My amiable friend, Mr. S. B. Russell of the “Lygon Arms,” is of those who deny this quaint tale. The “Lygon Arms” itself has become a stately house, both without and within. As the “White Hart,” of olden days it dates back to 1540. Traditionally Cromwell lay here, the night before the Battle of Worcester, and there are even traditions of Charles the First staying here, ten years earlier. I am not concerned to deny or to affirm these legends. In any case, it would be sheer futility to do so, for no evidence survives. But it is likely enough, for the “White Hart,” as it then was, ranked with the best—as it does now, if I may say it. We may readily judge of its then standing, by the fine Jacobean stone entrance doorway, built by John Trevis in 1620, and still admitting to the house. It bears his name and that of Ursula his wife, with the date, and seems to mark a general restoration of the already old hostelry undertaken at that time. John Trevis—or “Treavis”—himself lies in Broadway old church, an interesting old building a mile or more distant from the village, and situated along a lonely wooded road, adjoining an ancient manor-house lately restored with much taste and discrimination. Trevis died in 1641, and has a brass to his memory. This old church is in a solitary situation, and is largely superseded by a modern building near the village. There is a palimpsest brass in the chancel, and hard by is an enriched wooden pulpit, bearing this distinctly apposite and characteristically Reformation-period inscription: “Prov. 19. Wher the word of God is not preached, the people perish.”
But to return to Broadway and the “Lygon Arms.” Thirty years ago the house had fallen into a very poor condition, and the great stone building with its fine rooms and its air of being really a private mansion, had declined to the likeness of a village alehouse. It was all the doing of the railways, which had disestablished the coaches, and brought desolation upon this road, in common with most others. But in the dawn of the new era of road travel the present proprietor bought the house, and has by degrees reinstated those stone mullions which had been torn from the windows and replaced at some extraordinarily inappreciative period by modern sashes; and has wrought altogether, a wonderful transformation. The “Lygon Arms,” is now as stately a hostelry as ever it was.
I reach the old town of Chipping Campden by another route, and so will not climb on this occasion the steep, mile-long Broadway Hill by which you come this way to it. I will turn instead further south, to Winchcombe.
Winchcombe, it may be thought, is a far cry from Stratford-on-Avon. It is twenty-four miles distant, but though twenty-four miles formed in olden days a very much more considerable journey than now, the place and its surroundings were familiar to Shakespeare. If you would seek here local allusions in the plays, wherewith to belabour the Bacon fanatics, there is no lack in this district of “Cotsall,” those Cotswolds on which Page’s fallow greyhound was outrun: a portion of those “wilds in Gloucestershire,” whose “high wild hills and rough uneven ways, Draw out our miles and make them wearisome,” as Northumberland complains in King Richard the Second.
Shakespeare knew most that was to be known about the Cotswold Hills, and when he makes Shallow bid Davy “sow the headland with red wheat,” he alludes to an olden local custom of sowing “red lammas” wheat early in the season.
He was familiar with the consistency of Tewkesbury mustard, with which, doubtless, the Stratford folk of his day relished their meat, and he finds in it an apt illustration of a dull man’s attempted sprightliness: as where he makes Falstaff say, “He a good wit, hang him baboon! his wit is as thick as Tewkesbury mustard.”
Here, in the neighbourhood of Winchcombe, familiar rhymes, generally uncomplimentary, upon surrounding places are attributed to him almost as freely as are those upon the “Eight Villages.” They tell of—
“Dirty Gretton, Dingy Greet,
Beggarly Winchcombe, Sudeley sweet;
Hanging Hartshorn, Whittington Bell,
Dull Andoversford, and Merry Frog Mill.”
The epithets vary with the different narrators of the lines. Those quoted above do not in general fit the places, except beautiful Sudeley and perhaps “once upon a time” Frog Mill, which, in spite of its name was probably of old a sufficiently merry place, for it is the name of an ancient and once renowned inn adjoining Andoversford: an inn where men made merry until the railway came hard by and disestablished its custom.
Winchcombe it is difficult to believe ever “beggarly.” It is an old and picturesque market town in the Cotswolds, with a noble and particularly striking Perpendicular church, with clerestoried nave and central tower, and an array of monstrously gibbering gargoyles. Next it is a curious old inn, oddly named the “Corner Cupboard.” Here, too, at the “George” inn, are some traces of the hostelry formerly maintained by the Abbots of Winchcombe for pilgrims to their altars. Sudeley Castle, in its park a mile away, is a place of great interest, now restored, with a modern altar-tomb and effigy to Catherine Parr, sixth and last wife of Henry the Eighth, who resided here.