Coventry.
Coventry originated, according to tradition, in a convent established here as early as the sixth century. Canute is said to have been the founder of another. Whatever may be the truth of the matter, it is certain that the great Saxon Earl Leofric and his wife Godifu in 1043 founded that Benedictine Monastery whose Priory church afterwards became the Cathedral, whose scanty ruins alone remain. These real and legendary religious houses, together with the Monastery of the Carmelites, or White Friars, and numerous others originated a curious notion that the name “Coventry” was really a corruption of “Conventry,” the place of convents. It was an excusable mistake, when we consider that the somewhat similar name of “Covent Garden” in London does in point of fact derive from the old garden of the Abbots of Westminster, but it was a complete mistake, all the same. The place-name comes from a little stream called by the British the Couen, not easily to be found in the city itself, but rising to the north and passing through the village of Coundon. (There is a stream of similar name, the “Cound,” at Church Stretton, in Shropshire.) It was thus the “place on the Couen.” The Saxons, who called that stream by a name of their own, the “Scir-burn,” that is to say, the “clear stream”—which in course of time became the “Sherborne”—did not succeed in changing the name of the place, as they did at Sherborne in Dorset; and “Coventry” it remained.
The most famous incident in the ancient “history” of Coventry is entirely legendary; but although proved to be inherently improbable, if not impossible, the story of Godiva and her ride through the streets clad only in her own modesty, is one that will never be destroyed by criticism. It is too ancient a myth for that.
About the year 1130 the monkish writer, Roger of Wendover, started it. Whence he derived the story no one knows, but he probably heard it as a folk-legend unconnected with place or person, and took it upon himself to fix the tale on Leofric and his Countess Godifu. He had courage in doing so, for it was only about a hundred years after the time of Leofric and his wife that he wrote.
“The Countess Godiva,” he says, “who was a great lover of God’s mother, longing to free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy toll, often with urgent prayers besought her husband, that from regard to Jesus Christ and His mother, he would free the town from that service, and from all other heavy burdens; and when the Earl sharply rebuked her for foolishly asking what was so much to his damage, and always forbade her for evermore to speak to him on the subject; and while she, on the other hand, with a woman’s pertinacity, never ceased to exasperate her husband on that matter, he at last made her this answer: ‘Mount your horse, and ride naked before all the people, through the market of the town from one end to the other, and on your return you shall have your request,’ on which Godiva replied, ‘But will you give me permission, if I am willing to do it?’ ‘I will,’ said he. Whereupon, the Countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair, and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body, like a veil, and then mounting her horse and attended by two knights, she rode through the market-place without being seen, except her fair legs; and having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband and obtained of him what she had asked, for Earl Leofric freed the town of Coventry and its inhabitants from the aforesaid service, and confirmed what he had done by a charter.”
The incident of Peeping Tom was never thought of by Roger of Wendover, and does not become a part of the story until the seventeenth century. Who was the genius who invented him is not known; but from that time onwards the peeping tailor who alone of all the people of Coventry spied upon Godiva as she rode through the empty streets becomes an essential part of the legend. His fate takes so mediæval a turn that he seems really older than he is. Tennyson adopts him, in his poem, as a
“low churl, compact of thankless earth,
The fatal byword of all years to come,
Boring a little auger-hole in fear,
Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will,
Were shrivell’d into darkness in his head,
And dropt before him. So the powers who wait
On noble deeds, cancell’d a sense misus’d.”
A half-length effigy purporting to be Peeping Tom occupies a niche in the wall of the “King’s Head” in Smithford Street. He is really a portion of a figure of St. George from one of the old Coventry civic pageants; but he looks so peculiarly unsaintly and has so lecherous a grin that no one can for a moment dispute his entire suitability for the present part.
Coventry became so important a place in the early part of the fourteenth century that it was granted a charter of incorporation, and afterwards fortified with walls and gates. Parliaments were held there, in the stately buildings of the Priory; Coventry Cross became one of the most famous City Crosses in the kingdom; and the trade guilds were among the richest and most powerful. The mayors, too, were important and fearless magistrates, as we may judge from the example of John Horneby, who in 1411 caused the riotous Prince Hal, afterwards Henry the Fifth, to be arrested for creating a disturbance, and thus ranks with Judge Gascoyne, who on another occasion committed the Prince to prison.
Shakespeare rightly made Falstaff more ashamed to march through this rich and populous town with his ragged company of a hundred and fifty soldiers, and only a shirt and a half among the lot, than Godiva had been to ride through the primitive place of three hundred years before, with nothing—