The first prominent object on approaching the town is the “Wheatsheaf” itself, boasting of being established in 1610, but rebuilt in the coaching age, and just a white-painted, stucco-fronted building with a courtyard and a general Pickwickian and respectable Early Victorian air. Opposite stands an “Independent Chapel, erected 1722,” which, with its secular air and big gates, looks like a converted inn. Continuing along the narrow and unpicturesque Sheaf Street thus entered, the unwary pilgrim, unobservant on wheels, is downhill at the other end and out of the town in the proverbial “jiffy,” or the not less proverbial “two-twos.” But Sheaf Street, lining the Holyhead Road, is a snare and a delusion. That does not form the sum and substance of Daventry, sprawling largely down a street to the right and developing itself astonishingly at the end in a mutton-chop-shaped market-place, continued to the left hand again as a High Street. It is as though Daventry had long ago resolved to keep itself retired and select from the throng that once went up and down the Holyhead Road; and very quiet and empty the market-place looks to this day, with a church rebuilt in 1752 and supposed to be Doric: the exterior in a yellow sandstone rapidly crumbling away, and the interior like a concert-hall. The eye lights upon only one memorable thing, and that an epitaph to a certain Susanna Pritchett Godson, who died in 1809, aged twenty-five:—

Daventry Priory once stood hereby, but many years have passed since its last fragments were cleared away to provide a site for the town gaol in front of this ugly church. The Priory itself was, with others, suppressed by Wolsey, that ambitious Cardinal, for the purpose of seizing its funds, towards the endowment of his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He is charged with having sent five of his creatures to pick a quarrel with the house, and, causing the dispute to be referred to himself, of having dissolved it by fraud. The story of what happened to his five emissaries and himself, and the moral drawn from their fate, are quite in keeping with the superstitious spirit of those times. Thus, one learns that two of the five quarrelled, and one slew the other, the survivor being hanged; that a third drowned himself in a well; that a fourth, formerly well-to-do, became penniless and begged till his dying day; and that the remaining one “was cruelly maimed in Ireland.” This series of “judgments” is then carried on to the Cardinal, whose miserable end is historic; to his colleges, of which one was immediately pulled down, and the other finished under other patronage; and to the Pope who permitted Wolsey’s high-handed doings, and who was besieged and long imprisoned. Unhappily, for the sake of a poetic completeness of vengeance, Henry VIII.—who dissolved more religious houses than any one, and, moreover, appropriated their revenues and lands to his own uses—flourished amazingly for years afterwards. Like the wicked whoso good fortunes are bitterly lamented by the Psalmist, his eyes swelled out with fatness, and he was well filled.

The old pronunciation of “Daintry” goes back certainly to the sixteenth century, when it was probably responsible for the device of the old town seal, adopted at that time, representing a figure intended to picture a Dane at odds with an indeterminate kind of a tree. Pennant, on the other hand, derives the name from “Dwy—avon—tre,” “the dwelling of the two Avons”: and indeed the town is placed, as it were, at the fork of the Nen, sometimes called the Avon, and another insignificant stream; but this is looked upon with an almost equal contempt, and mystery still enshrouds the real origin and the significance of the name.

Whips were made at Daventry a hundred years ago, but it is now a boot-making town, not altogether unpicturesque, in the slatternly sort. Besides its “Wheatsheaf,” there are the “Peacock,” the “Dun Cow,” the “Bear,” and the “Saracen’s Head”—all old; but the palm must be given to the last, containing much black oak, and altogether a great deal more interesting than a casual glance at its commonplace plastered front would disclose. Its courtyard is especially quaint; in red brick, with a large building to one side, now practically disused, but once the busy dining-room of the coaches. It was built probably about 1780: the upper part ornamented with grotesque wooden figures of Jacobean date, evidently the spoils of some demolished building. The whole, overhung with grape-vines, makes a very pretty picture.

One leaves Daventry steeply down hill, through a trampish, out-at-elbows, dirty-children-wallowing-in-the-dust-in-the-middle-of-the-road quarter. Hills again rise to left and right: on the left Catesby Abbey; ahead, the exceedingly steep descent of a mile down Braunston Hill, with Braunston spire, a deserted and ruinated windmill, and leagues upon leagues of distant country, unfolded to the startled eye. The “steep and dangerous descent” was to have been improved by Telford, but the design was never put into execution, and the hill still owns those defects, and hurtling motor-cars and cycles descending at extravagant speeds alarm the propriety of the neighbourhood. In the hollow, 197 feet below the hill-top, stands Braunston Station, the “Old Ship” inn nestling beneath the thunderous girders of the railway-bridge crossing over the road; and on the next rise over the Oxford Canal, a roadside forge and the “Castle” inn, as old as Queen Elizabeth’s day. Here the rising road forks, presenting a puzzle to the stranger, for either has the appearance of a high road. The Holyhead Road, however, bears to the left, that to the right leading in an outrageously steep semi-circle to the long, rustic, stone-built street of Braunston village.

The tower and spire of the fine Decorated church are imposing, but the interior is of little interest—the body of the building, reconstructed some fifty years ago, swept and garnished, and cleared of everything but one old relic: the mail-clad effigy of a splay-footed crusading knight, in the act of violently drawing his sword, thrust in an unobtrusive corner.