The countryside congratulated itself upon being rid of three undesirables. The old woman had always been reputed a witch. And when the affair was becoming a stale and exhausted topic, one autumn evening at dusk, two years later, Mr. William Harrison, for whose murder three persons had been convicted and hanged, returned and walked into his own house.
He gave forth an ingenious but preposterous story to account for his two years’ absence. As he was returning home, he said, on the evening of his disappearance, he was intercepted by three horsemen who attacked, wounded and robbed him, and carrying him to a neighbouring cottage on the heath, nursed him there until it was possible to carry him across country to Dover, where they put him aboard a vessel and sold him to the captain, who had several others in like case with himself on his ship. They voyaged from Deal and after about six weeks’ sail they were seized by Turkish pirates and he and the others were put aboard the Turkish ship and sold as slaves in Turkey. His master lived near Smyrna. After serving him as a slave for nearly two years, the elderly Turk died and the slave escaped to the coast, where he persuaded some Hamburg sailors to take him as a stowaway to Lisbon. There he met an Englishman who took compassion upon him and found him a passage to England. Landing at Dover, he made his way directly home.
This cock-and-bull story was all that the country ever had in the way of satisfaction. Harrison went about his steward’s business as before, trusted and respected, and died ten years later. In after years some suspicion seems to have fallen upon the son, but for what reason does not appear. That industrious Oxford diarist, Anthony Wood, who took a keen interest in the affair, as did all the country, says, “After Harrison’s returne, John was taken down [from his gibbet] and Harrison’s wife soon after (being a snotty covetous presbyterian) hung herself in her owne house. Why, the reader is to judge.”
In leaving Campden and its memories, I must not let it be supposed that in speaking of the town as decayed and belonging to the past I either intend to slight it or forget the Guild of Handicraft established here in 1892. Removed from London in that year, it has sought to bring back in these more and more commercial and factory times the craftsman’s old traditions of artistic and individual work, no matter in what trade. In printing, bookbinding, enamel-work, jewellery and cabinet-making it has sought by precept and example to further the teachings of Ruskin and Morris, and has created a new feeling here and elsewhere which has effects in places little suspected.
CHAPTER XVIII
A Deserted Railway—Villages of the Stour Valley—Ettington and Squire Shirley—Shipston-on-Stour—Brailes—Compton Wynyates.
There is not an uninteresting road among the eight that lead out of Stratford, and all are beautiful. But none has more beauty than that which runs southward to Shipston-on-Stour. This way, or by the route leading through Ettington and Sunrising Hill, you go to Compton Wynyates, that wonderfully picturesque old mansion of the Comptons, Marquises of Northampton, which has remained unaltered for centuries in its remoteness, and is still not easily accessible. The Shipston road then, for choice, to Compton Wynyates. It follows, more or less closely the valley of the Stour, and here and there touches the river; while companionably, all the way run the grass-grown cuttings and embankments of that long-abandoned Stratford and Shipston Tramway whose red brick bridge is a feature of the Avon at Stratford town.
The deserted earthworks and ivy-grown bridges of this forgotten undertaking, now this side of the road and then the other, excite the curiosity of the stranger, but he will rarely find anyone to tell him the meaning of them, and at the best only vaguely. Their story is one of unfulfilled hopes and money flung ruinously away; for they are the only traces of the Central Junction Railway projected in 1820, to run through to Oxford and London. It was a horsed tramway, and was opened through Shipston to Moreton-in-the-Marsh in 1826. A remunerative traffic in general agricultural produce and goods was expected, but the enterprise seems to have been weighted from the beginning with the heavy expenses of construction. Estimated by Telford at £35,000 for the Stratford-on-Avon to Moreton section, they soon reached £80,000. But the doom of the project was sounded by the introduction of the locomotive engine, almost simultaneously with the opening. In 1845 it was leased to the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, a scandalously inefficient line whose initials, “O. W. W.” suggested to saturnine wags the appropriate name of “Old Worse and Worse.” This ill-managed affair was eventually absorbed into the Great Western Railway, which now owns these relics.
Little villages are thickly set along the course of the Stour, to the right of the road; ancient settlements, each but a slightly larger or smaller collection of farmhouses, barns and thatched cottages, with a church in their midst. Here the Saxon farmers came and early cultivated the rich meadow-lands, leaving the poorer uplands long unenclosed and untitled; and to every little community came the clergy and set up a church and tithed those farmers who earned their livelihood by the sweat of their brows. Such a village is Atherstone-upon-Stour, where a majestic red brick farmhouse, dating from the seventeenth century, neighbours a debased little church. There is little of interest in that church, and the loathly epitaph to William Thomas, a son of the rector, who died in 1710, aged nine, of smallpox, decently veils in the obscurity of eighteenth century pedagogic Latin the full particulars given of his disease.