Charles G. Harper

NEW BRIDGE, THE OLDEST ON THE THAMES—STANDLAKE—GAUNT’S HOUSE—NORTHMOOR—STANTON HARCOURT—BESSELSLEIGH

The Oxfordshire side of the river continues as flat as ever, to New Bridge, which, rising greyly from amid the sedges, commands extensive views, less by reason of its own height, which is nothing to speak of, than by the lowness of these level lands. New Bridge, which carries the Abingdon and Witney road across—it is not a greatly-frequented road—is the oldest bridge existing on the river. The traveller who has spent much time in exploring in the highways and byways of England is not surprised at this paradox, and has indeed met with so many Newtowns and Newports, Newmarkets, New Inns, New Colleges, and the like that are demonstrably of a hoary antiquity, and older than most other towns, markets, inns, and colleges, that he really expects a New Bridge to be at least five centuries gone in newness. And this bridge was built c. 1260, by the monks of a neighbouring monastery, which itself has wholly disappeared, while their old pont remains as sturdy as ever.

It is a queer, seven-arched building, just as Leland wrote of it in the time of Henry the Eighth, “lying in low meadows, often overflowed with rage of rain.” At the Berkshire end is the “Maybush” inn, and on the Oxfordshire side is the “Rose,” in friendly rivalry; but where the trade comes from, in this lonely situation, to keep them both going, is a mystery. The customers can be but few, but what magnificent thirsts they must possess!

At New Bridge the river Windrush falls into the Thames, from its source in the Cotswolds, thirty miles away, after passing through Witney, and by some very beautiful scenes. It is the “nitrous Windrush” of Drayton’s verse: those supposed nitric qualities of its waters having originally led to the establishment of Witney’s blanket-making industry.

That the flat, low-lying lands here were in former times under water seems sufficiently evident in the name of Standlake, a village a mile-and-a-half distant from New Bridge. A British village, discovered in 1857, near by, may have been one of those lake-villages in which, for security, our remote ancestors dwelt. The church of Standlake has a quaint semi-detached octangular tower, crowned with a spire.

There are some curious and interesting places to be found in these flat, unfrequented lands. Proceeding towards Northmoor, ever and again crossing tributary rills of the Windrush, the moated manor-house, now a farm, of “Gaunt’s House” lies secluded amid meadows. It takes its name from one John Gaunt, who originally built it about 1440, but there is nothing nearly so old here to-day. The place has its own little niche in history, for in the seventeenth century, at the outbreak of the Civil War, it was the property of that Dr. Samuel Fell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, who was the subject of the famous undergraduate rhyme—

The Doctor was a Royalist, and his moated house here was held for that side in 1644. After a stubborn defence by its garrison of fifty men, who kept a besieging force of eight hundred at bay for three days, it surrendered on May 31, 1645. The house, greatly injured in this warlike passage, was rebuilt in 1669 by Dr. John Fell, who also was Dean of Christ Church. It is not a picturesque house, and seems to have been greatly modernised about the beginning of the nineteenth century. The woodwork of one of the doors is, however, curiously pierced, as though for musketry defence.

But, although the house itself is commonplace, the broad moat, brimming full of water, is beautiful, and in summer-time is so covered with waterlilies that the water itself is not to be seen. Let those who think this the language of exaggeration go and see for themselves.

An old bridge, replacing a former drawbridge, gives access to the house, through two tall gateposts surmounted by worn stone heraldic effigies, blunted by time out of all recognisable likeness; not only to anything in nature, but even to anything in heraldry. Here, serving to keep the wooden gateway open, is an iron cannon-ball found in the moat, which, according to an inscription on the wall, was cleared in 1883.

Northmoor village, near at hand, has an interesting church of the Early English period, and a charming and unspoiled Jacobean mansion adjoining, which has the appearance of never having been altered since the first building of it.

Oddly placed by the road between mansion and church, is a delightful old timbered pigeon-house, which seems to be contemporary with the old residence.

At the west end of the church a quaintly balustered bell-loft bears the following inscription, obviously considered (by those who inscribed it) to be poetry:

Which was very wrong of him, a Protestant, living under the reformed religion.

The inner sides of the aisle-window splays here at Northmoor exhibit that peculiarity already noticed in several churches of the upper Thames Valley: a more or less decorative treatment of the inner arch. Here the special treatment is confined to a corbelling-out of the archway; but this is effected in a quaint manner: the corbel on one side being provided with a kind of vaulting-shaft. Here, as elsewhere along, or near, the course of the Thames, the strong influence of the river upon the imagination and work of the old architectural sculptors is distinctly to be noted: the capitals of the shafts being carved with representations of aquatic plants.

But the chief attraction, in all these parts adjacent, is of course the village of Stanton Harcourt, and that it is so, you who penetrate to it, along the level roads, cannot fail easily to perceive, if not by evidence of many sightseers making for it, then, at any rate, in the numerous notices displayed offering accommodation for tea-parties. Stanton Harcourt is beautiful, alike in its old-world rustic village of thatched, unpretending cottages, screened by noble elms from rude blasts, and in the romantic and unusual group formed by the ancient church-tower and the towers of the old manor-house. Approaching, it is as though the church had two towers, for the chief one of the manor-house is very like its ecclesiastical neighbour.

Stanton Harcourt must have derived the first part of its name from some stone road, but the road is obscure, and an absurd local legend, almost too childishly-ridiculous to be repeated, tells us that it arose from the brave deeds of a former Harcourt, who, in that conveniently vague period, “ages ago,” was fighting desperately in some unnamed battle, and was enjoined by his chief to fight on. “Stand to un, Harcourt,” he exclaimed; and Harcourt feats of arms in “standing to un” accordingly won the day. A curious thing may be noted: that the stones called the “Devil’s Quoits,” near the village, are themselves thought to be relics of a battle fought in A.D. 614, between the Saxons and the British; long before there were any Harcourts in the land.

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The Harcourts first came into possession of Stanton over seven hundred years ago. It was in 1125 that the second Queen of Henry the First gave the property to one Millicent de Camville, whose daughter married Richard de Harcourt, thus the first of a long line of that family, which really ended with the mother of Edward Vernon, who assumed his mother’s maiden name, and died in 1847, as Archbishop of York. The later and present Harcourts are therefore really Vernons.

The ancient and beautiful manor-house of Stanton Harcourt, a group of buildings forming a quadrangle, was built about the middle of the fifteenth century, with a rebuilt gatehouse tower of a century later, the work of a Simon Harcourt of that period. The house was occupied until 1688; and then, with the death of Sir Philip Harcourt, it fell upon evil times, for his widow deserted the place. Nuneham Courtney, which, in the course of these pages, we shall visit, below Oxford, had been purchased in 1710 by a later Simon Harcourt, and to it the family seat was removed, and the manor-house at Stanton allowed still further to fall into decay. Seventy years later the buildings, by that time mostly ruinous, were demolished, with the exception of the gatehouse, one of the towers of the mansion, and the curious and interesting ancient kitchen, which has only one fellow to it in England: the well-known and remarkable Abbot’s Kitchen at Glastonbury.

This Stanton Harcourt kitchen, standing now beside quiet lawns, and overgrown with creepers and ivy, has long lost any association with cookery, and looks particularly ecclesiastical, except perhaps for the rampant griffin, holding a vane, which crowns the tall pyramidal tiled roof, and wears rather a devilish expression. He is a formidable griffin, too, measuring eight feet high.

To properly impress the reader, or the beholder, with this kitchen, it is necessary to give its dimensions. It has a total height of seventy-two feet, made up of thirty-nine feet of the wall, twenty-five feet roof, and the eight feet, as aforesaid, of that banner-bearing monster.

There are no chimneys. The fires were made against the walls, which are three feet thick; the smoke from them escaping through wooden louvres, or shutters, above. According to the direction from which the wind blew, these louvres were shut to on one or other of the four sides. The mechanical ingenuity of the age was at a low level, and was not able to contrive means by which these ventilators could be opened or shut from within; so we find a turret staircase leading up to the roof, around which runs an open-air passage for access to the louvres.

Alexander Pope, residing in the neighbouring old tower during three summers, “translating” Horace, and writing fantastic letters in the meanwhile to his friend, the Duke of Buckingham, exercised his fancy on this kitchen, and found it to resemble the forge of Vulcan, the cave of Polyphemus, and the Temple of Moloch: “The horror of it has made such an impression upon the country people that they believe the witches keep their Sabbath here, and that once a year the Devil treats them with infernal venison, viz. a toasted tiger, stuffed with tenpenny nails.”

But all, according to him, was decrepit at Stanton Harcourt:—

“Its very rats are grey. I pray the roof may not fall upon them, as they are too infirm to seek other lodgings.”

It is the nature of rats to be grey; but we need not seek to deprive Pope of his point. The place was haunted, too, by the ghost of one “Lady Frances,” and we hear “some prying maids of the family report that they have seen a lady in a fardingale through the keyhole; but the matter is hushed up, and the servants are forbidden to talk of it.”

“Pope’s Tower” is in three floors. On the ground-floor is the domestic chapel, roofed in fan-vaulting. You enter it by an ante-chapel with a wooden ceiling in blue, spangled with gilt stars: a gorgeous, but tarnished firmament. The upper room, known as “Pope’s Study,” was occupied by him during two hard-working summers, and he celebrated the completion of his task by inscribing on a pane of red glass in one of the windows, “In the year 1718 Alexander Pope finished here the fifth volume of Homer.” The glass has been removed, and is now at Nuneham.

I have already placed the word “translating” in quotation-marks, to indicate the fact that Pope’s claim to have rendered Homer’s Iliad from the Greek into English verse was a mere pretence. He was no Greek scholar, and fobbed off upon his publisher and upon confiding subscribers his metrical version of translations by more scholarly persons. He grew rich upon the fraud, and still enjoys a reputation among the uncritical for a classical learning he did not possess.

The church, standing close at hand, has a central tower, of which the lower stage is clearly seen to be Early English. On this an upper stage has been reared. The junction of the two is prominently marked by the upper stage being boldly set back; producing a striking sense of massiveness.

The chancel-screen, west of the crossing of north and south transepts, is of exceptional interest, as perhaps the earliest such screen remaining in this country unaltered. The hinges and the lock and bolt of the door are in perfect order, and as good as ever they were, although now nearly seven hundred years old. The screen is of the Early English period, simple and pure in its every detail. A little more care for this relic would have resulted in the organ and the choristers’ seats being placed at less close quarters. The lock of the door is original, and so are the several curiously-patterned holes pierced through the lower part of the screen.

The altar-tomb in the north wall of the chancel, said to be that of Isabel de Camville, is very short, and its architectural details are of a hundred years’ later date than her death, leading to the supposition that this is rather an Easter sepulchre than a tomb. The sculptured emblems of the Passion support this view. On the south side is the tomb, with effigy, of Maud, daughter of Lord Grey, of Rotherfield Greys. She died, wife of Sir Thomas Harcourt, 1394. In the Harcourt Chapel, locked, and the key kept at Nuneham, many of that family lie; prominent among them Sir Robert Harcourt, and Margaret his wife, 1471; both effigies wearing the order of the Garter, the lady represented with it above the elbow of her left arm. She is one of the three dames known to be so decorated in monumental effigy: the others being the Duchess of Suffolk, at Ewelme, and Margaret Camoys, at Trotton, Sussex. There were some sixty ladies admitted to the Order between 1376 and 1488: the last of them the Lady Margaret Tudor, mother of Henry the Seventh. Since that time, the only women Companions have been reigning Sovereigns or Queens-consort.

Here, among the Harcourts, is an altar-tomb to that Archbishop of York who was not, as already shown, really a Harcourt, but a Vernon; and a life-sized marble effigy of William, third Earl Harcourt, Field-Marshal, and G.C.B., who died 1830.

On the south side of the church an unassuming tablet records the tragic fate which befel “John Hewet and Sarah Drew, an industrious young man and virtuous maiden of this parish, contracted in marriage, who, being with many others at harvest, were both in one moment killed by lightning, on the last day of July, 1718.”

Beneath are some lines written by Pope:

The Berkshire side of the river, from New Bridge downwards, now demands some notice. There, instead of the unbroken flatness that continues through Oxfordshire as far as the city of Oxford itself, you have a lofty ridge more or less closely continuing to follow the course of the stream. A fine highway runs along the ridge, with pleasant and interesting villages upon, or near it. There may be found Longworth, and Appleton; and there, too, Besselsleigh.

We can scarcely call Besselsleigh retired, for it stands directly upon this fine, broad, and well-frequented road that leads out of Oxford, on to Faringdon and only students of maps know what many towns further west. The motors come swishing along it at some very fine turns of speed, for there is none to say them nay. Such travellers never notice Besselsleigh, for the modern mansion stands well hidden within its park, and of the old house that once almost fronted the high road there is absolutely nothing left but two of the stone entrance gateposts, and those in a more or less wrecked condition. Those travellers may indeed notice the church, but even that is doubtful, for it is a very little and a very humble church, and although its little churchyard gives upon the road, it is so enshrouded by large trees and small trees that its very existence may not be suspected by quick-moving traffic.

The trees here are indeed noble, and form a splendid aisle of living green: elms, oaks, and Scotch pines intermingled. The church, rather barn-like, has an Early English double bell-cote at its west end. Of the Besils who gave this place its name in 1350 history has but a moderate amount to say. They married the estate, so to speak, with an heiress, last of the family that had hitherto held it; and in the course of time it passed from them in like manner: the heiress-general of the Besils marrying a Fettiplace. And nowadays for even a Fettiplace one may seek in vain, for that family, once so numerously spread over Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Gloucestershire, is itself extinct. But Besselsleigh did not pass from them in that accustomed manner, for they sold it to the Lenthalls in 1634, and it is still held by the same race.

“At this Legh,” says Leland, “be very fayre pastures and woodes; the Blessels hathe been lords of it syns the time of Edward the First. The Blessels cam out of Provence in Fraunce, and were men of activitye in feates of armes, as it appearith in the monuments at Legh; how he faught in lystes with a strange knyghte that challengd hym, at the whiche deade the kynge and quene at that tyme of England were present. The Blessels were countyed to have pocessyons of four hundred marks by the yere.”

Sir Peter Besils seems to have been the worthiest member of this family, for he not only gave freely of stone to the building of Burford Bridge at Abingdon, and of Culham Bridge, close by, but left £600 by his will of 1424 for the purpose of making amends for any wrong he or his ancestors may have done any man. If his executors did not spend that sum in this manner, presumably because they could find no aggrieved persons, then they were to construct roads with it.

Mr. Speaker Lenthall, to whom Besselsleigh was sold in 1630, repaired the little church, and here later members of that family are buried. But none of them have attained to the fame of Mr. Speaker, who died in 1662, and lies buried in Burford church. He was a long-headed and tactful man, and, as such, one well calculated to hold his own in troubled and uncertain times, by care not to give offence to either of the contending parties. He was member of Parliament for Woodstock, and was elected Speaker in the Long Parliament.

King Charles, at that critical moment in parliamentary history when his Majesty went down to the House in person, for the purpose of arresting the five members who had courageously withstood his will, asked Lenthall if he saw any of these five present, and he replied, with marvellous resourcefulness at so strained a juncture: “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and humbly beg your Majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your Majesty is pleased to demand of me.” Lenthall was one of the few prominent men of that time who were able to enrich themselves. While most were ruined in those long-drawn troubles, he snatched profits out of them, became extensively rich, and died owner of many manors. These are the goodly rewards of a moderator; but history gives no favourable verdict upon such.