Charles G. Harper

WYTHAM—THE OLD ROAD—BINSEY AND THE ORATORY OF ST. FRIDESWIDE—THE VANISHED VILLAGE OF SEACOURT—GODSTOW AND “FAIR ROSAMOND”—MEDLEY—FOLLY BRIDGE.

The river makes a great semicircular bend, as between New Bridge and Oxford, so that although but six miles between the two, measured in a straight line on the map, it is fifteen miles by water. Cumnor stands roughly in the middle of the projecting part of Berkshire enclosed within this bend, and Wytham almost at the farthest northward fling of it, just below where Eynsham Bridge (otherwise styled Swinford Bridge) carries the great highway from Oxford across the Thames towards Witney and Gloucester. Eynsham, a quaint old village, is one mile distant.

Wytham, amid the deep woodlands, on its bold hill-top in the bight of the river, is a sequestered place, the site of the mansion called Wytham Abbey, seat of the Earls of Abingdon. “Abbey” is a fanciful term, as applied here, for no religious house ever stood upon the site, and the existing buildings arose in the sixteenth century, at the bidding of one of the Harcourts, who then owned the property. How it eventually came through several hands and at last by marriage into the Bertie family, Earls of Abingdon, is not, I imagine, a matter of general interest. Wytham village, lying beneath that lordly seat, is one of the most charming villages in Berkshire, which is saying a good deal in the commendatory sort. It is, and has long been, famed for its strawberry-growing, and was once even recommended by the faculty to invalids for a “strawberry cure.” I cannot imagine the ailment for which the eating of strawberries is a likely remedy, but a pleasanter “cure” could hardly be invented.

Wytham woods crest Beacon Hill, and in them the pheasants are plentiful. This is the equivalent of saying that there is no right of way. But anciently the road from Oxford to Eynsham, and on to Witney and Gloucester, ran across this hill: a plaguey bad road, a very beast of a road. The track of it may still be followed (by permission sought and obtained from Lord Abingdon, let me hasten to add) steeply and roughly up through these sylvan surroundings, and as roughly and as steeply down again, to Eynsham Bridge, which was built in 1799 by a former Earl, to replace the ford by which all wayfarers up to that time were obliged to cross the river. It is still a toll-bridge for vehicles, levying the modest sum of one halfpenny for cycles, and sixpence for motor-cars. The arduous road from Oxford across the hill was abandoned about the same time, when the existing so-called “Seven Bridges Road,” leading along the levels to Eynsham Bridge, was reconstructed.

There is a great deal of interest wrapped up in that old road. It left Oxford on much the same line as now, but was neither drained nor embanked, and proceeded for some distance from the city along swampy ground, so that travellers upon it from Oxford to Eynsham were made to feed full of varied discomforts. Proceeding through Botley, often at the peril of their lives from floods, they then bore away to the right, for Wytham, passing through the village of Seacourt on the way. From Wytham, mounting and descending the hazardous track over Beacon Hill, at the imminent danger of their necks, they then came to the peril of the ford; and having haply passed over this in safety, felt that risks from natural causes were over. There remained only the bandits of an early period, and the highwaymen of a later to give them pause. As for Binsey, it is merely an insignificant hamlet situated at a very dead-end of traffic. You shall find it readily enough by proceeding from the “Perch” inn, beside the river, just above Medley Weir; but it is quite other guesswork seeking it from Wytham, for no way exists where formerly an ancient path ran, and a channel cut from the Thames winds a prohibitive course through the flat meadows.

Binsey, indeed, stands on an island in olden times called Thorney, where St. Frideswide, that celebrated Oxford saint, first built her oratory, the name of the isle being then, we are told, changed to “Binsey”: absurdly said to signify the “isle of prayer.” Here she also founded the well of St. Margaret, miraculously springing forth in answer to her prayer, as springs were wont to do in the eighth century. They have long since refused to do the like. It is perhaps not remarkable that Binsey and this famous well in after-years became, and long remained, the objects of pilgrimage. The halt and the lame, the epileptic and the otherwise afflicted, flocked to Binsey and were cured, hanging up their crutches in the oratory and festooning it with their discarded bandages: and incidentally leaving solid gifts of money behind, greatly to the gain of the monastery of St. Frideswide, in Oxford, to which Binsey belonged from 1132 until the end of such things, four hundred years later.

The crowds of pilgrims who came out of Oxford, making for the oratory and well of St. Frideswide, turned off at the vanished village of Seacourt.

Few places have perished so utterly as this long-lost habitation of men, styled at various times “Sekecourt,” “Seuecurde,” and “Sechworth”; for all we shall now discover of it is a farm so named. But Seacourt was for many centuries a considerable place. Not only did it lie directly upon the then highway to the west, but it was the pilgrims’ lodging-place, and for the accommodation of such it is recorded to have possessed no fewer than twenty-four inns. With the successive blows of the dissolution of the monasteries, when pilgrimages ceased out of the land, and then when the road itself was diverted, Seacourt’s doom befel. It subsided into ruin, and became the abode of foxes and wild-fowl; and presently the very stones of it were carted away.

The self-satisfied attitude of Binsey folk in summer, and the woe-begone, dreary, flooded-out experiences of the same people in winter are amusingly contrasted in traditional sayings, current in these parts. Thus, in summer, a villager, asked where he lives, is supposed to say, “Binsey; where d’ye think?” but in winter he will reply, disconsolately, “Binsey, Lord help us!” And it needs only a week or so of rain in one of our tearful summers for the low-lying meadows to be flooded, completely islanding the place in the midst of something resembling an inland sea.

In modern times the holy well has been found at the west end of Binsey church and restored, as the inscription records: “St. Margaret’s spring, granted, as it is told us, to the prayers of St. Frideswide, long polluted and choked up, was restored to use by T. J. Prout, student of Christ Church, the vicar, in the year of redemption, 1874.” The well may be holy, but the water again in these days looks provocative of typhoid.

Between Wytham and Binsey, and directly upon the river, is a very much better known place than either; to wit, Godstow. “Fair Rosamond” and Godstow have employed the morbidly-sentimental pens of uncounted scribblers. It is easy to be either sentimental or morbid, and of the easiest to be morbidly-sentimental over unworthy subjects: hence the exploitation in this wise of “Fair Rosamond.”

Godstow Nunnery, it seems, was founded by Edith, an ex-chÈre amie of Henry the First, and wife of the second Robert D’Oilgi, or D’Oyley, lord of Oxford. The buildings were consecrated with great state by the Bishop of Lincoln in 1138. There is little need here to dwell upon the history of the nunnery, which in general is sufficiently dull; and Godstow is, in fact, interesting only on account of that highly improper person known in romantic history as “Fair Rosamond,” who was educated here. The name of Rosamond, if we may believe Dryden, who, as a poet, is perhaps not to be altogether relied upon as an authority, was really Jane. It might have been worse. However:

That she was daughter of Walter, Baron Clifford, of Hay, in Wales, is historically certain; but much else relating to her is merely picturesque legend. She appears to have been born about 1150, and was educated in this then newly-built nunnery. Here, in some unexplained way, she attracted the attention of the King, Henry the Second, and became his mistress, greatly to the jealous rage of his Queen, Eleanor of Poitou, the divorced consort of the King of France, who by many was held to be no better. This association of the King and of Rosamond seems to have lasted about four years.

Legends tell variously how Queen Eleanor burst in upon a secret bower in which the King had hidden her at Woodstock, and gave her the choice of death by dagger or poison, and how she chose the bowl rather than the steel, drank of it and so died; but these are unhistorical. All that seems fairly certain is that a break in her relations with Henry occurred, and that she retired to Godstow and died there, some four years later, about 1176.

A great mass of legend has accumulated around these bare outlines of her story, and poets have freely employed their imagination upon her. With remarkable unanimity, they assume Rosamond to have been a blonde:

That she had two children seems to be established, but that they were, as often stated, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, and Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, has been disputed.

Rosamond, we are told, was for sake of her wit and beauty received back by the nuns of Godstow with alacrity. Doubtless she told them many strange tales of the wicked world, for who better qualified to know? Her body was buried before the high altar. King John, according to Lambarde, raised a gorgeous monument to her, inscribed,

Speed paraphrased this as follows:

A few years later, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, paying a round of pastoral visits in his diocese, in which Oxford was then included, coming to Godstow, saw this gorgeous monument and asked what great and good person it was, then, who lay here. It was, said the nuns, the tomb of Rosamond, sometime mistress of Henry the Second, who for love of her had done much good to that church. Thereupon the saintly and scandalised Bishop declared that the “hearse of a harlot was not a fit spectacle for a quire of virgins to contemplate, nor was the front of God’s altar a proper station for it”; and he directed that she should be removed and buried outside, “lest Christian religion should grow in contempt.”

Leland, diligent antiquary, tells us that in after-years Rosamond’s tomb was here, inscribed “Tumba RosamundÆ,” and that her bones had been found, enclosed in lead, “and within that closed in leather; when it was opened there was a very swete smell came out of it.” Time thus gave the lie to that fearful old epitaph of King John’s day.

The nunnery of Godstow when dissolved in the reign of Henry the Eighth contained eighteen nuns, and its annual income was £274; a considerable sum as prices then ruled. The property was granted to that Dr. Owen who at the same time secured Cumnor, and the domestic buildings became a secular residence. This was held during the Civil War by Colonel Walter, and was taken by Fairfax in May 1646, and burned.

All we see nowadays of Godstow nunnery is a small building, ruined and roofless, apparently of no very great antiquity, for besides the Perpendicular window there are no other evidences of Gothic architecture, the two other windows being merely flat-headed Elizabethan insertions.

Efforts have been made from time to time to discover the remains of Rosamond. Two stone coffins were dug up about 1800, and in one of them were the bones of a young woman. On the supposition that this was the sarcophagus of Rosamond, a once well-known antiquary and citizen of Oxford, Alderman Fletcher, appropriated it, and conceived the eccentric idea of being buried therein; and when his time came, in 1826, he was accordingly laid in it, in the church of Yarnton, a few miles distant.

An uncommon plant, said to have been introduced from foreign parts by the nuns, still grows freely in these meadows by the grey ruins. It is known to botanists as Aristolochia clematitis, but to ordinary country folk as “birthwort” and was used in confinement cases. You may identify it by its heart-shaped leaf and bold yellow flower.

The charm of the river fades away after passing Medley Lock and nearing Oxford, and suffers a change into the commercial ragged edges and untidy squalid purlieus of a great city.

We may read in old dry-as-dust authors how “Medley” derives from “Middleway”—this being midway between Godstow and Oxford—but we need not (indeed, we had better not) put any faith in that derivation. Also, according to those same authorities, it was a scene of great resort for “divers pleasures.” Of what those diversified pleasures chiefly consisted we must judge rather from the verses of George Withers than from the grudging phrase of Dryasdust, who, forgetful of his own youth, gives us no details. But let George Withers himself inform us:

Let nothing be said of the river between Medley and Folly Bridge. What should one say of gas-works in these pages, or of other evidences that we are not living in ancient times, and that the city of Oxford is a populous place, and up-to-date in all respects except that of its University?

Folly Bridge serves to mark the limits of the Upper and the Lower river, as well as its prime purpose of carrying the road to Abingdon across the stream; and it stands in the minds of many for the enterprising and industrious Salter, whose steamboats and whose row-boats are centred thereby.

The real original name of Folly Bridge, dating back to Norman times, is “Grand Pont,” that is to say, Great Bridge; great according to the ideas of those times. Even so lately as 1844, when the first Great Western railway-station was opened near this point, the bridge was still well known by its old name, in addition to the other, for the station was called after it, “Grandpont”; but, in the years that have passed since then, the name of “Folly Bridge” alone has survived, and you might expend the whole of a day asking for it by its original style, and not find any one who knows it.

In the middle of the old bridge stood an ancient tower known traditionally as “Friar Bacon’s Study,” where that learned man had been accustomed to take astronomical observations. It straddled across the roadway and formed, in fact, one of the gateways of the city. A strange saying was current of this tower, to the effect that when a man of greater learning than Bacon passed under it, the tower would fall. It never did fall, but was pulled down by the city corporation, as an obstruction to the road, in 1779. Years before that date, it had been let to a person named Welcome, who not only repaired it, but built another storey. The citizens of Oxford then called it “Welcome’s Folly.”

The bridge was rebuilt between the years 1825 and 1827; but, although Welcome is forgotten, his supposed folly still, as we perceive, gives the place a name. There can be no doubt that, to many uninquiring people, the name of the bridge seems to be a satire on the pleasure-seeking life of those so-called scholars, the University men, to whom boating and the “bumping” races are more than all the wisdom of the schools.

Below Folly Bridge begins that long line of glorified house-boats, headquarters of the various college boating-clubs, known as the “University Barges,” stationary along the left bank of the river, by Christ Church meadows. The ethics of bumping or being bumped, and the sporting politics of the Torpids or the Eights are subjects by themselves, and not to be discussed here.

What, strangers ask, are Torpids? The name suggests a boa-constrictor dined to repletion, and reduced to a state of torpidity; it is, however, merely the survival of an old Oxford nickname for the less active among boating men, who, roused by it, and adopting it, took to racing among themselves, as a separate class. The extinct “sloggers” on the river Cam at Cambridge, derived similarly, from the taunt of “slow-goer.”

The racecourse of these clubs is between Folly Bridge and Iffley: scenically a dull stretch of river, however exciting it may be from the aquatic sportsmen’s point of view. And if the river between Oxford and Iffley be dull, what shall we say of the road thither?