Campden’s position as a market town dates back to Saxon times, when the verb “ceapan,” to buy, gave the prefix “Chipping” to it. The town rose to greater prosperity when the ancient wool-growing wealth of the Cotswolds was doubled by the manufacture in these same districts of the cloth from those wealth-bringing fleeces; and great fortunes were amassed by both wool-merchants and clothiers. The rise of England from an agricultural and a wool-growing country, such as Australia now is, to a manufacturing community directly concerned such towns as Stroud, Northleach, Burford and Chipping Campden, which, with the introduction of weaving, earned two profits instead of one. There are perhaps a dozen little Cotswold towns whose great churches were rebuilt in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in a magnificent style by the wealthy merchants of the time, whose monumental brasses still in many cases remain, representing them standing upon sheep, or woolsacks, or with the tailor’s shears between their legs; the origins of their wealth. When the cloth manufacture largely migrated to the Midlands and the north, such towns as Campden, Burford, and Northleach began to decay, and now that Australia is the chief source of the wool supply it is difficult to see how they are ever to recover. They are not on the great routes of traffic, and railways do not come near them.
Campden is situated on a kind of shelf or narrow plateau upon the Cotswolds. You come steeply up to it, and, leaving it, rise as steeply as before. Like most of its neighbours on Cotswold, it is a stone-built town, grown grey with age and weathering. When some new mason-work is undertaken—which is not often—the stone is seen to be of a pale biscuit colour; but it soon loses that new tint and rapidly acquires the rather sad hue of the older work.
The traveller fresh from Stratford, where brick, and timber-framed and plastered houses abound, feels astonishment in the sudden transition to a place like Campden, in which I believe there is not a single example of timber-framing.
The old town of Campden is extraordinarily full of architectural interest; with domestic work ranging from the mid-fourteenth century house of the Grevels to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the town began to decline and building ceased. No modern suburbs are found on the outskirts of Campden. I do not know how the town manages to exist. There is a railway station, but it is a mile away and it is only incidental and placed on the line to Evesham and Worcester. No great genius was ever born at Campden, or if he was, he missed fire and perished unknown. Therefore it is not a place of pilgrimage, and only parties of architectural students, measuring up or sketching some of the charming bits with which it abounds; or artists, or contemplative ruminative folk who want to escape from the eternal hustle of this age and its devilish gospel of “get on or get out” ever go there. “Past” is traced over its every building. “There was a time” might be inscribed over the open-sided and quaintly-colonnaded market-house; and “Yesterday” should be the town motto. There are little courts off the main street where the leisured explorer in Campden will find remains of the old wool warehouses, with here and there a traceried Gothic window. Many old sundials still exist on the walls; in particular a charming example near the market-house with the initials W. S. T. and date 1690; and dated house-tablets show with what pride the old inhabitants looked upon their homes.
But the pride of all the ancient houses of Campden is that house where William Grevel lived in the fourteenth century. It is not a very large house, one thinks, for so wealthy a man as he was, described as he is on the brass in the church as “the flower of the wool-merchants of all England,” but it presents a charming frontage to the street and has an oriel window of peculiar beauty, presided over by two huge and hideous gargoyles, the one representing a winged, bat-like monster with gaping mouth and a ferocious expression; the other a kind of demon dog with glaring eyes of intense malignity—the late Mr. William Grevel’s familiar spirits, perhaps.
Every one well-read in the history of his country knows that the ranks of its aristocracy and its peerage have constantly been reinforced from the trading classes. It is a matter of money. When a man has great possessions he finds the House of Lords waiting to receive him. It has been so for centuries, and not only so, but the ennobled have in their own later generations given younger sons to trade. The different processes are still seen working; and why not? Wealth will secure consideration, and younger sons who cannot always marry money must in their turn go into trade and make it.
