Charles G. Harper

GREAT FARINGDON—BUCKLAND—BAMPTON-IN-THE-BUSH—COTE—SHIFFORD

Great Faringdon, on the right, or Berkshire, side of the river, is well worth visiting. Technically a town, its inhabitants would probably feel injured by any one styling it a village; but there are towns and towns; and Faringdon, although it perhaps may not be styled “decayed,” is at any rate unprogressive. There be those among us who are so constituted that they mislike the word “progress,” and are repelled by any place they hear to be “progressive.” This is entirely due to the recent connotation of “progress.” Modern men have seen so much of the futile striving and competition, the shameless advertising, and the sordid things that stand for “progress” in these days, that they look with yearning upon those spots that are said to be “unprogressive,” and ardently wish their lives might be lived therein, instead of being merely existed where the struggle for survival is waged with ever-increasing severity.

Great Faringdon—how humorously that epithet sounds to a Londoner!—is unprogressive in the best of these senses. You do not find, on approaching it, the ragged slummy selvedges that fringe the towns where commerce thrives so abundantly, where the rich grow daily richer, and the poor daily more abjectly and helplessly impoverished. No matter from what direction you approach Faringdon, along none of the five entrances to the town do you see mean suburbs spreading grimly into the shamed fields, nor plentiful notice-boards declaring “This eligible land” to be “ripe for building.” Faringdon’s expansive days are done, and no man can see the likelihood of their return, for, although the town is situated on such a network of highways that travellers by road can scarce get about the neighbourhood without going through it, the great days of the road are passed, and the motor-car is not going to bring them back in that old sense. The last blow was delivered at the chances of Faringdon’s expansion when the main line of the Great Western Railway was carried four miles to the south, past Uffington, whence a small branch line comes, to serve the town, and stops here.

Faringdon is an historic place, but its history ceased to be a living thing at so remote a period that it seems, to many who do not trouble to come to close quarters with it, to be a very dryasdust history indeed. It is largely the history of the Saxon kings, to many of whom Faringdon was a favourite place of residence. But of all these times, and of later royal visits, no tangible record is left; and the Faringdon of to-day is just an ancient market-town that contrives to live quietly on the needs of the surrounding agricultural population. In a rapidly-changing England, this town is one of a few that, made to stand aside from the ways of modern trade, remain very much what they have been during the last two centuries. The last incidents that ever stirred the pulses here were election contests, and the last issues in the larger sort that disturbed town and district were fought out so long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century, in the attack and defence of Faringdon in the Great Rebellion. Then the Royalists held the town and Faringdon House, the seat of the Pye family, behind the church. The Pyes had been in possession of the property only some twenty-three years when the troubles broke out, having purchased it in 1622. They were then on the popular side, Sir Robert Pye, indeed, having married the sister of John Hampden, the patriot, who lost his life at Chalgrove Field. Greatly to his mortification, the Royalists had seized and garrisoned his mansion, and it fell to his lot to besiege it. The elder of the two sons of this Sir Robert was that Hampden Pye, born in 1647, who is the subject of the Ingoldsby Legend of “Hamilton Tighe,” “a sobriquet interfering neither with rhyme nor rhythm,” as the author justly claims. The legend of Hampden Pye, which Barham thus versified, was one once current in Faringdon and Uffington, and the surrounding district; and told how he, the eldest son, heir to the family estates, contracted what his family regarded as an undesirable marriage, and how he was hounded on to join the naval expedition to Vigo, under the command of Sir George Rooke, in 1702. His own mother is said to have been chiefly instrumental in this, and to have been among those who secured his being placed prominently in the post of danger, so that he might be got rid of. One of the earliest shots in action carried off the head of Hampden Pye, who was by no means the reckless youngster we might at first suppose, for a comparison of dates shows him to have been fifty-five years of age at the time.

It was believed in Faringdon that always afterwards, when his mother went out in her carriage, the spectre of her son stood at the door with his head under his arm, handed her in, and took his seat opposite. He grew even more troublesome after her death, but was at last “laid” for a hundred years in a small pond near the house by an eminent divine skilled in dealing with refractory ghosts. “The period,” continues Barham, writing in 1832, “lapsed a few years ago, and the people are now very shy of passing the said pond after dark.” And now the best part of another century has fled; but in the meanwhile the ghost of Hampden Pye appears to have been quiescent.

But the most famous of the Pyes was that Henry James Pye, born here in 1745, who was descended from Edmund, the younger brother of the unfortunate Hampden, and was not only a typical county gentleman, and sometime a member of Parliament, but became also, in 1790, Poet Laureate. The appointment was one of Pitt’s political jobs, and given as a reward for support in Parliament. Pye effected a change in the old-time payment of poets-laureate in kind by the annual gift of a tierce of Canary wine, and accepted an annual £27 instead.

He was, in addition, a police magistrate at Westminster; and was as excellent on the bench as he was execrable in verse. When the office of Poet Laureate comes under discussion, Pye in the eighteenth century, and Alfred Austin in the present era, are inevitably bracketed together, for the purpose of showing to what depths of inanity a Poet Laureate can descend. But both these laurelled bards have been unjustly handled. To deliberately select the inferior versifier of the age and to make him Laureate is of itself a doubtful official service to a man; and then for critics to maliciously pick out his most feeble efforts by which to judge him and hold him up to contempt is cruel. It is something as though we were to appraise Tennyson by the Skipping Rope (which is worse than any of Pye’s futilities) and to leave Maud altogether out of account. Pye’s idea of poetry was at any rate a part of the habit of thought current at the time, and of the same order of flowery compliment as that of Thomson, who wrote The Seasons: although infinitely inferior in execution. Topographical description, interlarded with generous praise of his country-gentlemen neighbours, whose seats dotted the country he described: that was largely Pye’s idea of poetry; and not a vicious, if on the other hand not an inspired, view.

Pye was not a man favoured by fortune. When his father died, he found himself heir indeed to the family estates, but they were encumbered with debts to the amount of £50,000; and soon afterwards the house was burned down. He sold the estates about 1785, from sheer inability to make head against his financial embarrassments; and Faringdon knew the Pyes no more.

But Faringdon Clump, already mentioned, was planted by him before the family connection was thus severed, and still flourishes; while his poetry lies dead and forgotten by the world at large. His other chief work was the pulling down of that Faringdon House which had been besieged by his ancestor, and replacing it by a new residence.

The large parish church, with curiously squat central tower, suffered greatly during those warlike operations of 1645-6. The spire, with which the tower was at that time surmounted, was destroyed, as also was the south transept; since rebuilt. Numerous monuments and brasses are to be found in this extensive Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular building. Prominent among these monuments is the fine alabaster altar-tomb of Sir Henry Unton, 1596, in the Unton Chapel. It was placed here by his widow, Dame Dorothy Unton, whose own effigy, in a kneeling attitude, was at the feet of that of her husband, until tactless “restorers” effected a very injudicious separation, and not only took her away from her husband, but out of the Unton Chapel, and placed her in that of the Pyes.

Sir Henry Unton was both a warrior and a diplomat. He had earned his knighthood at the siege of Zutphen, where his kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney, met his death. Afterwards he became Ambassador to France. It was while in Paris that he sent to the young Duke of Guise, who had spoken slightingly of Queen Elizabeth, a bitter challenge to a duel:—

“Forasmuch as in the lodging of Lord Dumayne, and in public elsewhere, impudently and indiscreetly and overboldly, you spoke badly of that Sovereign whose sacred person I in this country represent: to maintain both by word and weapon—her honour (which never was called in question among people of honour and virtue)—I say you have most wickedly lied; and you shall do nothing else than lie whensoever you shall dare to taxe her honour. Moreover, that her sacred person (being one of the most complete and virtuous Princesses that lives in the world) ought not to be evil spoken of by the tongue of such a perfidious Traytor to her Law and Country as you are; and hereupon I do defy and challenge your person to mine with such manner of arms as you shall like or choose, be it on horseback or on foot. Nor would I have you think that there is any inequality between us, I being issued of as great a race and noble house in all respects as yourself. So … I will maintain my words, and the lie which I have given, and which you should not endure if you have any courage at all in you. If you consent not to meet me hereupon, I will hold you, and cause you to be held, for the errantest coward and most slanderous slave that exists in France. I expect your answer.” The Duc de Guise did not accept this offensive challenge, although thrice repeated.

Built into the exterior east wall of the chancel is an unconventional monument. This is a cannon-ball, underneath which we read that it is “Sacred to the memory of John Buckley, formerly surgeon in His Majesty’s Navy, who in an engagement with the French squadron off the coast of Portugal, Aug. 17, 1759, had his leg shot off by the above ball.”

In the middle of Faringdon’s steeply-descending street, here suddenly growing very narrow, is the old town-hall and market-house, supported on stone pillars, after a pattern familiar throughout Berkshire and other counties, and formerly open on the ground floor. A modern Fire Station now, however, fully occupies one end, and an old-fashioned lock-up, with barred and bolt-studded door, part of the other. On the stone pillar beside that prison door there is still to be seen a fragment of the hand-pillory, or iron wristlet, by which petty offenders were formerly secured until they had purged their offending.

Returning now to Radcot Bridge, and the boat which is waiting all this while to convey us on our downward voyage, we pass on to Radcot Lock, a mile down, and under “Old Man’s Bridge”; or rather the successor of an old wooden bridge that went by that name, and is now replaced by a smarter, white-painted bridge of like material, of which type there are several others between this and Oxford. The landscape is here very open: the Berkshire hills situated at some considerable distance off, on the right, while the flat Oxfordshire plain, on the left, is lost in infinity. Here, on the way to Rushey Lock, are many backwaters, so screened by the tall growths of midsummer rushes and by the drooping branches of the willows, now made heavy by fully-grown foliage, and further masked by dense masses of water-lilies, that their existence is scarcely suspected. And thus we come to Tadpole Bridge, of which the very best to be said is that it is an eminently useful, and quite inoffensive stone structure of one arch, perhaps nearly a century old. We shall find, proceeding down the Thames, that all too often it is difficult to award even such negative praise as this to the bridges that cross the river.

Here Tadpole Bridge carries an excellent road across to Buckland, two miles on the right, in Berkshire; and two miles to the left, to Bampton, in Oxfordshire. We will first see what Buckland may be like.

It is soon obvious that it occupies a site on the ridge of hills running between Oxford and Faringdon; for its square church-tower presently becomes prominent on the skyline.

Buckland was for many generations, and until the present time of writing, in possession of the Throckmorton family, but now the extravagances of bygone baroneted Throckmortons, and the mortgage-charges they recklessly heaped up, have overtaken the present generation, and Buckland has at last been sold into other hands.

The great church of Buckland, largely Norman and Early English, is neighboured by a modern Roman Catholic church. The old church contains some monuments of these long-descended Throckmortons, and others to their predecessors, the Yate family, among them that of a seventeenth-century baronet and his lady, Sir Edward Yate and Lady Katherine, who would appear, between them, according to their epitaph, to have held all the virtues in fee-simple:

So the ancient tradition of the “bad Baronet” has its exception here, at any rate. But what shall we say of the lady whose “sanctimonious zeal” is the subject of such confident allusion? Only this: that there are two different meanings to “sanctimonious,” and that we must give her the benefit of the best of them. Referring to dictionaries we find that to be sanctimonious is either to be holy, or to be “hypocritically pious or devout,” like Shakespeare’s “sanctimonious pirate.” Unfortunately for the posthumous fame of the doubtless altogether estimable lady, there is but one connotation of that expression nowadays, and it is not the flattering one.

The stately stone eighteenth-century mansion of the Throckmortons, with widespreading wings, ending in pavilions looking more than a thought too airy for this cold climate of ours, was the work of the Woods, to whom much of the architectural dignity of the city of Bath is due.

There are (or we must now say there were) curious relics in this grand house of the Roman Catholic Throckmortons. They included a chemise of that precious “martyr,” Mary, Queen of Scots, whom we know from the pages of history to have been one of the most wicked women that ever lived, and who was justly—but belatedly—beheaded; and a gold medal of Charles the First, another “martyr.”

Here, too, is, or was, the famous coat made for Sir John Throckmorton in 1811. Curious prints of the making of this celebrated article of attire, brought into being as the subject of a wager, are still sometimes to be met with. The fashioning of it was a hey-presto! kind of business. From the shearing of the sheep, all through the many processes of treating the wool, weaving the cloth, and making the coat, to the wearing of that coat for dinner at Newbury, the total time occupied was but thirteen hours and twenty minutes!

The way to Bampton from Tadpole Bridge is uneventful and unfrequented. This district was long notorious for its entire lack of roads, and we may read in old histories, “There was no stoned road of any kind leading from Bampton to the neighbouring towns and villages, and travellers were in the habit of striking across the common and finding their way to Witney, Burford, Oxford, or any other place as best they could.”

From these circumstances Bampton was known as “Bampton-in-the-Bush,” and appears of speculative interest; but Bampton-in-the-Bush has long since lost the greater part of its name; and now that the roads in these parts of Oxfordshire are no better and no worse than those to be found elsewhere in this county, and now the scrub-woods and widespreading common-lands that once overspread the locality have given place to flat and uninteresting fields, it is “Bampton” only; and a very dull place at that.

Its church is the principal feature—and a very beautiful and unusual feature—of Bampton. The tall stone spire is visible for miles across the level landscape. It is largely a Transitional-Norman and Early English church, and cruciform, with central tower and north and south transepts. The broach-spire is supported at the angles by graceful flying buttresses, from which rise shafts, each of these four shafts bearing the stone effigy of an apostle. The effect of these figures, standing out boldly against the sky, is very striking and unusual.

In the porch the otherwise unremarkable tablet to Thomas Euston, who died in 1685, proceeds to record the death of “Mary, his only wife,” in 1699. No polygamist he, at any rate!

The exceptional size and beauty of Bampton church are greatly due to the peculiar ecclesiastical history of Bampton, which until 1845 rejoiced, or ought to have rejoiced, in the possession of no fewer than three vicars for this one church; and, what is more extraordinary still, these three clergymen had each a vicarage, standing respectively north, south, and east of the church. To complete this holy fence, so to speak around it, on the west side was situated the Deanery, now a farmhouse, where the Deans of Exeter once resided when taking their summer holidays. The origin of this remarkable arrangement is due to Leofric, first Bishop of Exeter, a native of Bampton, who, having endowed the church, presented the living to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter; with the stipulation that all vicars presented must have already served in the diocese of Exeter. The three vicars were styled “Portionists,” each taking four months’ duty in the year. This curious arrangement came to an end in 1845, when the parish was divided into Bampton, Bampton Aston, and Bampton Lew, each with its vicar, and either of the two newly-constituted parishes, it may be added, with its fearsome would-be Gothic church of that not sufficiently instructed period.

No one ever reads architectural descriptions, and so let it suffice to say that the interior of Bampton church is very well worth seeing; notably for its fine Saxon and Transitional-Norman chancel-arch. The monuments include one with a mutilated stone effigy of George Tompson, dated 1603. It could never have been a good example of the sculptor’s art; and time and unsympathetic hands have conspired to reduce it to something the appearance of an almost shapeless log, but the rhymed epitaph, cast in characteristic early seventeenth-century form, has a certain prettiness of imagination:

There stands in the flat country between Bampton and Northmoor, amid the level meadows, washed, and not infrequently severely flooded, by the Charney Brook, by the Windrush, and by many mazy rills, the picturesque old mansion, now a farmhouse of a superior residential type, of Cote. It was built in the reign of James the First, between the years 1608 and 1612, by one Thomas Horde, and was originally surrounded by a moat. Alterations, apparently undertaken in 1704, the date of the fine wrought ironwork of the old gates secluding it from the road, abolished the moat; but a squat tower at one end of the grey, many-gabled mansion still discloses the old ideas of defence. It was at one time some twenty feet higher. At that period, when Thomas Horde built his house at Cote, times were, in fact, still unsettled, and one never knew into what dangers one might be drawn. The very year when he began building was the year of the Gunpowder Plot; and when such things could be, a man did well to stand upon the defensive.

Beyond Cote, towards the river, lies Shifford, secluded and rarely visited. The old church of Shifford fell down in 1772, and a new building took its place. This was removed in 1863.

Shifford is traditionally the scene of a Parliament, or Witanagemot, held here by Alfred the Great about A.D. 890: “There sate at Shifford many thanes, many bishops, and many learned men, wise earls, and awful knights: there was Earl Elfrick, very learned in the law; and Alfred, England’s herdsman, England’s darling; he was king of England; he taught them that could hear him how they should live.”

There still remain, in the meadows by Shifford, traces of earthworks and the stump of an ancient cross, sufficiently proving that this was indeed anciently a place of considerable importance. But commerce with the world of affairs no longer stirs the pulses of Shifford, or the neighbourhood of it, and the Thames steals softly along, between tall palisades, as it were, of rushes, and past the sentinel willows, with only an occasional farmstead in sight; farms where one might almost suppose the farmers to consume their own produce, so remote from all methods of conveying it away do they seem to be.