Charles G. Harper

WALLINGFORD—GORING

And so we come, past the pretty Oxfordshire hamlet of Preston Crowmarsh, into the good old Berkshire town of Wallingford.

Wallingford town has been thrust aside by modern circumstances and altogether deposed from its ancient importance. If we look at large maps, and thereby see how several great roads here converge and cross the Thames, the reason of this former importance will be at once manifest, and likewise the existence of the great castle of Wallingford will be explained. Wallingford derives its name from “Wealinga-ford,” a Saxon term by which the ford of the Wealings—that is to say the British, or the Welsh, whom the Saxons were gradually displacing—was meant.

How they held the fort here in those dim times before the Norman came and built his great stone castle—and before even the Saxon came—we may perhaps see in the remarkable earthworks that still form three sides of a square enclosure: the river itself forming the natural defence of the fourth side. No stranger whose eye lights upon those ancient dykes in the Kine Croft can fail to notice them, nor help speculating for what purpose they were made. No facts are, or will ever be, available; but it does not require much penetration to reconstruct the needs of that primeval community protected within these earthworks, not in themselves a sufficient protection, but easily defensible in that age when they formed—as they doubtless did—the foundation for a wooden stockade.

At that time, when William the Conqueror had descended upon England and fought the battle of Hastings, there lived and ruled in Wallingford a Saxon thane, by name Wygod, who, noting the caution which forbade the Conqueror to advance directly upon London and caused him to make a circuitous march, invited him to cross the Thames here, which he accordingly did, at this place receiving the homage of the chief Saxon notables. Was Wygod, then, a traitor, or was he merely a level-headed opportunist who saw that all was lost, and sought to moderate strife by wise action? We are not in full possession of the facts, and therefore cannot tell whether to praise or blame him. But the results show that he did well: did, perhaps, better than he knew at the time of doing; for he thus—and also in giving his daughter Edith in marriage to Robert D’Oyley, one of the Conqueror’s knights—helped in the great work of bringing about the settlement of the realm and the eventual merging of the Norman and the Anglo-Saxon races. And by so much those who fell at Hastings, fighting for their country, had died in vain.

It was not very long before the great castle of Wallingford was put to proof as a fortress, for it played an important part in the wars between the Empress Maud and King Stephen. The Empress, sorely beset in the castle of Oxford, escaped thence through the snow of one December night, covered with a sheet; and by favour of that covering entirely escaped observation, and came safely to Wallingford, whither she was followed after an interval by Stephen, who built a castle at Crowmarsh, on the Oxfordshire side of the river, to keep her in check. She then escaped to Gloucester, while her trusty partisan, Brian Fitzcount, held out for years: until, indeed, Stephen was wearied, with the result that the long civil war was at last concluded by the treaty of Wallingford, effecting the compromise by which Stephen was to reign for his life, and Henry, son of the Empress Maud, was to succeed him: which, in the fulness of time, he accordingly did; and reigned, and misgoverned sometimes, and at others governed well, as Henry the Second, in a truly Norman way, for thirty-five years.

Wallingford was in after-centuries frequently a royal residence; chiefly, it is true, for royal widows and other such extinct volcanoes, Have Beens, and back-numbers; but by the sixteenth century the castle appears to have become dilapidated. Leland, for example, declared it in his time “sore yn ruine”; but Camden, coming after him, said its size and magnificence were amazing to him, as a young man. “My fer-ends, what is ter-ewth?” as Chadband despairingly asked. Perhaps Leland’s capacity for amazement was less than that owned by Camden. After Leland’s time, it must surely have been repaired; or how else could the sixty-five days’ siege have been withstood by the gallant Royalist governor, Blagge, in 1646? I pause for a reply, without, however, in the least expecting one. Six years later, the cautious Parliament caused this stronghold to be blown up, and now all we can see are some rude fragments of walls in the large and beautiful grounds of a private residence, courteously opened on summer afternoons.

Its curious privileges also mark the antiquity of Wallingford. Among them is the nine o’clock curfew, instead of at eight o’clock: said to have been granted as a special favour by William the Conqueror, in recognition of his friendly reception here. The curfew-bell still sounds from the tower of St. Mary-le-More every evening at nine o’clock.

The native-born burghers of Wallingford had the immemorial right (perhaps they have it now, for what it may be worth) of claiming, when tried for a first offence against the criminal law, that, instead of being put to death, they should have their eyes put out and be otherwise mutilated. Those lenient, soft-hearted, sentimental ways of dealing with crime have ever been the curse of the country! At Wallingford, Thomas Tusser, author of Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, who was born about 1524 and died 1580, began his career as a chorister in the castle chapel, and appears to have had a sorry time of it here, according to his reminiscent verses,

Reason sufficient, it would seem, by those eloquent lines!

There were of old fourteen churches in Wallingford; but the town suffered so greatly in the plague of 1343, and then from the Black Death, that the population dwindled away to almost nothing, and most of the churches fell into ruin, so that three only remain: St. Mary-the-More, St. Leonard, and St. Peter’s; and even those were greatly battered during the siege. The last named is that whose fantastic white masonry steeple is prominently seen from the river. It was built, together with the body of the church, in 1769. In its churchyard lies Sir William Blackstone (died 1780), Lord Chief Justice, and author of the most famous Commentaries since Julius Caesar. But Blackstone’s work is of quite another kind than that of the “noblest Roman of them all.” It is, of course, a work of legal erudition.

St. Mary-the-More, whose name carries with it allusion to another St. Mary’s—St. Mary-the-Less, united with St. Peter, so long ago as 1374, is in the market-place, grouping finely with the curious seventeenth-century Town Hall that stands supported on an open arcade, affording space for the market. It is so fine and so entirely satisfactory a Town Hall, and so imbued with architectural grace and distinction, that no one will be in the least surprised to see it some day improved off the face of the earth, in the usual manner of provincial authorities with such. The prominent gallery above was, and is, used for proclaiming public events, from the accession of a Sovereign down to the result of a municipal election.

For the rest, Wallingford is a quiet town, with a workhouse and the gasworks as the chief architectural features of one end; and a very fine stone bridge of fourteen arches, rebuilt in 1809, at the other. Some solid, comfortable-looking seventeenth- and eighteenth-century residences somewhat ennoble the quiet streets, and the George Inn is picturesque.

Crowmarsh Gifford is a little village on the Oxfordshire side of the river.

Newnham Murren stands beside a steep and exquisitely-wooded road that leads on past Mongewell, where it loses that lovely woodland character and goes undulating over chalky switchbacks to come eventually to North Stoke, South Stoke, and Goring.

Mongewell church stands in a beautifully-wooded park, on a lawn-like expanse close to the river bank. It has, unfortunately, been entirely rebuilt. Shute Barrington, Bishop-Palatine of Durham, who possessed a country residence here, and died in London in 1826, aged ninety-three, is buried in the building.

North Stoke is just the matter of a few farms and a rustic church, but South Stoke is a considerable village, lying between the river and the Great Western Railway on its way from Goring to Cholsey. It is, perhaps, a thought too much obsessed by the railway, for the embankment of it, not at all masked by trees, looks starkly down upon village street and church. Here, too, the church has been restored and rendered uninteresting, except for its old wrought-iron hour-glass stand.

And so we come into Goring, and to its strangely-named inn, the “Miller of Mansfield”; its sign, painted by Marcus Stone, R.A., with a scene from the old legend, and a quotation from it; “Here,” quoth the Miller, “goode fellowe, I drink to thee.” The sign is strangely out of its geographical setting, for the neighbourhood of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, is a far cry from Goring. The legend tells how Henry the Second, lost while hunting in Sherwood Forest, sought shelter of the miller, who gave him half a bed with his son Richard, and fed him well on venison; “only,” said he, “you must not let the King know I poach it.” The King (always according to the legend) gave the miller a pension of a thousand marks yearly, for life. His name, it appears, was Job Cockle, and the King created him “Sir John,” and made him ranger of the forest; and perhaps, on the well-proved principle of “set a thief to catch a thief,” he served well to preserve the royal game.

Goring (“Garinges” in Domesday), whose name means “the meadow on the edge,” or margin—i.e. on the shores of the Thames—is a Thames-side village improved utterly out of its olden country style. It is still a village, just as one may truly say that a commoner created a peer is still a man; but it is a village almost wholly composed of stylish up-river residences; and those few shops, a hotel or two, and a scanty sprinkling of cottages that exist here, do so only by way of ministering to the villa-residents. It is extremely difficult to come to the river banks here, except at the picturesque bridge that joins Goring with Streatley, on the opposite shore, for every piece of land and every access are jealously guarded, and there are not a few rights-of-way that may be observed by the observant to be artfully masked with hedges and screened by gates, or even decorated with lying “Private Road,” and “Trespassers will be Prosecuted” notices. The stranger who desires to wander at will is well-advised to disregard all such. The same new tale is told from the river, for boating-parties nowadays proceed up-stream or down between endless notices displayed on inviting riverside lawns and at seductive side-channels, to the effect that this, that, and the other are “Private”; “No Landing,” or “Private Backwater,” and the like.

Amid all these modern developments, the ancient Norman parish church of St. Thomas À Becket stands, not so greatly altered. Even tyros in the understanding of architecture can tell at a glance that its tower is of that period, and some heavy cylindrical columns within proclaim the same age; but the “Norman” semicircular apse is a modern rebuilding of the original, destroyed long ago.

The evident ancient importance, ecclesiastically, of Goring is due to the existence of an Augustinian convent here, from the time of Henry the Second; but its secular importance was of far remoter date, for this was the place where that immemorial British track, the Icknield Way, crossed the Thames, on its course from Icklingham, the capital of the Iceni, out of Suffolk and through Essex, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, to climb the Berkshire downs, and so continuing into the West of England. The Romans found Goring as useful a strategic point as did those early British peoples; and must, if the evidences of coins, and foundations of buildings, and mosaic pavements discovered here are worth anything, have made it almost as favourite a residence in the more settled years of their occupation of Britain as it is in our own era. Streatley, on the Berkshire bank, in its name, the “street meadow,” alludes to the passing through it of this ancient street, or road.

There are a few unimportant brasses and other memorials to the Whistler and other families in Goring church. Among these is a Latin inscription to “Helinor and Margaret Whistler,” which is rendered into English thus:

“This Helinor Whistler, a pious, beautiful, and modest virgin, lies with her sister Margaret in the tomb. These, whom love and one spirit united, are enshrined together in bronze by their only brother. She was wont to weep ever, seldom to smile; for a season, vows, prayers, and tears were her meat and drink. She seemed to outlive her two sisters in actual existence, yet to them it was as if she were dead, though living; and after they were ashes she, fed by the fear of God, did not touch bread and drink for seven years. The vows and prayers of the poor of Goring and the neighbourhood and the muse of Oxford forbid her to die; and, being dead, she still lives.”

Fortunately for the gaiety of nations, we may say with conviction that this remarkable person is exceptional.

Goring was the scene of a sad happening in 1674, by which “about” sixty persons were drowned. This is related in a scarce pamphlet of the time, called

This calamity so impressed the pamphleteer that he drew from it the conclusion the end of the world was at hand; but he appears to have been quite as eager to sell his pamphlet as though the world were good enough to last all his time. That is over two hundred and thirty years ago, and the old globe still spins in space.

The white-painted wooden toll-bridge that carries the road across the river to Streatley gives the wayfarer the best views. From it you see to greatest advantage the foaming weir, the green backwaters, and the mill. Let us cross this bridge to Streatley, avoiding the fearful hill that leads past the hamlet of Gathampton, circuitously up to Goring Heath, and then alarmingly down to Whitchurch. Streatley we shall find much smaller and simpler than Goring. There, to one side of the bridge, is the mill, with the neatest of lawns, decorated with brilliant flowers, giving upon the water; while on the other is the waterside Swan inn, greatly resembling some ancient private residence, also with its lawns and with a full supply of the easiest chairs, wherein to do that most difficult of things—nothing.