One sees the city perhaps to best advantage from the Warwick road, or from the rising ground at Stivichall, close by. There below lies Coventry, the famous trinity whence comes the familiar name of the City of the Three Spires, silhouetted against the calm evening sky. The view recalls that eloquent passage where Ruskin, speaking with enthusiasm of the old coaching age that he had known, paints the joy of the traveller who from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw for the first time the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset, and came to his appointed inn after “hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent.”

Those three spires still advise the stranger, to whose ears by some strange chance the fame of ancient Coventry has not come, that he is indeed about to enter, not merely the great home of the cycle-making industry, but a city that has for centuries been famous for its religious houses, and was indeed a place notable in this wise before ever the Battle of Hastings was fought, to bring England under a Norman domination. Its very name, whence the present form has been evolved, is held by some to have been originally “Conventre,” or Convent Town, and it came in after years to own, not three, but seven spires. The other four went down in the days of spoliation that came in with Harry VIII.

Earl Leofric, the pious founder of the original Greyfriars monastery around whose religious buildings secular Coventry first arose, must have been a hard man, if legends tell truth, for his grinding taxation aroused the pity of his Countess, the immortal Godiva. Those must have been no slight hardships that could have earned the compassion of a Saxon gentlewoman, whose times and training alike could only have made her look upon the miseries of the lower orders as incidental to their lot. They were chiefly churls; men and women of bondage, and mere chattels, who had, it is true the accidental advantages of speech and a modicum of understanding; but, for the rest, were of no account.

Tennyson has “shaped the city’s ancient legend” into verse, and reveals the circumstances that led to his doing so, in the opening lines:—

Waiting for a railway train is so unpromising a prelude to a mediÆval legend that at the first blush a processional “train” is understood, and certainly a practical man would wait on the platform, rather than the bridge, for the train to London or Birmingham. But Tennyson actually did allude to the railway, and if he shaped the legend while he waited, the train must have been very late, for the poem is a long one. These unpromising circumstances perhaps account for its unequal merit, and for the figure of fun that Leofric, “the grim Earl,” is unintentionally made to represent, with “his beard a foot before him and his hair a yard behind.” It is a tripping music-hall line, and the words those of a comic song. Not even a Duke—nay, nor a King—in these days of vulgar boys and popular songs, could dare defy the current prejudice in favour of a close crop, and so the Tennysonian Leofric suffers accordingly.

Leofric, so says the ancient legend, consented to remove the tax if his Countess would ride unclothed through the streets of Coventry. This, as he thought it a thing impossible for her to do, was his grimly humorous way of refusing to satisfy her compassionate pleadings. But she took him at his word, and thus, “clothed on with chastity,” rode the length of the town, her hair, we are told, in competition with Leofric’s own yard-length, falling about her in golden masses, shielding her person from the shameless sun.

Coventry that day was a city of the dead. None stirred, or might stir, out of doors while the pious Godiva rode her enfranchising pilgrimage, and all faces were turned from curtained and shuttered windows. All, that is to say, save one. A graceless tailor, whose name has been handed down to us as “Peeping Tom,” looked out from a hole he had bored in a shutter, and we are asked to believe that he was blinded by the wrath of Heaven for his presumption. “The story of Peeping Tom is well known,” says Wigstead, writing in 1797; adding, “This effigy is now to be seen next door to the ‘King’s Head’ inn, said to be the very house from whence he attempted to gratify his curiosity.” Peeping Tom, in fact, is a personage whom Coventry will not willingly resign to oblivion. Representations of that “low churl, compact of thankless earth,” have been numerous in the city. Not so long since there were three, all spying from their several positions down upon the streets, and certainly the one Wigstead mentions is still in evidence, not now “next door” to the “King’s Head,” but built into a blank window of that rebuilt hostelry. If tailors dressed thus in Saxon days, they must have been gorgeous persons. But the effigy, looking like that of an Admiral from some comic opera, is not older than a century and a half, and is perhaps a portion of a figure carried in the Godiva processions that at intervals have paraded Coventry’s streets for many years past. They do so now, but whether the obvious wig and the pink silk tights of the music-hall woman, representing Godiva, commend themselves as realising the old legend, is a matter of individual taste.

To tell Coventry’s long story is not the purport of these pages. Much of it is inseparable from the history of England. History in that more spacious sort was making when, in the reign of Richard II., the Dukes of Hereford and Norfolk fought their duel on Gosford Green, in 1398. Richard banished both: Norfolk for life and Hereford for ten years; but Hereford was back within a year and proclaimed King, and Richard deposed and murdered in the dungeons of Pontefract.

A hundred years later, Coventry’s beautiful hospitals and the noble St. Mary’s Hall, the home of the great trading guilds, began to rise. They remain, in greater or less preservation, until the present time; and perhaps there is nothing in the kingdom to surpass the exquisite beauty of Ford’s Hospital—an almshouse built in 1529, whose tiny courtyard of traceried woodwork should for its delicacy be under the protection of a glass case. Six years after Ford’s beautiful almshouse was built, the dissolution of the monasteries took place throughout the land; and Coventry, fostered by the great religious houses of the Whitefriars and the Greyfriars in its midst, shared in the ruin that befel them. Its population fell from 15,000 to 3,000 in a few years. Yet it was in this melancholy period that the great “Coventry Cross” arose. It was, however, not a building erected by the city, but the gift of one of its sons, who could find no other way of employing his superfluous wealth. It rose in all the majesty of carved pinnacles, tabernacled statuary, and gilded bannerets, in the market-place of Cross Cheaping: a sight to dazzle the eyes of all who beheld it. The Cross was repaired and re-gilded in 1669; but from that time, although the city was prosperous again, it fell into decay and was removed in 1771.

Coventry is a city by ancient right of the time when there were Bishops of Coventry and Lichfield. The style of the See was afterwards reversed, and the scanty ruins of Coventry’s Abbey Church or Cathedral alone tell of that ancient dignity. The encircling walls, too, of Coventry are gone. They kept out many unwelcome visitors in their existence of three hundred years, and behind them the citizens withstood the Royalists of 1642 with such effect that the memory of it rankled twenty years later, when the Restoration brought the Stuarts back again, and Charles II. ordered the fortifications to be destroyed. It was to the Civil War that the expression of “sending to Coventry” any objectionable person owes its origin. Every one knows that this means the social ostracism—the “cutting”—of those thus punished; but its original meaning is not so commonly understood. It derives from Birmingham, where the townspeople took up a hostile attitude towards the Royalists, overwhelming scattered parties and sending them prisoners to Coventry. A very excellent reason for not keeping them at Birmingham was that, the town had no defences and no prisons, while Coventry was a fortress-city and had both.

“True as Coventry blue” would, in view of this old attitude, seem a saying ill-applied to a place of Puritan politics; but it referred to a dye then used here. When Ogilby came to Coventry in the compilation of his great road-book, he noted its position “on the little river Sherborne, whose water is peculiar for the Blue Dye.” Even then, it will be seen, the city was beginning to recover from the decay of a hundred years before.