Norton, whose full name is Abbot’s Norton, comes next. It was for some years, until the beginning of 1912, the property of the Orleans family, one of the exiled Royal houses of France; but the Duc d’Orléans has now sold his estates and his residence at Wood Norton, close by, to Mr. Justice Swinfen Eady. Norton has yet more, and very fine timbered houses, and in its church lie a number of the Rigg family, in effigy on altar-tombs emblazoned to wonderment with their heraldic honours and those of their wives. The marble lectern is a relic from Evesham Abbey.
From Norton the road enters Evesham along Greenhill, where the battle was fought in 1265, and where the suburbs now chiefly extend.
CHAPTER XX
Evesham.
The legendary story of Evesham’s origin takes us back to the year 701, when one of the Bishop of Worcester’s swineherds, seeking a strayed sow, penetrated the forest that then covered this site, and here found his sow and also a ruined chapel, relic of an ancient and forgotten church. A modern discoverer of ruins would find shattered walls and nothing else, but Eof, the swineherd, beheld a vision of the Virgin and attendant saints singing there. Instead of worshipping, he ran, almost scared out his life, and only ventured back under the protection of Bishop Ecgwin himself, who saw the same wonderful sight and heard the singing. There could be but one outcome of this: the founding of a religious house upon the spot; and thus arose the great Benedictine monastery of Eof’s-hamme. Even in those times there would seem to have been people who could not digest this story, as the Bishop soon found, and he seems to have been so stricken by the tales told of him that he considered nothing less than a pilgrimage to Rome would avail him much. His preparations for departing were peculiar. He chained his legs together and having locked the chain, threw the key into the river. Arrived at Rome in spite of this amazing difficulty (we are not told how he got there!), a salmon bought for him proved to contain, when cut open, the key to unlock his fetters. The salmon had swallowed it in the Avon and had swum across seas! This cumulative outrage upon common sense then proceeds to tell us how the bells of Rome rang of themselves, and how impressed was the Pope. Nothing afterwards ever astonished him: his capacity for wonder was filled to the brim. These unparalleled occurrences seemed to this credulous and doddering old pontiff so strong a proof of Ecgwin’s honesty that he forthwith conferred upon his monastery not only many valuable privileges, but freed it from the authority of Worcester. And Ecgwin, third Bishop of Worcester, resigned the greater post for the lesser, and became first Abbot of Evesham. There appears to have been an early doubt as to what the name was to be, for it is once referred to as “Ecguineshamme”; but the legendary herdsman Eof easily won the honour, and although Ecgwin was created a saint after his death, the place never acquired his name and thus we have “Evesham” instead of “Exham,” as the place would probably otherwise have been called.
On this foundation of incredible story the future wealth and power of the great Abbey of Evesham was laid. Its Abbots never grew ashamed of the stupid lies, and to the last sealed their deeds and documents with seals bearing representations of Ecgwin’s unlocked fetters and other incidents of his fantastic invention. In spite of fire, invasion and even early confiscation of some of its property, Evesham Abbey grew wealthier and more influential. Its Abbots were of those great mitred Abbots who sat in Parliament, prone to anger and violence on occasion; and not infrequently they were of the type of Abbot Roger, who in the thirteenth century expended the substance of the monastery on riotous living and kept his seventy monks and sixty servants so ill-clothed and fed that they went in rags and even starved. No bite nor sup for them; and when they crawled into the Abbey, the leaky roof poured water on them. Some died of starvation. It would take long to tell in full the story of the many years in which this strange Abbot ruled.
But the monastery and its great Abbey church easily survived this miserable time, and fresh architectural glories were added. Even at the last, when the suppression of the great religious houses under Henry the Eighth was impending, more building was in progress. Abbot Lichfield, the last of the long line, then ruled, and was building the Bell Tower, which almost alone remains of the Abbey church. That church, 350 feet in length, and its many chapels and chantries, filled with the tombs of generations of benefactors who had hoped by their gifts to be prayed for “for ever,” was destroyed in almost the completest manner. Even Thomas Cromwell, the most zealous of Henry the Eighth’s coadjutors, was impressed with the beauty of this great mass of buildings; but all efforts to avert the destruction, and to put them to some collegiate use, failed. Not even the great Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds disappeared quite so completely as this of Evesham. Leland, writing in 1540, six years later, remarked, with astonishment: “Gone, a mere heap of ruins.”
The position of the town upon the meadow-lands by the Avon is enshrined in the second half of the place-name, which in this case is not the more common “ham,” indicating a “home,” or settlement, but “hamme,” a waterside meadow. You do not see the justness of this until the river has been crossed by the fine modern bridge, and the town viewed from Bengeworth, on the other side of Avon. Thence those meadows are seen, with the Abbey Bell Tower, and the towers and spires of the churches of St. Lawrence and All Saints, making an unusual grouping, with a certain grandeur in their contrasting dispositions. We may readily admit that the famous Bell Tower is the finest architectural work in Evesham, because the admission will make it the easier to criticise its great defect, its comparative dwarfness. Built in 1533 by Abbot Lichfield, it was the last work of the Gothic era at Evesham, and is perhaps one of the most striking examples of the Perpendicular period:
embodying the features of the style in the highest degree, in the long lateral panellings wholly covering its surface. It is the more noticeable because of its solitary position. But to lavish upon it the unqualified praise that is commonly given is alike uncritical of its own defect of insufficient height, and shows an ignorance or forgetfulness of the grander proportions of the central tower of Gloucester Cathedral, very closely resembling it in style, or of the unmatched towers of the Somersetshire churches, many of which are not only loftier, and with far better and varied details, but have also that sense of height which is rather painfully lacking here.