RADCOT BRIDGE.
Now comes Radcot Bridge, neighboured and overhung by a wealth of trees; tall, slim, spiring poplars, and others that spread boldly out. Radcot Bridge is your only possible halting-place hereabouts for the night; for here is the waterside “Swan” inn, with its lawn sloping down to the river, its landing-steps and boathouse: and Faringdon and its inns are three miles distant. Thither, however, you must needs fare, if so be the “Swan” is full.
The single-span, round-arched bridge through which one comes in these times is not the real original bridge, nor is the present course of the Thames at this point the real original river. This is a new cut, made in 1787, to improve the navigation, then still considered to be of considerable commercial importance. The old course of the river flows sluggishly to the right-hand, and is not now practicable for boats. Here still stands the ancient gothic bridge, with its three pointed arches and the base and socket of what was once a cross on the eastern parapet. This bridge and the causeway built to it, across the meadows, once formed a more important means of communication than now, for the road across the Thames from Faringdon led northwards to Burford, and so by degrees into the Midlands. Its strategic value has been at least twice illustrated. The bridge itself dates from about 1300, and was on December 20th, 1387, the scene of a sharp action in which Henry, Earl of Derby, met and defeated Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, favourite of Richard the Second. Many of de Vere’s men were drowned here on that December day, and their commander himself narrowly escaped, by swimming across the river, half clad in his armour. His force seems to have been taken completely by surprise. The “Henry, Earl of Derby” of this affair was he who twelve years later, 1399, at last succeeded in deposing Richard, and reigning in his stead, as Henry the Fourth.
The second occasion of Radcot’s figuring in martial annals was a skirmish in the long course of the Great Rebellion, when Faringdon House, up yonder, three miles away in the town, was held for the King, and the bridge was occupied as an outpost. Cromwell’s men appear to have driven the outpost in, with some loss.
But, before an end is made with Radcot Bridge, let us note the little-known fact that it was hence, in those seventeenth-century times, when roads were little better than muddy tracks across the fields are now, that much of the stone employed by Wren in the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral was brought to London. The old quarries whence this stone came have been closed now for two hundred years, but the site of them is still to be found at a spot to this day known as “Kit’s Quarries,” near Burford, eight miles north of Radcot Bridge. I have written about Christopher Kempster—the “Kit” of those quarries—in another place,[1] and have shown that he was firstly clerk of works and master-mason in the employment of Sir Christopher Wren for many years, not only in the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but also in the general rebuilding of the City of London churches. Retiring from those positions, he bought the quarries, and thenceforward dealt largely in the stone with which he had once built.
The stone was conveyed from near Burford, along eight miles of bad roads, and here at Radcot Bridge, on the old course of the river, before the new channel was cut, was loaded, into barges, and so found its way to London.
It will be well to explore into the level Oxfordshire hinterland behind Radcot Bridge. There we shall, in the course of two miles, find the untidy village of Clanfield, which straggles lengthily on either side of the grassy edges of a stream three parts dry in summer, and thus revealing to the disgusted wayfarer rich and varied deposits of unconsidered village refuse—in the way of battered tins and old boots embedded in the ooze. Thistles, nettles, and scrubby weeds bedevil the grass that might so easily be made beautiful.
ST. STEPHEN.