DOW BRIDGE ON WATLING STREET
And now, just ahead, on the same line of hill as Clifton, stands the town of Rugby. No good view of it can be found from the river-side, for the middle distance is always a straight line of railway sheds or embankments. Perhaps the best is to be had from the towpath of the Oxford Canal, marked high above our right by a line of larch and poplar, where a tall aqueduct carries it over the river Swift.
This is the stream which, coming from Lutterworth, bore down in 1427 the ashes of John Wiclif to the Avon. Forty years after his peaceful interment the Council of Constance gave orders to exhume and burn his body, to see if it could be discerned from those of the faithful. “In obedience thereto,” says Fuller, “Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight sent at a dead carcass!) to ungrave him accordingly. To Lutterworth they come—sumner, commissary, official, chancellor, proctors, doctors, and the servants (so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone amongst so many hands), take what is left out of the grave, and burn them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a brook running hard by. Thus the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”
For aught we know, the upper part of this stream may justify its name.
RUGBY FROM BROWNSOVER MILL
The two streams unite in that green vale over which Dr. Arnold used to gaze in humorous despair. “It is no wonder,” he said, “we do not like looking that way, when one considers that there is nothing fine between us and the Ural Mountains;” and, in a letter to Archbishop Whately,” ... we have no hills, no plains, not a single wood, and but one single copse; no heath, no down, no rock, no river, no clear stream, scarcely any flowers—for the lias is particularly poor in them—nothing but one endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedge-row trees;” lastly, “I care nothing for Warwickshire, and am in it like a plant sunk in the ground in a pot; my roots never strike beyond the pot, and I could be transplanted at any moment without tearing or severing my fibres.” And we consent, in part, for the fibres of great men lie in their work, not in this or that soil. But what fibres—not his own—were cracked when Rugby lost its great schoolmaster we feel presently as, haunted by his son’s noble elegy, we stand before the altar of the school chapel, where he rests.
AVON INN, RUGBY