A short way below, Hampton Wood rises on a bold eminence to the right, where once Fulbroke Castle stood. The “steep uphill” is now dotted with elders, and tenanted only by “earth-delving conies;” for the castle was destroyed and its land disparked in Henry VIII.’s time, the materials being carried up to build Compton-Winyates, that beautiful and quiet mansion in a hollow of the Edge Hills where Charles I. slept on the night before Kineton (Edgehill) battle. The park passed in time to a Lucy of Charlcote, and the name reminds us that we are in Shakespeare’s country. In fact, we have reached the very place where Shakespeare did not steal the deer.
AT WASPERTON
To shed a tear in passing this hallowed spot was but a natural impulse; nor, on reading the emotions which Mr. Samuel Ireland squandered here, did we grudge the tribute. “If,” he writes, “the story of this youthful frolic is founded on truth, as well as that Sir Thomas Lucy’s rigorous conduct subsequent to this supposed outrage really proved the cause of our Shakespeare’s quitting this his native retirement to visit the capital, it will afford us the means of contemplating, at least in one instance, with some degree of complacency even the imperious dominion of our feudal superiors, the tyranny of magistracy, and the harshest enforcement of the remnant of our forest laws; since in their consequences they unquestionably called into action the energies of that sublime genius, and of those rare and matchless endowments which had otherwise perhaps been lost in the shade of retirement, and have ‘wasted their sweetness on the desert air.’”
DOVE-COTE, WASPERTON
The river spread out as it swept round the base of Hampton Wood, and took us to Hampton Lucy. Here is a beautiful modern church, in the worst sense of the words, and beside it a village green, where, as we passed, the villagers were keeping harvest-home. Lo! many countrymen in wheelbarrows, and others, with loins girded, trundling them madly towards a goal, where a couple of brand-new spades
From Hampton Lucy to Harrington