TINTERN ABBEY AND CHEPSTOW CASTLE.
The Wye at Monmouth also receives the Trothy River, and the confluence of the three valleys makes a comparatively open basin, which, however, again narrows into another romantic glen a short distance below the town. Wild woods border the steep hills, and the Wye flows through the western border of the Forest of Dean, an occasional village attesting the mineral wealth by its blackened chimneys. Here, below Redbrook, was the home of Admiral Rooke, who captured Gibraltar in 1704, and farther down are the ruins of the castle of St. Briard, built in the days of Henry I. to check Welsh forays. Here lived the lord warden of the Forest of Dean, and for three centuries every Whit-Sunday they held the annual "scramble" in the church. It appears that a tax of one penny was levied on every person who pastured his cattle on the common, and the amount thus raised was expended for bread and cheese. The church was crowded, and the clerk standing in the gallery threw out the edibles to the struggling congregation below. The railway closely hugs the swiftly-flowing river in its steep and narrow glen as we pass Offa's Dyke and Chair and the Moravian village of Brockweir. Here the line of fortifications crossed the valley which the king of Mercia constructed to protect his dominions. The valley then slightly expands, and the green sward is dotted by the houses of the long and scattered village of Tintern Parva. The river sharply bends, and in the glen on the western side stand the ruins of the far-famed Tintern Abbey in the green meadows at the brink of the Wye. The spot is well chosen, for nowhere along this celebrated river has Nature indicated a better place for quiet, heavenly meditation not un-mixed with earthly comforts.
TINTERN ABBEY.
Walter de Clare founded Tintern Abbey in 1131 for the Cistercian monks, and dedicated it to St. Mary. It was built upon an ancient battlefield where a Christian prince of Glamorgan had been slain by the heathen, but of the buildings erected by De Clare none now exist, the present remains being of later date, and the abbey church that is now in ruin was erected by Roger Bigod, Duke of Norfolk. It is a magnificent relic of the Decorated period. The vaulted roof and central tower are gone, but the arches which supported the latter remain. The row of columns on the northern side of the nave have fallen, with the clerestory above them, but the remainder of the structure has suffered little damage. The western front, with its noble window and exquisite tracery, is very fine. Ivy and ferns overrun the walls and form a coping, while green sward has replaced the pavement, so that it would be difficult to imagine a more enchanting ruin, and as such Tintern is renowned the world over. Lord Houghton has written:
"The men who called their passion piety,
And wrecked this noble argosy of faith,—
They little thought how beauteous could be death,
How fair the face of time's aye-deepening sea,
Nor arms that desolate, nor years that flee,
Nor hearts that fail, can utterly deflower
This grassy floor of sacramental power
Where we now stand communicants."
Tintern Abbey is two hundred and twenty-eight feet long. It had no triforium, and the clerestory windows are rather large. The great east window was even more elaborate than the western, but all of it has fallen excepting the central mullion and the stronger portion of the tracery which branches out on either side from it. There yet remain in the building a few tiles with heraldic emblems, some broken monuments, and some heaps of choice carvings, shattered as they fell, but afterwards collected and piled against the walls. The Duke of Beaufort, to whose estate it belongs, has done everything possible to arrest decay, and all is kept in perfect order. A door leads out of the southern transept to a few fragments of buildings in the fields on that side, but most of the convent was on the northern side, where its ruins surround a grass-grown quadrangle. A cloister once ran around it; on the eastern side is the chapter-house, with the dormitory above, and on the western side the remains of the abbot's lodgings and the guest-chambers have been converted into cottages. The refectory and guest-hall are to the northward, with ruins of the octagonal columns that supported the roof. Such is this magnificent relic of the Cistercians, and yet it is but one of seventy-six abbeys that they possessed before Henry VIII. dissolved them. From the high-road down the valley of the Wye, which skirts the green meadows along its southern face, is the best view of the abbey, and the ruddy gray stone ruins, with the grassy fields and the background of wooded hills beyond the broad river, make up a picture that cannot easily be forgotten. Yet Tintern is most beautiful of all when the full moon rising over the eastern hills pours a flood of light through the broken east window to the place where once stood the high altar.
The valley of the Wye again broadens, and the river flows in graceful curves through the meadows, guarded on either hand by cliffs and woods. The river is here a tidal-stream, having a rise of twelve feet, so that it is now a strong current, flowing full and swift between grassy banks, and anon is a shrunken creek, fringed by broad borders of mud. The railway on the eastern bank runs over the meadows and through occasional tunnels in the spurs of the cliffs. The high-road climbs the hill on the western bank, known as the Wynecliff, from the top of which there is a grand view over the valley and to the southward towards and beyond Chepstow. This cliff rises nine hundred feet above the river, and is the great monarch of a realm of crags that poke up their heads in all directions. Across the Wye, on a tongue of land projecting into the stream, Sir John Wyntour in the Civil War, with one hundred and eighty Royalists, hastily built a fort to command the river. Before their intrenchments were complete the enemy in superior force attacked and completely routed them; but twenty escaped, and Wyntour, cutting his way through the assailants' lines, took refuge in the beetling crags behind known as the Tidenham Rocks. The cavalry pursued him, when he forced his horse down a part somewhat less precipitous than the rest, reached the bank in safety, and escaped by swimming his horse over the river. The precipice is still known as Wyntour's Leap. Below, the Wye flows through Chepstow, with iron bridges spanning it to carry the road and railway across. The main part of the town on the western part is built upon a slope that in places descends somewhat rapidly to the river. Parts of the old walls are still preserved, strengthened at intervals by round towers. Chepstow has its ruined church, once a priory, within which Henry Marten the regicide was buried after twenty years' imprisonment in the castle.
CHEPSTOW CASTLE.
The great point of interest is Chepstow Castle, built here to command the Wye, and standing in a fine situation on the edge of the river in a naturally fortified position. Upon the land-side deep trenches and outworks protect it, while a grassy meadow intervenes between its gateway and the Wye, that here makes a sharp curve. To get the castle in between the crags and the river, it was constructed upon a long and narrow plan, and is divided into four courts. The main entrance on the eastern side is through a ponderous gateway flanked by solid towers and with curiously-constructed ancient wooden doors. Entering the court, there is a massive tower on the left hand with an exterior staircase turret, while on the right the custodian lives in a group of comparatively modern buildings, beneath which is a vaulted chamber communicating with the river. Within this tower, whose walls are of great thickness, Henry Marten was imprisoned. He was one of the court that tried King Charles, and his signature is upon the king's death-warrant. He was a spendthrift, and afterwards had a quarrel with Cromwell, who denounced him as an unbeliever, and even as a buffoon. When Charles II. made the proclamation of amnesty, Marten surrendered, but he was tried and condemned to death. He plead that he came in under the proffer of mercy, and the sentence was commuted to a life imprisonment; and after a short confinement in the Tower of London he was removed to Chepstow, where he died twenty years later, in 1680. Passing into the smaller second court, for the rocks contract it, there is a strong tower protecting its entrance, and at the upper end are the ruins of the great hall, relics of the fourteenth century. Two or three windows, a door, and part of an arcade remain, but roof and floor are gone. A still smaller court lies beyond, at the upper end of which is a gateway defended by a moat, beyond which is the western gate and court of the castle, so that this last enclosure forms a kind of barbican. Chepstow was elaborately defended, and its only vulnerable points were from the meadows on the east and the higher ground to the west; but before the days of artillery it was regarded as impregnable, and excellently performed its duty as a check upon the Welsh. Fitzosbern, Earl of Hereford, built the older parts in the eleventh century, but the most of Chepstow dates from that great epoch of castle-building on the Welsh border, the reign of Edward I. We are told that the second Fitzosbern was attainted and his estates forfeited, but that the king one Easter graciously sent to him in prison his royal robes. The earl so disdained the favor that he burned them, which made the king so angry that he said, "Certainly this is a very proud man who hath thus abused me, but, by the brightness of God, he shall never come out of prison so long as I live." Whereupon, says Dugdale, who tells the tale, he remained a prisoner until he died. Chepstow was then bestowed upon the De Clares, who founded Tintern Abbey, and it afterwards passed by marriage to the Bigod family. Chepstow in the Civil War was held for the king, and surrendered to the Parliamentary troops. Soon afterwards it was surprised at the western gate and retaken. Cromwell then besieged it, but, the siege proving protracted, he left Colonel Ewer in charge. The Royalist garrison of about one hundred and sixty men were reduced to great extremity and tried to escape by a boat, but in this they were disappointed, as one of the besiegers, watching his opportunity, swam across the Wye with a knife in his teeth and cut the boat adrift. Then the castle was assaulted and taken, and the commander and most of the garrison slain. Parliament gave it to Cromwell, but after the Restoration it was returned to the heirs of the Marquis of Worcester, its owner, and it still belongs to his descendant, the Duke of Beaufort. The neighborhood of Chepstow has many pleasant villas in beautiful sites, and the broadening Wye flows a short distance beyond through the meadow-land, and then debouches into the estuary of the Severn.