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CROUCH HILL

CHAP.

Cherwell, to which we shall soon have to make our pilgrimage. The son and heir of the house at this time was Sir Richard Knightley, who had married Hampden's eldest daughter, and was one of the chief local supporters of the popular party: like his friend Lord Saye, however, he held aloof from its final excesses and took part in the restoration of the monarchy. We cannot doubt that he was often one of the mysterious visitors to Broughton, and we can picture him riding over the hills from Fawsley, lost in anxious thought and awaking from his reverie at his journey's end to stable his horse in the ancient range of buildings by the moat.

It is with regret that we turn our backs upon the fine old mansion and church of Broughton, but since the days of the Civil War we have no record either of the history of the family, or of any events connected with the place. Would that one of the Fiennes, like Sir Ralph Verney, whose accumulations have furnished the materials for the delightful Memoirs of the Verney Family, had religiously preserved his correspondence and domestic papers! The family story of Broughton might then have vied in interest with that of Claydon.

On reaching the top of the hill, before descending into Banbury, we pass an eminence on the right crowned with a clump of trees. This is Crouch Hill, the "May-morn Hill" as a local bard of the later eighteenth century calls it, from the fact that it was formerly visited on May morning by the young people of the neighbourhood. The view to be obtained from it extends for many miles over the surrounding country, and is duly lauded by the bard in question; his poetic powers I will merely indicate here by quoting his comforting assurance that "No craggy precipices here affright,

But gently rising hills and vales delight."

The top of the hill is evidently artificial, and was no doubt raised in order to communicate with the neighbouring camps. Thus the whole has a clearly defined conical appearance when

III

THE DEVIL AS LABOURER

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seen from a distance, and has of course been attributed to diabolical agency. The story, as quoted by the Banbury historian, is, that the three churches of Bloxham, Adderbury, and King's Sutton were built by three masons, who were brothers; that the devil served them all as a labourer, and that one day he fell down with a load of mortar and so made Crouch Hill.

CHAPTER IV

A BROKEN undulating region, full of ups and downs, is this North Oxfordshire country. With the exception of the Stour, which rises in Wigginton Heath, and the little brook which waters the village of Long Compton, the many rills the traveller has to cross all make their way southward to swell the volume of the Thames. Towards one of these, the Swale, I am taking my journey this morning, for it gives its name to a village which may boast one of the most interesting churches in the county. The church of Swalcliffe, like its neighbour at Tadmarton, has been respected by the restorer. You have no need to peer here and there with anxious eye to discover that you have not entered a spick-and-span erection of yesterday. The carved oak pews of the seventeenth century, the venerable arcades, the fine, open, timber roof, and the perpendicular chancel screen, which still retains traces of its original colouring, strike you at once, and the charm of the whole is enhanced by the warm tints of the native stone, and the flood of light which in the absence of objectionable glass the windows are still able to admit. Only in the chancel do we find scraped walls, and other traces of the enemy. The pews and pulpit were the gift of a branch of the Wykeham family, who long resided here; and the squire's house is still the property of their representative, while New College is the patron of the living. There are two curious features in the church which we must notice; one, a doorway in the jamb of one of the windows of the south

CH. IV

SHENINGTON

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aisle, approached by a staircase on the outside; it no doubt led to a raised chapel; the other, two small windows over two arches of the nave, one on either side. How they got there, for they are evidently much older than the arches, is a puzzle. It has been suggested they belonged to a pre-existing Saxon church without aisles, and that when the arches were built, the wall above containing these windows was shored up with props to prevent the necessity of taking the roof off. Similar windows are found at Witney and at Tysoe.

We may make our way northward from the village across the fields by Madmarston camp to Shutford. To the south-east of the camp, on some ground known as Blacklands, traces of British and Roman settlements have been discovered. The name of course refers to the colour of the soil, and occurs elsewhere in this district, where remains of ancient villages or encampments have been found. The fact that the same site had been occupied and built over by successive bands of settlers would account for the darker colour of the earth. At Shutford we shall stop to look at the tall, grey manor-house, which quite dwarfs its near neighbour the church, but if we express a desire to see the interior, we shall find that Highways and Byways, and all such very unpractical matters, are by no means to the taste of the occupier, and that we must confine our curiosity to the outside. There is nothing else to detain us at Shutford, so speculating on the carved mantel-pieces, long galleries, and secret chambers which the forbidden mansion doubtless contains, we take the Edgehill road, and turning off to the right in a mile or two by a field-road we reach the twin villages of Shenington and Alkerton, which crown the hill-tops on either side of the Sor brook here running at the bottom of a deep valley. Shenington is one of the villages in which the custom of strewing the church with grass or rushes at Whitsuntide is still kept up; certain lands were bound to provide these materials, but the obligation is now commuted for a fixed payment. The visitor, however, who is led to hope that a

G

82

ALKERTON

CHAP.

church which preserves this old custom must have preserved all else that should be preserved will be disappointed; it will be enough to say that the fine Norman chancel arch has been taken down, and actually put up again in the north wall of the chancel! Accordingly we will lose no time in crossing the valley to the still more picturesque village, and really unspoilt church of Alkerton. Round the outside of the church is a cornice ornamented with figures in relief, as at Adderbury and Hanwell the figures on the south side have been taken to represent the life of a man, and local tradition goes a step further, and affirms that the man in question is the Black Prince, even pointing to his triumphant entry into London on his return from the French wars. Hard by the church is the venerable Jacobean Rectory-house, built by Alkerton's most celebrated rector, Thomas Lydyat. The son of the Lord of the Manor of Alkerton, Scholar of Winchester, Fellow of New College, and a writer of European reputation, in addition to divinity, he devoted himself to the study of astronomy and chronology. He recommended himself to Henry, Prince of Wales, who appointed him his chronographer and cosmographer, and would have promoted him to higher honours had he lived. But the Prince's early death in 1612 put an end to his hopes, and he accepted the rectory of his native village, of which his father was the patron. In this retired spot he gave himself up to his studies, and published many learned scientific treatises, of which the reader will find a list in the Dictionary of National Biography. I do not, however, expect that he will be tempted to make the acquaintance of the works themselves; he will be more interested in the fortunes or misfortunes of the author, who after all his toil is best known to-day by Johnson's famous lines in The Vanity of Human Wishes:

"There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol.

See nations, slowly wise, and meanly just,