THE AVON, STRATFORD, WARWICKSHIRE
with Shakespeare or his relatives. Comparatively few realise what a beautiful stream of its kind it is, what a wealth of architectural treasures—churches, manor-houses, and cottages—are clustered along its banks. Nor had any river in England more concern with the great war between King and Parliament, watering as it were the very cockpit of the strife.
Naseby and Edgehill, as we have seen, were both fought upon or near its banks. But they were almost as nothing compared with the constant skirmishes and minor sieges, the burning and harrying that for four years went on along the banks of the Worcestershire Avon. The Upper or Warwickshire Avon was held for the Parliament, the lower or Worcestershire portion for the King, nearly all through the war. But the fords and bridges of the river, being vital points between Oxford and the West, were constant scenes of strife. Evesham was the scene of siege and battle then as it had been four centuries earlier, when Simon-de-Montfort heard his last Mass in the Abbey church and fell that same day upon the banks of Avon. Charles and Rupert, Maurice and Massey, Essex, Waller, and Cromwell himself knew the Lower Avon as well as a modern general commanding on Salisbury Plain knows the Avon of South Wilts, and in grimmer fashion. Its mouth was dyed crimson with Lancastrian blood at Tewkesbury in the last sanguinary battle in the Wars of the Roses, and Tewkesbury itself was taken and retaken no less than eleven times in the wars of King and Parliament. And then inseparable from the story of the Avon is that of the three great monasteries upon its banks, from the legends associated with their inception in Saxon times down to the great power they became in the West Midlands prior to their fall at the Dissolution. Finally, the Avon can boast, not merely of all the Shakespeare and Warwick glories, and of its great abbeys, but yet further of what in regard to its wealth of Tudor and Jacobean buildings is perhaps the most striking country town in England. Tewkesbury Abbey would alone be sufficient glory for any little town, but even without its abbey Tewkesbury would be very hard in its own style to find a match for anywhere.
CHAPTER VI
THE RIVERS OF DEVON
DEVONSHIRE is notoriously prolific in bold streams, a fact due to the presence of those two great areas of spongy moorland, Dartmoor and Exmoor, which lie in whole or part within her borders. Next to her splendid sea-coast, both north and south, the streams of Devon and the deep valleys they have cut are her chief glory. The actual moorland—Dartmoor, for instance, Exmoor being largely in Somerset—owes its celebrity in a great measure to the unexpected nature of its situation: a patch of South Wales or Yorkshire dropped, as it were, into the heart of a warm southern county. The uplands of the moor, save for a scantier supply of heather, are practically identical in appearance with hundreds of square miles in South and Mid Wales, or the northern counties of England, that have no notoriety at all outside their own districts. The same indeed may be said for the beautiful Devonshire streams. They are merely the streams of the North and of Wales disporting themselves in an unexpected quarter. Or, to put it more lucidly, the contrast between the soft low-pitched, bridled landscape, with its gentle streams of the neighbouring southern counties and the moors of Devonshire, with the impetuous rivers that they send spouting through the humpy low country, upsets the equilibrium of people not widely acquainted with their native land, and gives rise to a good deal of ill-instructed gush. Again and again in fiction, on the stage, or in fugitive articles, you find the Devonshire village glibly quoted as the ideal of English rustic architecture and bowery cosiness. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Cornwall, Devonshire stands easily last in this respect of all the southern and west midland counties, including the rural counties of South Wales. The wanderer by Devon streams other than those on the Dorsetshire side of the county must not expect, save in a few favoured districts, to find the picturesque villages that will confront him everywhere on the chalk streams, or by the slow rivers of Warwickshire, Gloucester, or Worcester, or the livelier brooks of Shropshire, Hereford, and
THE HAMOAZE, DEVONPORT, FROM MOUNT EDGCUMBE
