Chipping Campden.

Campden’s position as a market town dates back to Saxon times, when the verb “ceapan,” to buy, gave the prefix “Chipping” to it. The town rose to greater prosperity when the ancient wool-growing wealth of the Cotswolds was doubled by the manufacture in these same districts of the cloth from those wealth-bringing fleeces; and great fortunes were amassed by both wool-merchants and clothiers. The rise of England from an agricultural and a wool-growing country, such as Australia now is, to a manufacturing community directly concerned such towns as Stroud, Northleach, Burford and Chipping Campden, which, with the introduction of weaving, earned two profits instead of one. There are perhaps a dozen little Cotswold towns whose great churches were rebuilt in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in a magnificent style by the wealthy merchants of the time, whose monumental brasses still in many cases remain, representing them standing upon sheep, or woolsacks, or with the tailor’s shears between their legs; the origins of their wealth. When the cloth manufacture largely migrated to the Midlands and the north, such towns as Campden, Burford, and Northleach began to decay, and now that Australia is the chief source of the wool supply it is difficult to see how they are ever to recover. They are not on the great routes of traffic, and railways do not come near them.

Old Houses, Chipping Campden

The Market House, Chipping CampdenCampden is situated on a kind of shelf or narrow plateau upon the Cotswolds. You come steeply up to it, and, leaving it, rise as steeply as before. Like most of its neighbours on Cotswold, it is a stone-built town, grown grey with age and weathering. When some new mason-work is undertaken—which is not often—the stone is seen to be of a pale biscuit colour; but it soon loses that new tint and rapidly acquires the rather sad hue of the older work.

The traveller fresh from Stratford, where brick, and timber-framed and plastered houses abound, feels astonishment in the sudden transition to a place like Campden, in which I believe there is not a single example of timber-framing.

The old town of Campden is extraordinarily full of architectural interest; with domestic work ranging from the mid-fourteenth century house of the Grevels to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the town began to decline and building ceased. No modern suburbs are found on the outskirts of Campden. I do not know how the town manages to exist. There is a railway station, but it is a mile away and it is only incidental and placed on the line to Evesham and Worcester. No great genius was ever born at Campden, or if he was, he missed fire and perished unknown. Therefore it is not a place of pilgrimage, and only parties of architectural students, measuring up or sketching some of the charming bits with which it abounds; or artists, or contemplative ruminative folk who want to escape from the eternal hustle of this age and its devilish gospel of “get on or get out” ever go there. “Past” is traced over its every building. “There was a time” might be inscribed over the open-sided and quaintly-colonnaded market-house; and “Yesterday” should be the town motto. There are little courts off the main street where the leisured explorer in Campden will find remains of the old wool warehouses, with here and there a traceried Gothic window. Many old sundials still exist on the walls; in particular a charming example near the market-house with the initials W. S. T. and date 1690; and dated house-tablets show with what pride the old inhabitants looked upon their homes.

But the pride of all the ancient houses of Campden is that house where William Grevel lived in the fourteenth century. It is not a very large house, one thinks, for so wealthy a man as he was, described as he is on the brass in the church as “the flower of the wool-merchants of all England,” but it presents a charming frontage to the street and has an oriel window of peculiar beauty, presided over by two huge and hideous gargoyles, the one representing a winged, bat-like monster with gaping mouth and a ferocious expression; the other a kind of demon dog with glaring eyes of intense malignity—the late Mr. William Grevel’s familiar spirits, perhaps.

Every one well-read in the history of his country knows that the ranks of its aristocracy and its peerage have constantly been reinforced from the trading classes. It is a matter of money. When a man has great possessions he finds the House of Lords waiting to receive him. It has been so for centuries, and not only so, but the ennobled have in their own later generations given younger sons to trade. The different processes are still seen working; and why not? Wealth will secure consideration, and younger sons who cannot always marry money must in their turn go into trade and make it.

Grevel’s HouseThe old wool-merchants and clothiers often rose to the peerage on their own account, or married their sons and daughters into its ranks. William Grevel, who was a descendant of other mercantile Grevels, never became more than a wealthy trader. As such he died in 1401, and it was not until just over two centuries had passed that his descendant, Fulke Greville, entered the lists of the coroneted as Baron Brooke; the eighth Baron Brooke not becoming Earl of Warwick until 1759. The Grevels—or “Grevilles,” as they afterwards spelt their name—therefore only belatedly won to that haven where they would be; but most others were more fortunate. Baptist Hicks, for example, is an extraordinary instance of swift accumulation of wealth. He, however, made it in London, as a mercer and perhaps a good deal more as a moneylender. He lent money to James the First among others, and became so warm a man that he returned in 1609 to his native Gloucestershire and purchased the manor of Campden, building a magnificent country seat next the church. The cost of this was £29,000: over £200,000 according to present value. He had so much money and so fine a house that he, being already a Knight, was in 1628 created a Viscount. He died the following year, not like Tennyson’s Countess of Burleigh, because of the weight of an honour to which he had not been born, but by reason of age and possibly chagrin that he had not been created an Earl.

He was a benefactor to Campden, and built the charming group of almshouses that stand on the left-hand on the way to the church.

Past these almshouses, the way goes directly to the church, a noble building of date somewhere about 1530. It owes its present stately proportions and Perpendicular style largely to the benefactions of Grevel and others. The tower is remarkable for a buttress which is in some ways a kind of highly-developed mullion running through the centre of the window of the lower stage. It is perhaps rather more curious than beautiful, and as it cannot be of any constructional value and adds little if anything to the stability of the tower, we can only regard it as one of those freaks of the last phase of Gothic architecture which tell us, if we have but the wit to understand, that, Reformation or no Reformation, with Henry the Eighth or without, the Gothic spirit was dying.

Interior of the Market House, Chipping CampdenThe curious ogee-shaped roof of a building seen in the foreground of the accompanying view of the church is that of a garden-pavilion, or gazebo, of Campden House, the lordly mansion built in 1613 by Sir Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campden. I have seen curious old illustrations of this fine house, by which it would seem to have been a place of extraordinary grandeur. It is said to have been the largest house ever built in England, and stood upon eight acres of ground. This truly extensive mansion existed no longer than thirty-two years, for it was burnt by order of Prince Rupert in 1645. During that time of civil war Campden House had been a notable rallying-place for the Royalists, who under a rough soldier, Sir Henry Bard, had made themselves a pestilent nuisance, not only to their natural enemies, but even to sympathisers. If they needed anything in the way of food, forage, or apparel, they took it where it was to be found, whether from Roundhead or Royalist. They raped the very clothes off the country people’s backs. “A man,” says one of these lamenting rustics, “need keep a tight hold of his very breeches, or ’tis odds but what these Sabines will have them, and if he is let keep his shirt, it is thought a matter of grace.” So it was not altogether regretfully that they saw Bard and his brigands depart while there remained one of those indispensable articles, or a hat, or pair of shoes in the neighbourhood. When the garrison left, they fired the mansion. It was never rebuilt, and to this day its ruins stand to keep the tale in mind.That the church was rebuilt in the very last years of the Late Perpendicular style is more and more evident as you approach and examine it. William Grevel in 1401 left a hundred marks towards the work, and you will be told locally that the present building is the result of that gift. But not very much could have been done with such a sum, and in any event, the fabric is distinctly and unmistakably over a hundred years later in date. The ogee pinnacles and mouldings, and especially the flattened arches of the nave-arcade tell their architectural tale in a way that cannot be gainsaid.

On the floor of the chancel is the fine brass to William Grevel, 1401, and Marion, his wife, 1386. It is, with its canopied work, eight feet nine inches high; the figure of Grevel himself being five feet four inches. We see him habited in the merchant’s dress of his period, and with the forked beard that was then the usual wear of the elderly among his class, as Chaucer says, in his Canterbury Tales: “A marchant was there with a forked beard.”

Other brasses are to William Welley, merchant, 1450, and wife Alice; John Lethenard, merchant, 1467, and his wife Joan; and William Gybbys, 1484, with his three wives, Alice, Margaret and Marion, and seven sons and six daughters.

The stately monument of Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campden, and his wife occupies the south chancel chapel. It is one of the works of Nicholas Stone and his sons, whose extraordinarily fine craftsmanship as sculptors and designers of monuments in the seventeenth century redeemed to a great extent the rather vulgar ostentation which marked in general the neo-classic style of the age. The monument takes up nearly all the floor space and rises to a great height. Beneath a canopy formed by it rest the recumbent marble effigies of that ennobled wool-merchant and sometime Lord Mayor of London, and his wife, habited in the robes of their rank, and with coronets on their heads. They are impressive in a very high degree. A long Latin inscription narrates his good deeds and expatiates upon the good fortune of Campden which benefited by them.

It is not easy to excuse the deplorable taste which produced the large monument against the wall to Edward Noel, 2nd Viscount Campden, who died 1642, and his widow, Juliana, 1680. We would like to believe that the idea of it was none of Nicholas Stone’s, but was dictated by the mortuary grief of that thirty-eight years’ long widow, who no doubt found great satisfaction and consolation in coming every now and then to open its doors and look at the gruesome white marble figures, larger than life, of herself and her husband, representing them standing hand in hand, in their shrouds. They remind one very vividly of the lines in Ruddigore—

“And then the ghost and his lady toast
To their churchyard beds take flight,
With a kiss perhaps on her lantern chaps
And a grisly, grim ‘Good-night!’”

The visitor to Campden church is told that the black marble doors disclosing these figures and now fixed permanently open, against the wall, were generally closed during the lifetime of the widow, and were opened at her decease. The long epitaphs tell us in detail about her, her husband, and her family. On the left-hand is that to the husband—

“This monument is erected to preserve the memory and pourtrait of the Right Honourable Sr. Edward Noel, Viscount Campden, Baron Noel of Ridlington and Hicks of Ilmington. He was Knight Banneret in the warrs of Ireland, being young, and then created Baronet anno 1611. He was afterwards made Baron of Ridlington. The other titles came unto him by right of Dame Juliana, his wife, who stands collaterall to him in this monument, a lady of extraordinary great endowments, both of vertue and fortune. This goodly lord died at Oxford at ye beginning of the late fatall civil warrs, whither he went to serve and assist his sovverain Prince Charles the First, and so was exalted to the Kingdom of Glory, 8° Martii 1642.”

The right hand door is inscribed with the lady’s own description, and of her children’s fortunes—

“The Lady Juliana, eldest daughter and co-heire (of that mirror of his time) Sr. Baptist Hicks, Viscount Campden. She was married to that noble Lord who is here engraven by her, by whom she had Baptist, Lord Viscount Campden, now living (who is blessed with a numerous and gallant issue). Henry, her second son, died a prisoner for his loyalty to his Prince. Her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was married to John Viscount Chaworth: Mary, her second daughter, to the very noble Knight, Sr Erasmus de la Fontaine. Penelope, her youngest daughter, died a mayd.

“This excellent lady, for the pious and unparallel’d affections she retained to the memory of her deceased lord, caused this stately monument to be erected in her lifetime, in September Anno Dom. 1664.”

A very charming mural monument to the Lady Penelope shows a delicately-sculptured bust. She is seen wearing a dress with deep Vandyck lace collar. As with the other monuments, it is clearly from the hands of the Stone family. The Lady Penelope, who died young in 1633, is traditionally said to have died from the effects of pricking her finger when working in coloured silks. The position of the hand is said to be in allusion to the accident. A companion figure is that to the Lady Anne Noel, wife of the Lady Penelope’s brother, Baptist. She died 1636.

Chipping Campden ChurchThe “Campden Wonder,” at which people in 1662 marvelled, is still an unsolved mystery, and ever likely to remain so. The story of it began in 1660, on August 16th, when William Harrison, a staid elderly man of about sixty years, who had been trusted for many years as the steward of the widowed Juliana, Viscountess Campden, went to Charingworth, three miles away, to collect some rents. When night had come and he had not returned, his wife sent a servant, John Perry, in search. By morning, when he too had not come back, Mrs. Harrison grew more alarmed and sent her son, Edward, who met Perry returning, without having seen anything of his master. Young Harrison persuaded the man to go to Ebrington with him and to raise further inquiries. There they heard that William Harrison had called the evening before and rested, and that he had then left. He had then about £23 on him.

On their way back to Campden, young Harrison and Perry met a woman who handed them a bloodstained comb and band which that morning she had found in the furze on the road between Ebrington and Charingworth. They were those of the missing man, but of him no trace could be found. It did not take long to come to the conclusion that Perry must have had a hand in his master’s disappearance, and he was arrested on suspicion of murder. He had told so many contradictory tales that he was rightly suspected, and after a week’s imprisonment he had yet another story. He now “confessed” that his mother, Joan Perry, and his brother Richard had long urged him to rob his master, and that at last they had on this occasion waylaid and robbed him, afterwards strangling him and throwing the body into the great mill-sink of the neighbouring Wallington’s Mill. The comb and band had been put on the road by himself.

John Perry’s mother and brother were accordingly arrested and the three were tried at Gloucester and convicted, notwithstanding the fact that no body had been found, and in spite of the piteous protestations of innocence by Joan Perry and Richard, and in face of the avowal by John that he must have been mad when he “confessed.” He now declared he knew nothing of Harrison’s death; but in spite of all these doubts, the three were executed, on Broadway Hill. Joan was hanged first, and Robert next. John calmly saw them die and listened to their last appeals to him to confess and to exonerate them. He was hanged last, protesting that he had never known anything of his master’s death, or even if he were dead. But, he added, they might hereafter possibly hear.

The countryside congratulated itself upon being rid of three undesirables. The old woman had always been reputed a witch. And when the affair was becoming a stale and exhausted topic, one autumn evening at dusk, two years later, Mr. William Harrison, for whose murder three persons had been convicted and hanged, returned and walked into his own house.

He gave forth an ingenious but preposterous story to account for his two years’ absence. As he was returning home, he said, on the evening of his disappearance, he was intercepted by three horsemen who attacked, wounded and robbed him, and carrying him to a neighbouring cottage on the heath, nursed him there until it was possible to carry him across country to Dover, where they put him aboard a vessel and sold him to the captain, who had several others in like case with himself on his ship. They voyaged from Deal and after about six weeks’ sail they were seized by Turkish pirates and he and the others were put aboard the Turkish ship and sold as slaves in Turkey. His master lived near Smyrna. After serving him as a slave for nearly two years, the elderly Turk died and the slave escaped to the coast, where he persuaded some Hamburg sailors to take him as a stowaway to Lisbon. There he met an Englishman who took compassion upon him and found him a passage to England. Landing at Dover, he made his way directly home.

Brass to William Grevel and Wife, Chipping CampdenThis cock-and-bull story was all that the country ever had in the way of satisfaction. Harrison went about his steward’s business as before, trusted and respected, and died ten years later. In after years some suspicion seems to have fallen upon the son, but for what reason does not appear. That industrious Oxford diarist, Anthony Wood, who took a keen interest in the affair, as did all the country, says, “After Harrison’s returne, John was taken down [from his gibbet] and Harrison’s wife soon after (being a snotty covetous presbyterian) hung herself in her owne house. Why, the reader is to judge.”

In leaving Campden and its memories, I must not let it be supposed that in speaking of the town as decayed and belonging to the past I either intend to slight it or forget the Guild of Handicraft established here in 1892. Removed from London in that year, it has sought to bring back in these more and more commercial and factory times the craftsman’s old traditions of artistic and individual work, no matter in what trade. In printing, bookbinding, enamel-work, jewellery and cabinet-making it has sought by precept and example to further the teachings of Ruskin and Morris, and has created a new feeling here and elsewhere which has effects in places little suspected.