224 BUCKLAND CH. IX A charming field path to the right will take you to Buckland, whence you may wander on along the slopes of the hills to Stanton and Stanway, and even further to Hayles and Sudeley, and a day or two may well be devoted to a ramble along this delightful hillside, with its constant variations of wooded coombe and upland meadow, and its outlook across the broad vale of Evesham to the distant hills beyond. The villages just mentioned are all secluded and unspoilt, and for two or three centuries have worn much the same aspect that they do to-day; but a time of probation is approaching, the new railway will soon be open-and then? But I will not forestall the date of grief; they are all built of the good local stone and are built to last. To begin with Buckland, bookland that is-a common name enough-in this case it was the abbey of Gloucester that held it by charter or book-and to speak only of the church, the manor house and the rectory. From 1466 to 1510 the rector was William Grafton. He probably built the rectory, for one of the windows of the hall has his rebus, a tun with the graft of tree issuing from it: this fine room retains its original proportions, but at the manor house, behind the church, the hall has been divided up by modern partitions. On the south side of the church in the churchyard is a pre-Reformation altar tomb with quatrefoils on the sides—a rarity outside a church. The east window has three compartments of painted glass, a century older than the stonework, and perhaps the gift of William Grafton: the subjects of the glass are the sacraments of confirmation, marriage, and extreme unction. The panelling of the walls is early seventeenth century work, as appears by the following inscription: "Thomas Izzard and James Sowthern of theyr own cherg have given this wainscot and benchin to church in the yere of our Lord 1615." At Buckland, evidently the yeomen had not by that time ceased to take a pride in their parish church, or to be able and willing to spend their money on it. 226 STANTON CH. IX Stanton and Stanway each have their great house, but Stanton Court conforms to the ordinary type of Cotswold manor-house; Stanway House, as we shall see, has distinctive features of its own. Another fine old house in Stanton is Warren House, built by one Thomas Warren in 1577; one of its principal rooms has an elaborate plaster ceiling adorned with the Warren arms, Tudor roses and fleurs-de-lys. The present owner of this house assured me that King Charles slept in it after his escape from Worcester field, and added that he himself occupied the bedroom used by his Majesty. I am afraid, however, that this story will hardly fit in with known facts, for, as readers of the Boscobel tracts are aware, the King accomplished the journey from Mr. Tombs's at Long Marston to the rectory at Coberley in a single day. Moreover he took the ordinary road through Campden across the hills, and would have left Stanton some miles on his right. Nor is there any evidence that his father, though more than once at Broadway, and nearer still, ever actually entered Stanton. The church, originally built by the monks of Winchcombe in the twelfth century, retains its Norman arcade on the north side of the nave, but the rest is of later date. One of its most remarkable features is the west window of the fifteenth century south aisle : it has two transoms in its upper part, thus forming two tiers of smaller lights above the larger lower ones. The effect is so good that the architect responsible for the recent restoration has inserted two copies of this window in the south wall of the same aisle. The estates owned by the great Mercian monasteries in the Cotswold were enormous. As Broadway belonged to Pershore, Buckland to Gloucester, and Stanton to Winchcombe, so Stanway belonged to Tewkesbury, and here its abbots had a country house. No situation within such easy distance could have been better chosen. Tewkesbury lies low in the vale, and in winter time was much exposed to fogs and floods. Stanway is from two to three hundred feet higher, and could bid |