Oldalképek
PDF
ePub
[graphic]

The vale of Evesham from Hidcote Boyce, near Ebrington.

214

UPPER QUINTON

CHAP.

stand that another volume of this series is to be devoted to it. At Ilmington I was in Warwickshire; here I am again in Gloucestershire. But sundry ancient, half-timbered cottages remind me that I have trespassed beyond the limits of the Cotswold, and have penetrated into a typical village of the vale. Facing the village green is a comfortable old inn known as the "College Arms." Wherever any college has large estates, you may be sure that there it is the college par excellence; the others, if they exist at all, are not worth counting. At Quinton the college is Magdalen, who have been lords of the manor for four hundred years, and the diamonds and lilies are swaying in the wind at the summit of the tall sign-post that stands in front of the inn. The church alone is well worth coming some miles out of your way to see, though the effect of the interior is marred by the undignified appearance of the cheap deal pews, which are sadly out of harmony with the venerable Norman and Early English arcades, and the solid tracery of the windows. The chancel is spacious, but its character has been altered in modern times by the insertion of a large east window in the Decorated style. Formerly, as in the case of certain churches, already noticed, the east end was windowless, and the wall decorated with frescoes: it is a pity that a historical feature of such distinction should have been annihilated. In the nave is an altar tomb, on which rests the effigy of a knight in plate armour, said to be that of Sir Thomas Rouse, who died in 1499, and at the east end of the south aisle, where the sedilia and piscina of a chapel remain, is another raised tomb with the fifteenth century brass of Joan Clopton, widow of Sir William Clopton. On her husband's death she became an anchoress and was immured for the rest of her days in a cell adjoining the churchyard.

At the detached hamlet of Upper Quinton is an ancient, mysterious-looking farmhouse, that seems a fitting home for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, and is appropriately shrouded

IX

MICKLETON

215

in a thick overgrown garden. What plots may be hatched there nowadays, I cannot certainly affirm; but it is not unreasonable to imagine that the victims are largely drawn from the geese which frequent the long open green in large flocks. In fact these grassy levels that lie between the Cotswold and the Warwickshire hills seem to be particularly adapted to the cultivation of this petulant bird, and numbers of them no doubt eventually find their way to the Birmingham Christmas market. So along under the western slopes of lovely Meon, whose praises I am never tired of singing, to Mickleton.

Now Mickleton both on the score of its own merits, and from its associations, deserves more than a passing notice. Even a glimpse from the distant railway of its spire rising out of a mass of clustering orchards, backed by the verdant slopes of Cotswold, which hereabouts are cleft with deep and darkly wooded coombes, must rouse both envy and curiosity. It is not a place where the squire and the parson seem to reign in solitary state. There are many other comfortable-looking houses besides the manor and vicarage, there are village shops, there is a resident doctor, and the whole has all the air of a place where a man might possess his soul (and body) in peace. The manor-house is a fine substantial mansion close to the church: the grounds are fenced from the road by a lofty wall, but the beautiful gardens on the other side of the house lie open to the meadows, and look across to the hills. The manor which belonged to the abbey of Eynsham has, since the Dissolution, twice been held by men of some reputation for learning and scholarship. In 1597 it was purchased by Edward Fisher, whose grandson, also named Edward, succeeded to the estate in 1654. This last Edward, a member of Brasenose College, was well read in ecclesiastical history, and a zealous upholder of the rites and ceremonies of the Church against the Puritans. He was the author of A Christian Caveat to the Old and New Sabbatharians, or a Vindication of our Gospel Festivals (1653) and other works.

216

THE GRAVES FAMILY

CHAP.

When he succeeded to the Mickleton estate he found it heavily encumbered, and he had no money to clear it. He therefore retired to Carmarthen, where he supported himself by teaching, but his creditors pursued him, and he took refuge from them in Ireland, where he died. In 1656 Mickleton was bought by Richard Graves, a London lawyer, in whose family it still remains. The grandson of this Richard, another Richard Graves, was one of those benefactors to posterity who devote themselves to the study of the history of their native place. He made extensive collections, which are now among the Lansdowne MSS. in the British Museum, and projected a History of the Vale of Evesham, but died in 1729 at the age of fifty-two, before he had anything ready for publication. He was a valued friend of Hearne's, who gives us a pleasant picture of him: "He was one of the most worthy and most virtuous gentlemen I was acquainted with. He was also a most excellent scholar and antiquary, a man of great modesty and of a most sweet temper, and a great friend to his tenants and to the poor, so that all people are very sorry for his death." On the marble tablet to his memory in the church there is a portrait of him in profile. His eldest son, Morgan Graves, succeeded him at Mickleton: his younger son was Richard Graves, the author of The Spiritual Quixote. We have already noted in connection with Dover's meeting that it is at Mickleton that the opening scene of this entertaining story is laid. I like to fancy that I can identify the old elm at the cottage gate of the "honest sociable cobbler," beneath which the villagers were wont to congregate of an evening to discuss the news of the day, as well as "the Angel" frequented by Jerry Tugwell, though there is no inn now called by that name.

The author, like his father and three of his own sons afterwards, was "bred" at Pembroke College; he became a Fellow of All Souls, and in 1748 was presented to the rectory of Claverton near Bath, which he held till his death in 1804 at the age of eighty-nine. At Pembroke he formed a life-long friend

IX

UTRECIA SMITH

217

ship with Shenstone, who became a frequent guest at Mickleton Manor, where Richard's brother Morgan now reigned as squire. It was here that Shenstone made his first essays in landscape gardening, an art which he afterwards cultivated on so elaborate a scale at the Leasowes. The stranger who takes the footpath leading from the churchyard to the foot of the hills will come upon a fine avenue of elms which is carried up the slope towards the aerie-like modern mansion of Kiftsgate Court. This avenue was planted by Shenstone on one of his Mickleton visits, and will long preserve his memory there. But this is not all in the church, now standing on the floor of the south aisle, but formerly in the chancel and apparently intended for a more elevated position, is a funeral urn with this inscription: "Utreciae Smith, Puellae simplici, innocuae, eleganti: R. G. Una actae memor pueritiae Moerens posuit M.DCC.XLIV." Utrecia Smith was the daughter of the curate of Mickleton, with whom Richard Graves had read the classics until he was old enough to be sent to Abingdon school. She developed remarkable talents as she grew to womanhood, and won the admiration of the two young Oxford students, Graves and Shenstone. "At a time," writes the former in his memoir of Shenstone, "when the ladies did not so generally rival our sex in learning and ingenuity, from the books with which her father supplied her [she] had formed to herself so good a taste of polite literature and wrote so well in prose (and sometimes in verse) that a very ingenious clergyman, bred at a public school, and a Master of Arts in the University, often said he was afraid to declare his opinion of any author till he previously knew hers." I regret to add that the ingenious clergyman after being engaged to Miss Smith for four or five years, broke off the match "for prudential reasons." Poor Utrecia was carried off by small-pox at the early age of thirty; Shenstone wrote his fourth Elegy, "Ophelia's urn," in her memory. It is addressed to his friend Graves, but is not penned in his happiest style; there is a stiffness about it which repels rather

« ElőzőTovább »