ABINGDON AND RADLEY.
ENTRANCE TO ABINGDON ABBEY.
Crossing over into Berkshire, we find, a short distance south of Oxford, on the bank of the Thames, the ruins of the once extensive and magnificent Abingdon Abbey, founded in the seventh century. It was here that Henry, the son of William the Conqueror, was educated and gained his appellation of Beauclerc. The gatehouse still remains, and is at present devoted to the use of fire-engines, but there is not much else remaining of the abbey save a remarkable chimney and fireplace and some fragments of walls. We are told that the Saxons founded this abbey, and that the Danes destroyed it, while King Alfred deprived the monks of their possessions, but his grandson Ædred restored them. The abbey was then built, and became afterwards richly endowed. For six centuries it was one of the great religious houses of this part of England; and the Benedictines, true to their creed, toiled every day in the fields as well as prayed in the church. They began the day by religious services; then assembled in the chapter-house, where each was allotted his task and tools, and after a brief prayer they silently marched out in double file to the fields. From Easter until October they were thus occupied from six in the morning until ten o'clock, and sometimes until noon. Thus they promoted thrift, and as their settlement extended it became the centre of a rich agricultural colony, for they often, as their lands expanded, let them out to farmers. A short distance from Abingdon is Radley, which was formerly the manor of the abbey, and contains a beautiful little church, wealthy in its stores of rich woodwork and stained glass; it stands in the middle of the woods in a charming situation, with picturesque elm trees overhanging the old Tudor building. Radley House is now a training-school for Oxford, and it has a swimming-school attached, in which have been prepared several of the most famous Oxford oarsmen, swimming being here regarded as a necessary preliminary to boating. Near by is Bagley Wood, the delicious resort of the Oxonians which Dr. Arnold loved so well. The village of Sunningwell, not far from Radley, also has a church, and before its altar is the grave of Dean Fell, once its rector, who died of grief on hearing of the execution of Charles I. From the tower of this church Friar Bacon, the hero of the story of the brazen head, is said to have made astronomical observations: this renowned friar, Roger Bacon, has come down to us as the most learned man that Oxford ever produced. Bacon's Study was near the Folly Bridge, across the Thames on the road to Oxford, and it survived until 1779, when it was taken down. Among the many legends told of Bacon is one that he used such skill and magic in building the tower containing this study that it would have fallen on the head of any one more learned than himself who might pass under it. Hence, freshmen on their arrival at Oxford are carefully warned not to walk too near the Friar's Tower. Bacon overcame the greatest obstacles in the pursuit of knowledge; he spent all his own money and all that he could borrow in getting books and instruments, and then, renouncing the world, he became a mendicant monk of the order of St. Francis. His Opus Majus—to publish which he and his friends pawned their goods—was an epitome of all the knowledge of his time.
RADLEY CHURCH.
Other famous men came also from Abingdon. Edmund Rich, who did so much to raise the character of Oxford in its earlier days, was born there about the year 1200; his parents were very poor, and his father sought refuge in Eynsham Abbey. We are told that his mother was too poor to furnish young Rich "with any other outfit than his horsehair shirt, which she made him promise to wear every Wednesday, and which probably had been the cause of his father's retirement from their humble abode." Rich went from Eynsham to Oxford, and soon became its most conspicuous scholar; then he steadily advanced until he died the Archbishop of Canterbury. Chief-Justice Holt, who reformed the legal procedure of England, was also a native of Abingdon; he admitted prisoners to some rights, protected defendants in suits, and had the irons stricken off the accused when brought into court, for in those days of the cruel rule of Judge Jeffreys the defendant was always considered guilty until adjudged innocent. Holt originated the aphorism that "slaves cannot breathe in England:" this was in the famous Somerset case, where a slave was sold and the vendor sued for his money, laying the issues at Mary-le-Bow in London, and describing the negro as "there sold and delivered." The chief-justice said that the action was not maintainable, as the status of slavery did not exist in England. If, however, the claim had been laid in Virginia, he said he would have been obliged to allow it; so that the decision was practically on technical grounds. Lord Campbell sums up Holt's merits as a judge by saying that he was not a statesman like Clarendon, or a philosopher like Bacon, or an orator like Mansfield, yet his name is held in equal veneration with theirs, and some think him the most venerated judge that ever was chief-justice. There is a really good story told of him by Lord Campbell. In his younger days Holt was travelling in Oxfordshire, and stopped at an inn where the landlady's daughter had an illness inducing fits. She appealed to him, and he promised to work a cure: which he did by writing some Greek words on a piece of parchment and telling her to let her daughter wear the charm around her neck. Partly from the fact that the malady had spent itself, and possibly also from the effect of her imagination, the girl entirely recovered. Years rolled on and he became the lord chief-justice, when one day a withered old woman was brought before the assizes for being a witch, and it was proven that she pretended to cure all manner of cattle diseases, and with a charm that she kept carefully wrapped in a bundle of rags. The woman told how the charm many years before had cured her daughter, and when it was unfolded and handed to the judge he remembered the circumstance, recognized his talisman, and ordered her release.