letters above the various doors. The faculties—the faculty of Arts with its subdivision into the Trivium and Quadrivium, the faculties of Canon and Civil Law and of Medicine lead up to the fifth and crowning faculty, the science of sciences, Divinity, lodged behind the richly-panelled front of the Proscholium. Before this, the faculty of Arts had been housed in the thirty-two schools that gave their name to Schools Street. In these the Regents, that is the young M.A.’s, the ruling and teaching body of the University, gave lectures and sat, at stated times, to determine in the disputations that preceded, as examinations do now, the B.A. degree. The public viva voce in the schools is the remnant of this formal exhibition of logical skill. The disputant went round to solicit the presence of his friends, and statutes were passed to restrain the system of touting for an audience as well as to limit the regular supper that followed. At Cambridge it was the duty of the Bedells to go round to the various colleges and halls where the questionists were, and “call or give warninge in the middest of the courte with thees words: ‘Alons, alons, goe, Mrs., goe, goe,’” and any tendency to a real viva voce was rudely checked by the same officer. “If the Father shall uppon his Chyldren’s aunswer replie and make an Argument, then the Bedel shall knocke him out”—which seems to have meant that he hammered loudly on the door.[3] The Act, or public contest of degrees, still took place in St. Mary’s, till the Sheldonian Theatre completed the new group of the schools in 1669. The new Convocation House, with the Selden Library above, had already been added in 1640 at the further end of the Divinity school. About the same time as the new schools Wadham College had been built. Complete at the outset, it is remarkable among Oxford buildings for its singleness and symmetry of design, and its skill of building or fortune of stone; it is one of the most ancient of the colleges in the sense that it is authentic.

The rebuilt University College and Oriel and the new Jesus may be grouped together. They have in common the beautiful treatment of the upper windows as a series of little gables in place of the tiresome screen of battlements. The front of Jesus is a modern disguise, the clever but unsympathetic work of Mr. Buckler. It replaces the old Elizabethan front with its gateway in the fashion of the beautiful one of St. Alban’s Hall. The Jesus gate, however, had been obscured by a heavy rusticated screen. Brasenose gained in the Jacobean Period its exquisite dormer windows; Lincoln its homely second quad and lovely chapel. Another fine example is the hall and chapel of St. Mary Hall. In Merton four of the five orders of the Schools Tower were reproduced. The chief author of all this work was a Thomas Holt of York. Among his followers were the brothers Bentley, and Acroide, Oxford builders. A greater name is associated with the new quad of St. John’s. In this Inigo Jones was mastered by the genius of the place, and constrained to build the wonderful garden front. Inside the quad he had his own way in the colonnades, but he was more in character still when he designed the Danvers Gateway of the new Physic Garden, and plotted its wall and walks. Here, at last, in a quiet corner of the place, where science was beginning in a gentle way to stir, the English Gothic tradition of building was fairly broken, and the key struck of the manner that in the end of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century gave Oxford its sturdy and picturesque English Classic. Soon after, the troubled times of the Civil War, the rather farcical, but disastrous siege of Oxford, “leaving no face of a University,” and the subsequent spoiling of the colleges by the Puritans, must have served very effectually to snap the chain of building tradition, and make a blank for the new ideas.

THE DOME OF THE RADCLIFFE, FROM BRASENOSE.

When the strange holiday time was over, and the University was in a frame for building again, the period of Wren and of his school began. The Chapel of Brasenose, built under the Commonwealth, marks the point when the relations of the mixed styles were becoming too strained. The Sheldonian Theatre announces the rupture. It is in Wren’s happiest manner. There is no building where the audience is more artfully disposed so as itself to be a great part of the architecture. This was followed by various buildings of the school of Wren. He revised Bathurst’s design for Trinity Chapel, though he clearly thought it a bad job, and he is said to have had a hand in Hawksmoor’s work at Queen’s and All Souls. Certainly the robust screen and gateway of the Queen’s front are not unworthy of him. Aldrich’s All Saints’ Church and Peckwater Quad at Christ Church belong to the early eighteenth century. The last great building in this manner is Gibbs’s Radcliffe Library. It gives the University a comfortable centre as only a dome can, and counts for quite half in any distant view of Oxford buildings.

The rest of the eighteenth century has nothing very notable to show. Hawksmoor, in his nightmare buildings at All Souls’, had proved how dead Gothic was. A good deal of Classic went up, the work of academic amateurs, dabbling in Vitruvius and Palladio. But one holds one’s breath till the period is well over. Dilettanti among the dons travelled to Italy and came back terribly ashamed of their barbarous Oxford. It is a matter for thankful wonder that all the old buildings were not replaced by Palladian colleges. The clean sweep of old Queen’s and of the mass of buildings that made way for the Radcliffe, must have tempted many a common room. Hawksmoor actually prepared a design for a brand-new Classic Brasenose, with four domes and a High Street front. Magdalen had the narrowest escape. A Mr. Holdsworth, a Fellow of the College, “an amiable man and a good scholar,” returned from a sojourn in Rome full of enlightenment. His first scheme was to pull down the whole building, tower and all; but he had to give up the tower chapel and hall, and content himself with the destruction of the cloister quad. However, he began his scheme with the New Buildings on unoccupied ground, and somehow it was not carried further; so the great new quad, with its three colonnades, remained on paper.

But in 1771 the University set itself to a wider change. The rough unpaved streets in which the buildings were rooted like trees, the island markets that blocked the traffic, the narrow rambling bridges, and above all, the North Gate or Bocardo by St. Michael’s, and the East Gate above Magdalen, hurt the best feelings of dons dreaming of vistas and piazzas. The place, besides, was no doubt very dark and dirty. An Act of Parliament was obtained for cleaning, lighting, and paving the town, removing gates and other obstructions, building markets, and repairing or rebuilding Magdalen Bridge. So Oxford became convenient and lost half its pictorial effect. The old bridge over the Cherwell at Magdalen was everything that a good bridge can be without being convenient. It had a chequered course of six hundred feet over land and water, leaping the water in a series of arches of different height and width just as was necessary; occupied by houses and shops where it crossed the land; and throwing out, at irregular intervals, angular bays of varying width and projection. But in some places it was as narrow as thirteen feet, some of the arches were ruinous, and the city and county were responsible for the repair of different parts, which they both appear to have left alone. So it had to come down. The new bridge, as well as the market and other changes, was the work of an engineer named Gwyn. His bridge kept something of the old picturesqueness, though in a formal way. It had the same places to go over; a circular bay in the centre stood for the old angles; and the lines at either end swept out in graceful curves. But people were very angry because it was so narrow and high. The roadway was afterwards heightened to reduce the pitch of the bridge, the parapet was lowered, and in our own time the width has been doubled for the convenience of trams. Old St. Clement’s Church, too, has gone from the road on the further side, and has been rebuilt in another place and manner in full view of every one who crosses the bridge.

Many of the old houses had been shorn away in the process of widening the streets; but some people were not satisfied. The old Gothic buildings had begun to command a certain zeal without knowledge; but people disliked the Gothic pattern of the streets, and the irregular patches of domestic buildings. They wanted to have things cleaned up, and made regular; to have “views;” to see the great buildings in solitary distance with no interference from house-roofs or trees, a thing that very few buildings in the world can stand. An interesting evidence of this state of mind is a little book by a certain rector of Lincoln, Dr. Tatham. It was he who defaced the old quad of his college with stupid battlements and other changes. He is remembered by Mr. Cox as an old gentleman, who lived out of Oxford, but might be seen landing his pigs in the market-place on Saturdays, and who, in defence of the faith and the Three Witnesses, in the University pulpit, wished all the “Jarmans” at the bottom of the “Jarman” Ocean. The book is called “Oxonia Explicata et Ornata: Proposals for Disengaging and Beautifying the University and City of Oxford.” The buildings of Oxford, he thought, were “too crowded and engaged. Our forefathers seem to have consulted petty convenience and monastic reclusiveness, while they neglected that uniformity of Design which is indispensable to elegance, and that grandeur of Approach which adds half the delight. If the Colleges and Public Edifices of this place were drawn apart from each other, and dispersed through the extent of a thousand acres, so that each might enjoy the situation a man of genius would approve, we might boast,” &c. He prefixes to the book a little design of his own for a martyr’s memorial, “a triumphant monument to be placed across Broad Street, the whole so airy as very little to obstruct the view of the buildings.” Of this design one may say that it would have been much more interesting than the Eleanor Cross of Sir Gilbert Scott.

THE ’VARSITY BARGE.

This cross of Scott’s was one of the first new works at Oxford of the Gothic revival. Wyatt and others had already worked at what they called restoration, and Pugin’s gateway, lately removed, had been set up at Magdalen the year before. Oxford has suffered its full share of buildings that were the costly grammatical exercises of men learning a dead tongue. In architecture such exercises are more expensive and obtrusive than in any other art, and it will be long perhaps before people will have the courage and sacrifice to pull them down again. Some are merely learned and lifeless, like Buckler’s Magdalen School and Jesus, and Scott’s Chapel of Exeter. Others are hopeless, sullen blocks, like Scott’s extensions of Exeter and New College, and Butterfield’s new buildings at Merton. Others are fancifully bad, like the conscientious ugliness of the Museum, and the recherché ugliness of Balliol, and the mixture of both in the Meadow Buildings of Christ Church. Butterfield in Balliol Chapel and Keble College shows a great power of geometrical invention in form and colour, an invention for the most part greatly astray. It is refreshing among all this to come upon the strong, though wayward artistic temperament of Burges in the decoration of the hall and chapel of Worcester, or even the respectable classic Taylorian buildings of Cockerell, unpleasant in colour and jarring on the spirit of the place as they are.

Very different work has been done of late years. There is less about it of defiant expression of undesirable artistic personality, or pedantic exhibition of a style—more recognition of the power of the place, more actual artistic instinct. Even the much abused Indian Institute of Champneys, in spite of the heavy frivolity of its details and interior, is, in the disposition of the wall and window space, the invention of its tower, and the way the whole building takes its place in the picture, a piece of architecture, which such things as Balliol are not. The space of blank wall on its corner tower is worth more than all the geometrical troubles that fret the face of Keble. At Magdalen, again, the genius of the old buildings has been lovingly reproduced by Mr. Bodley in the new. His tower is not good, and it was carrying faithfulness too far to reproduce the stupid gargoyles and grotesques of the original; but much of the rich decoration in wood and stone is refined in design and workmanship. One can praise, too, the extension of St. John’s. It may be said of all the new Oxford buildings that they are apt to be heavy within, owing a good deal to the fear of fire that makes all the staircases of stone.