Broadway—Winchcombe—Shakespearean Associations—Bishop’s Cleeve.

“An Eden of fertility,” says an old writer, dwelling with satisfaction upon the Vale of Evesham. The neat orchards of to-day, with their long perspectives, and with bush-fruit planted in between the lines of plum and apple-trees, to economise every inch of this wonderful soil, would seem to him even more of an Eden, neater and more extended than in his day. It is not, you will say, the most picturesque form of cultivation, but it has that best of picturesque beauty to some minds, the picturesqueness of profit. I never yet knew a farmer who could see a cornfield with an artist’s eye, and was the better pleased the more the poppies, corn-cockles, and herb-daisies grew in it. For generations past, you will be told, the fruit-growing of the Vale of Evesham has been steadily giving less profit, and scarce a man among the growers but will declare the times are ruining the trade. But the pastures continue to be planted as extensions of the orchards, and the railway traffic in fruit is an increasing branch of business. The only possible inferences, therefore, are that these jolly-looking market-gardeners, who live so well and look so prosperous, thrive on ruination and really cultivate the plum for the Æsthetic but fleeting pleasure of seeing every spring that wondrous vale of snow-white blossom that spreads out below Cotswold.

Five miles or so south-eastwards across the vale brings you into Broadway, a village exploited some thirty years ago, and now, converted from the rustic place it was, into a residential district. The old houses and cottages remain, but the simple rustic folk who lived in them are dispersed, and in their old homes live that new class of appreciative and cultivated people with anything at command, from great wealth down to a sufficient independence. A generation ago people of this class would have thought life out of London or such great centres unendurable. They would have missed their town life and the shopping and all the thousand-and-one distractions, and if you had suggested Broadway or any such place, they would indignantly have asked if you wanted them to “bury themselves alive.”

And now ideals have changed, or perhaps more exactly, a new class of persons has been born. The wealthy who cannot live away from the centres of life still numerously exist, but there are great numbers of the leisured who have culture and resources within themselves and are not dependent for their amusement upon extraneous things. Also we have in these days of swift travel by road and rail to reckon not only with the “week-ender” (who does not trouble Broadway much), but upon that class who will have it both ways, will take the best of town, and when the country is most desirable will leave town to others and retire to such places as this.

These things have made Broadway a very different place from what it was a generation ago. The old people, sons of the soil, have been disinherited, and strangers—not only the “foreigners,” of whom the rustics speak, meaning merely people not of the same shire, but foreigners from overseas—are living in their homes, and they still resent it, even though they may earn more in wages and in “tips” from the tipping classes. The sense of place and of justice too, is strong in the blood of the countryman, and he feels it to be a shame that strangers should come from remote countries and covet the house where he and his fathers lived, and turn him out. It is an outcome of the recent appreciation of country life which is creating bitterness and resentment, not at Broadway alone, but all over the country. [213]

The broad street, with its grey stone houses, is to outward seeming very much the same, but there is a neatness, an unmistakable sense of money about the place. Every little plot of grass in front of the houses at the upper end, that never used to know the attentions of the mower, has become a lawn; small cottages have been enlarged and thrown into one another, and farmhouses, whose ancient features have been ingeniously adapted by resourceful architects, have become residences of the most delightful type. A little golfing, some motoring, half a dozen other interests and the modern craze for collecting, fill the lives of the people who live here. A retired actress collects pewter, and others scan the neighbourhood with the amiable object of snapping up rare and valuable pieces of china or furniture at much less than their worth from country-folk who are ignorant of their value. There is a curiosity shop in the village, too, where the stranger may find bargains, or may not; and I am told—although I have never seen him—that an innocent-looking old person carrying a rare specimen of a grandfather’s clock under his arm may generally be seen crossing the road by the “Lygon Arms,” at times when obviously wealthy, and possibly American and appreciative, occupants of motorcars drive up. The suggestion is that very often this ingenious person sells his rare, and possibly “unique,” clock at a stunning price and will be seen in another day or two with the fellow of it. This has been indignantly denied by the outraged people of Broadway, but reaffirmed in print, and I will leave it at that.

My amiable friend, Mr. S. B. Russell of the “Lygon Arms,” is of those who deny this quaint tale. The “Lygon Arms” itself has become a stately house, both without and within. As the “White Hart,” of olden days it dates back to 1540. Traditionally Cromwell lay here, the night before the Battle of Worcester, and there are even traditions of Charles the First staying here, ten years earlier. I am not concerned to deny or to affirm these legends. In any case, it would be sheer futility to do so, for no evidence survives. But it is likely enough, for the “White Hart,” as it then was, ranked with the best—as it does now, if I may say it. We may readily judge of its then standing, by the fine Jacobean stone entrance doorway, built by John Trevis in 1620, and still admitting to the house. It bears his name and that of Ursula his wife, with the date, and seems to mark a general restoration of the already old hostelry undertaken at that time. John Trevis—or “Treavis”—himself lies in Broadway old church, an interesting old building a mile or more distant from the village, and situated along a lonely wooded road, adjoining an ancient manor-house lately restored with much taste and discrimination. Trevis died in 1641, and has a brass to his memory. This old church is in a solitary situation, and is largely superseded by a modern building near the village. There is a palimpsest brass in the chancel, and hard by is an enriched wooden pulpit, bearing this distinctly apposite and characteristically Reformation-period inscription: “Prov. 19. Wher the word of God is not preached, the people perish.”

But to return to Broadway and the “Lygon Arms.” Thirty years ago the house had fallen into a very poor condition, and the great stone building with its fine rooms and its air of being really a private mansion, had declined to the likeness of a village alehouse. It was all the doing of the railways, which had disestablished the coaches, and brought desolation upon this road, in common with most others. But in the dawn of the new era of road travel the present proprietor bought the house, and has by degrees reinstated those stone mullions which had been torn from the windows and replaced at some extraordinarily inappreciative period by modern sashes; and has wrought altogether, a wonderful transformation. The “Lygon Arms,” is now as stately a hostelry as ever it was.

I reach the old town of Chipping Campden by another route, and so will not climb on this occasion the steep, mile-long Broadway Hill by which you come this way to it. I will turn instead further south, to Winchcombe.

Winchcombe, it may be thought, is a far cry from Stratford-on-Avon. It is twenty-four miles distant, but though twenty-four miles formed in olden days a very much more considerable journey than now, the place and its surroundings were familiar to Shakespeare. If you would seek here local allusions in the plays, wherewith to belabour the Bacon fanatics, there is no lack in this district of “Cotsall,” those Cotswolds on which Page’s fallow greyhound was outrun: a portion of those “wilds in Gloucestershire,” whose “high wild hills and rough uneven ways, Draw out our miles and make them wearisome,” as Northumberland complains in King Richard the Second.

Shakespeare knew most that was to be known about the Cotswold Hills, and when he makes Shallow bid Davy “sow the headland with red wheat,” he alludes to an olden local custom of sowing “red lammas” wheat early in the season.

He was familiar with the consistency of Tewkesbury mustard, with which, doubtless, the Stratford folk of his day relished their meat, and he finds in it an apt illustration of a dull man’s attempted sprightliness: as where he makes Falstaff say, “He a good wit, hang him baboon! his wit is as thick as Tewkesbury mustard.”

Here, in the neighbourhood of Winchcombe, familiar rhymes, generally uncomplimentary, upon surrounding places are attributed to him almost as freely as are those upon the “Eight Villages.” They tell of—

“Dirty Gretton, Dingy Greet,
Beggarly Winchcombe, Sudeley sweet;
Hanging Hartshorn, Whittington Bell,
Dull Andoversford, and Merry Frog Mill.”

The epithets vary with the different narrators of the lines. Those quoted above do not in general fit the places, except beautiful Sudeley and perhaps “once upon a time” Frog Mill, which, in spite of its name was probably of old a sufficiently merry place, for it is the name of an ancient and once renowned inn adjoining Andoversford: an inn where men made merry until the railway came hard by and disestablished its custom.

Winchcombe it is difficult to believe ever “beggarly.” It is an old and picturesque market town in the Cotswolds, with a noble and particularly striking Perpendicular church, with clerestoried nave and central tower, and an array of monstrously gibbering gargoyles. Next it is a curious old inn, oddly named the “Corner Cupboard.” Here, too, at the “George” inn, are some traces of the hostelry formerly maintained by the Abbots of Winchcombe for pilgrims to their altars. Sudeley Castle, in its park a mile away, is a place of great interest, now restored, with a modern altar-tomb and effigy to Catherine Parr, sixth and last wife of Henry the Eighth, who resided here.

Gretton is a village two miles from Winchcombe, on the Tewkesbury road, and Greet is a wayside hamlet in between. We have no authority for the Shakespearean authorship of the rhymes, but “old John Naps of Greece,” who is mentioned with “Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell” as cronies of Christopher Sly, was not “of Greece” but of this place. “Greece” is one of those many misprints that in the early folios and quartos continue to puzzle critics. In one of them Hamlet declares he can tell the difference between “a hawk and a handsaw,” and it was long before “handsaw” was seen to be a printer’s error for “heronshaw,” a young heron. To emigrate John Naps from Greet to Greece was a comparatively easy matter, in type, if not in actual travel. We will allow, for argument’s sake, that this by itself might not be convincing evidence that Shakespeare knew Greet and intended to refer to it; but we have Davy, Shallow’s servant in the Second Part of Henry the Fourth, referring to “William Visor of Woncot,” who has an action at law against “Clement Perkes of the hill.” By “Woncot,” is meant the hamlet of Woodmancote, three miles west of Winchcombe, a place then and now called “Woncot,” locally. The name, correctly spelt in the original edition of 1600, has been mistakenly altered to “Wincot,” in later issues. At Woodmancote the family of Visor, sometimes spelled “Vizard” was in Shakespeare’s time and until recent years living. It lies beneath Stinchcombe Hill, locally “the Hill,” which rises to the imposing height of 915 feet. There, it has been ascertained, the Perkes family then had their home. The name of Perkes was variously spelled “Purkis” and “Purchas.” The last representative appears to have been one “J. Purchas, Esq., of Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley, Glos.,” who is mentioned in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1812, as having died at Margate, in his seventy-fifth year.

It is a tremendous and a beautiful view from the lofty plateau of Cleeve Common as you go from Winchcombe to Woodmancote and Bishop’s Cleeve, on the way to Tewkesbury. I shall never forget the glory of that evening of early summer when, romping out of Cheltenham, our car breasted the long rise to this view-point and we halted here as the westering sun sank across the golden-blue distance of the Vale of Avon, with the Malvern Hills, grey and indistinct, beyond. Distant views of the Promised Land could have made no better promise of beauty and plenty.

From this Pisgah height you come “down-a-down-a,” as Ophelia says, to Bishop’s Cleeve, thinking upon the sheer appropriateness of the place-name; not the “Bishop” part of it, but the “Cleeve”; which stands of course for “cleft,” or “cliff.” Thenceforward, the way lies along the levels into Tewkesbury, through Stoke Orchard and Treddington.