Gretton is a village two miles from Winchcombe, on the Tewkesbury road, and Greet is a wayside hamlet in between. We have no authority for the Shakespearean authorship of the rhymes, but “old John Naps of Greece,” who is mentioned with “Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell” as cronies of Christopher Sly, was not “of Greece” but of this place. “Greece” is one of those many misprints that in the early folios and quartos continue to puzzle critics. In one of them Hamlet declares he can tell the difference between “a hawk and a handsaw,” and it was long before “handsaw” was seen to be a printer’s error for “heronshaw,” a young heron. To emigrate John Naps from Greet to Greece was a comparatively easy matter, in type, if not in actual travel. We will allow, for argument’s sake, that this by itself might not be convincing evidence that Shakespeare knew Greet and intended to refer to it; but we have Davy, Shallow’s servant in the Second Part of Henry the Fourth, referring to “William Visor of Woncot,” who has an action at law against “Clement Perkes of the hill.” By “Woncot,” is meant the hamlet of Woodmancote, three miles west of Winchcombe, a place then and now called “Woncot,” locally. The name, correctly spelt in the original edition of 1600, has been mistakenly altered to “Wincot,” in later issues. At Woodmancote the family of Visor, sometimes spelled “Vizard” was in Shakespeare’s time and until recent years living. It lies beneath Stinchcombe Hill, locally “the Hill,” which rises to the imposing height of 915 feet. There, it has been ascertained, the Perkes family then had their home. The name of Perkes was variously spelled “Purkis” and “Purchas.” The last representative appears to have been one “J. Purchas, Esq., of Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley, Glos.,” who is mentioned in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1812, as having died at Margate, in his seventy-fifth year.
It is a tremendous and a beautiful view from the lofty plateau of Cleeve Common as you go from Winchcombe to Woodmancote and Bishop’s Cleeve, on the way to Tewkesbury. I shall never forget the glory of that evening of early summer when, romping out of Cheltenham, our car breasted the long rise to this view-point and we halted here as the westering sun sank across the golden-blue distance of the Vale of Avon, with the Malvern Hills, grey and indistinct, beyond. Distant views of the Promised Land could have made no better promise of beauty and plenty.
From this Pisgah height you come “down-a-down-a,” as Ophelia says, to Bishop’s Cleeve, thinking upon the sheer appropriateness of the place-name; not the “Bishop” part of it, but the “Cleeve”; which stands of course for “cleft,” or “cliff.” Thenceforward, the way lies along the levels into Tewkesbury, through Stoke Orchard and Treddington.
CHAPTER XXII
Tewkesbury.
The little town of Tewkesbury, which numbers about 5500 inhabitants, and is one of the most cheerful and bustling, and withal one of the most picturesque towns in England, occupies a remarkable situation. Not remarkable in the scenic way, for a more nearly level stretch of very often flooded meadow lands you will not see for miles. The site of Tewkesbury is close upon, but not actually on, the confluence of England’s greatest river, the broad and turbid and rather grim Severn, with the Avon. All around, but in grey and blue distances, are hills: the Cotswolds, the Bredon Hills, the greater Malverns, and the yet greater, but more distant Welsh mountains; but the Severn and the Avon flow through levels that extend considerable distances. When those two rivers—so different in every respect; in size, in character, and in the very colour of their waters, the Avon being clear and bright, and the Severn a sullen, dun-coloured waterway—unite to flood these low-lying lands the only way to travel comfortably about the neighbourhood is by boat. Tewkesbury is at all times particularly old-world and quaint, and it makes on these occasions an excellent substitute for Venice. This peculiarity, or rather this contingency, let us say, perhaps explains the at first sight rather singular fact that the town should have been built on the Avon, half a mile from its junction with the Severn, and not upon the larger river at all. It looks like a wanton disregard of the advantages that the Severn navigation would bring to the town, with riverside wharves and quays; but those who selected the site probably considered the Severn to be too dangerous a river, and so set their town back half a mile or so from its banks. A consequence is that the external trade of Tewkesbury has always been negligible, and to-day, although the text-books tell you of its industry of making shirt-fronts—“particularly stiff shirt-fronts”—and the olden one of flour-milling, which is carried on by Avonside, the scale of their activities has never become large.
The founding of Tewkesbury is said to have been the work of a seventh-century religious Saxon named Theoc, who established a church here; but the Roman station, Etocessa, was here first, and although the place-name is supposed to derive from Theoc, by way of “Theocsbyrig,” and the Domesday version, “Teodechesberie,” too little is known of him for us to take much interest in it. It is rather interesting, however, to consider that, the site being among water-meadows, and that the land at the confluence of Severn and Wye is called “the Ham,” how very near Tewkesbury was to being called “Tewkesham.”
The monastery that was thus seated by the two rivers became a flourishing Benedictine house, and after its full share of the early adversities of fire and sword, famine and flood, it resulted in the building of the grand Abbey church, which is still the greatest architectural glory of the town. The re-founder of the monastery and builder of this noble and solemn example of Norman architecture was Robert Fitz Hamon, Earl of Gloucester, the greatest of the early Lords Marchers of Wales, and overlord of Glamorgan, who died in 1197, fighting in foreign wars. He had seen so many post-mortem bequests go wrong and never reach their intended destination that he determined to perform his re-founding of monastery and church in his own lifetime. Both were well advanced when he died, and the Abbey was finally consecrated in 1223; a remarkable example of expedition for those times. I do not propose to narrate the story of the Abbey, which has no such picturesque and fantastic falsehoods as that of Evesham. The monastery ran its course and was suppressed with others by Henry the Eighth, and the Abbey church was saved by the townsfolk, who paid the King the equivalent of £5000 for the site and fabric. And so it remains to us to this day, more venerable by lapse of time, minus its Lady Chapel, and with evidences of the puritan zeal of rather more than a hundred years later than Henry’s great reform; but it is yet the veritable building of Fitz Hamon’s and of the generations that succeeded him.
You cannot see this great Abbey church to advantage from the town. It is only from the open meadows by the Severn, and its tributary brooks, where the little town is to be guessed at by the evidence of a few roofs and chimneys, that its great scale and solemn majesty are fully apparent. There the great central Norman tower and the magnificent and unique West Front of the same period are seen in their proper relation with the surroundings. The long outline is very like that of St. Albans, but 237 feet less; St. Albans Abbey being 550 feet long, and Tewkesbury 313 feet.
The near view of the West Front and its great and deeply-embayed Norman window, filled not unsuitably with the Perpendicular tracery of three hundred years later, is no disillusionment; it is, after the glorious West Front of Peterborough, one of the most striking compositions of the kind in England, and the flanking Norman tourelles and spirelets have by contrast the most delicate appearance.