Coventry.

Coventry originated, according to tradition, in a convent established here as early as the sixth century. Canute is said to have been the founder of another. Whatever may be the truth of the matter, it is certain that the great Saxon Earl Leofric and his wife Godifu in 1043 founded that Benedictine Monastery whose Priory church afterwards became the Cathedral, whose scanty ruins alone remain. These real and legendary religious houses, together with the Monastery of the Carmelites, or White Friars, and numerous others originated a curious notion that the name “Coventry” was really a corruption of “Conventry,” the place of convents. It was an excusable mistake, when we consider that the somewhat similar name of “Covent Garden” in London does in point of fact derive from the old garden of the Abbots of Westminster, but it was a complete mistake, all the same. The place-name comes from a little stream called by the British the Couen, not easily to be found in the city itself, but rising to the north and passing through the village of Coundon. (There is a stream of similar name, the “Cound,” at Church Stretton, in Shropshire.) It was thus the “place on the Couen.” The Saxons, who called that stream by a name of their own, the “Scir-burn,” that is to say, the “clear stream”—which in course of time became the “Sherborne”—did not succeed in changing the name of the place, as they did at Sherborne in Dorset; and “Coventry” it remained.

The most famous incident in the ancient “history” of Coventry is entirely legendary; but although proved to be inherently improbable, if not impossible, the story of Godiva and her ride through the streets clad only in her own modesty, is one that will never be destroyed by criticism. It is too ancient a myth for that.

About the year 1130 the monkish writer, Roger of Wendover, started it. Whence he derived the story no one knows, but he probably heard it as a folk-legend unconnected with place or person, and took it upon himself to fix the tale on Leofric and his Countess Godifu. He had courage in doing so, for it was only about a hundred years after the time of Leofric and his wife that he wrote.

“The Countess Godiva,” he says, “who was a great lover of God’s mother, longing to free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy toll, often with urgent prayers besought her husband, that from regard to Jesus Christ and His mother, he would free the town from that service, and from all other heavy burdens; and when the Earl sharply rebuked her for foolishly asking what was so much to his damage, and always forbade her for evermore to speak to him on the subject; and while she, on the other hand, with a woman’s pertinacity, never ceased to exasperate her husband on that matter, he at last made her this answer: ‘Mount your horse, and ride naked before all the people, through the market of the town from one end to the other, and on your return you shall have your request,’ on which Godiva replied, ‘But will you give me permission, if I am willing to do it?’ ‘I will,’ said he. Whereupon, the Countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair, and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body, like a veil, and then mounting her horse and attended by two knights, she rode through the market-place without being seen, except her fair legs; and having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband and obtained of him what she had asked, for Earl Leofric freed the town of Coventry and its inhabitants from the aforesaid service, and confirmed what he had done by a charter.”

The incident of Peeping Tom was never thought of by Roger of Wendover, and does not become a part of the story until the seventeenth century. Who was the genius who invented him is not known; but from that time onwards the peeping tailor who alone of all the people of Coventry spied upon Godiva as she rode through the empty streets becomes an essential part of the legend. His fate takes so mediÆval a turn that he seems really older than he is. Tennyson adopts him, in his poem, as a

“low churl, compact of thankless earth,
The fatal byword of all years to come,
Boring a little auger-hole in fear,
Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will,
Were shrivell’d into darkness in his head,
And dropt before him. So the powers who wait
On noble deeds, cancell’d a sense misus’d.”

A half-length effigy purporting to be Peeping Tom occupies a niche in the wall of the “King’s Head” in Smithford Street. He is really a portion of a figure of St. George from one of the old Coventry civic pageants; but he looks so peculiarly unsaintly and has so lecherous a grin that no one can for a moment dispute his entire suitability for the present part.

Coventry became so important a place in the early part of the fourteenth century that it was granted a charter of incorporation, and afterwards fortified with walls and gates. Parliaments were held there, in the stately buildings of the Priory; Coventry Cross became one of the most famous City Crosses in the kingdom; and the trade guilds were among the richest and most powerful. The mayors, too, were important and fearless magistrates, as we may judge from the example of John Horneby, who in 1411 caused the riotous Prince Hal, afterwards Henry the Fifth, to be arrested for creating a disturbance, and thus ranks with Judge Gascoyne, who on another occasion committed the Prince to prison.

Shakespeare rightly made Falstaff more ashamed to march through this rich and populous town with his ragged company of a hundred and fifty soldiers, and only a shirt and a half among the lot, than Godiva had been to ride through the primitive place of three hundred years before, with nothing—

“If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet . . . you would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I’ll not march through Coventry with them that’s flat; nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves on; for indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There’s but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half shirt is two napkins tied together, and thrown over the shoulders, like a herald’s coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host at Saint Albans, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daintry.”

Coventry, in right of this importance, became a city in 1451, and went on from good to better, until the suppression of the religious houses. At that time its population numbered 15,000, but within a few years it had declined to 3000. Yet in another thirty years the city is found receiving Queen Elizabeth not only with enthusiasm and splendid pageants, but with the present of a purse of £100; although the depression was still acute.

“It is a good gift, an hundred pounds in gold; I have but few such gifts,” said her Majesty, who was great but greedy.

“If it please your Grace,” answered that courtly Mayor, “there is a great deal more in it.”

“What is that?” she asked.

“The hearts,” he rejoined, “of all your loving subjects.”

“We thank you, Mr. Mayor,” said the Queen, “it is a great deal more, indeed.”

But she did not confer the honour of knighthood upon him.

James the First, visiting Coventry in 1617, was given £100 and a silver cup; probably in the hope of getting a renewal of the charter; but in the next reign we find a very different spirit. “Ye damnable puritans of Coventry,” says a letter-writer of the time, “have thrown up earthworkes and rampires against his Maiestie’s forces, and have put themselves in a posture of defence.” It was at this time that the expression arose of “sending to Coventry” any objectionable person. Those thus consigned to Coventry were prisoners of war, Royalists captured by the people of Birmingham, for whom no prison could be found except in this walled and fortified city.

Those walls were promptly destroyed at the Restoration, by order of Charles the Second, the citizens of Coventry offering no objection. They had grown weary of the Commonwealth, and when the King came to his own again the city was given over to festivity. The fountains spouted claret (not good claret, nor very much of it, we may suppose); bonfires blazed; and a deputation waited upon the King in London and gave him £50 and a basin and ewer of gold.

Coventry Cross, already mentioned, was built between the years 1541–44, at the time of the city’s decay, after the suppression of the monasteries, and was the gift of Sir William Holles, Lord Mayor of London, who bequeathed £200 for the purpose. It was described by Dugdale as “one of the chief things wherein this city most glories, which for workmanship and beauty is inferior to none in England.” But soon after Dugdale wrote this the Cross wherein Coventry so gloried was destroyed, and the chief outstanding architectural feature is now formed by the spires of St. Michael’s, Holy Trinity, and Christ Church: Coventry indeed being known far and wide as the “City of the Three Spires.” It is rather unfortunate that the fine grouping of these three spires, seen best from the approach to the city by the Kenilworth road, is spoiled by the most distressingly commonplace houses in the foreground; and that from no other point of view do they group at all.

St. Michael’s spire, incomparably the finer, rises with the tower to a height of 303 feet; that of Holy Trinity to 237 feet; and Christ Church to 201 feet. St. Michael’s church has the reputation of being the largest parish church in England, a distinction claimed also by St. Nicholas, Great Yarmouth, and St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. The honour appears to belong to St. Michael’s, which in other ways is a notable building. It is generally said to have a nave and four aisles, the two additional “aisles” being really chapels of similar length and appearance: the work of the Smiths’ and Girdlers’ Companies and the Fellowship of Woollen Cardmakers; two among the great trading guilds of the city. The Cappers, the Dyers, the Mercers, the Drapers and the Smiths had also their part in these outer aisles. The greater part of the church is of the Perpendicular period and is due to the local family of Botoner, who expended their substance lavishly upon it—

“William and Adam built the Tower,
Anne and Mary built the Spire;
William and Adam built the Nave
And Mary built the Quire.”

So ran the old rhyme. The works were in progress between 1373 and 1436.

A narrow road separates St. Michael’s from Holy Trinity, which, although in itself a fine Perpendicular building, suffers by comparison with its greater neighbour. Here also the guilds—the Tanners, Marlers, Butchers and others—exhibited their wealth and piety in the building of chapels; and here was a noble stained-glass fourteenth-century window containing the figures of Leofric and Godiva, with the inscription—

Stained-Glass Window Inscription

Christ Church retains only its ancient spire, the ruined body being replaced in 1829 by a work in the most lamentable style.

Besides its churches, Coventry is famed for its ancient “St. Mary’s Hall,” originally the hall of St. Mary’s Guild, but afterwards serving as that of the Holy Trinity, a religious society which amalgamated and swallowed up St. Mary’s and many others. It became the headquarters of the old municipal life of Coventry, and so it still remains; a noble centre for the city’s business and hospitalities.

Coventry nowadays is remarkable for its modern manufactures. In the thirteenth century it was soap that supported the city. Later it was prosperous in the making of woollen fabrics, needles and pins, and famed for a dye known as “Coventry Blue.” As time went on, silk-weaving and ribbon-making took prominence, and doubtless it was from Coventry that the promised “fairing” was to have come that is mentioned in the old ballad of that faithless Johnny who was so long at the fair—

“He promised to buy me a fairing to please me,
A bunch of blue ribbons he promised to buy me,
To tie up my bonny brown hair.”

But by 1869, when the duty on foreign-made silks had been removed, the silk and ribbon trade began to decline, and the enterprising citizens turned to the manufacture of sewing-machines. Then came the velocipede, the bicycle, and the motor-car. In the making of those two last-named articles and in that of ordnance, Coventry has found its fortune. They are not Shakespearean manifestations, and so need not be enlarged upon in this place.

In spite of its modern growth, Coventry remains a very picturesque city. In Butcher Row, and in narrow old alleys little touched by modern developments, something of the mediÆval place may yet be traced; and in those two charming old almshouses, Bablake’s Hospital, founded in 1506, and “Ford’s Hospital,” built in 1529, half-timbered work is seen very nearly at its best.