There were of old fourteen churches in Wallingford; but the town suffered so greatly in the plague of 1343, and then from the Black Death, that the population dwindled away to almost nothing, and most of the churches fell into ruin, so that three only remain: St. Mary-the-More, St. Leonard, and St. Peter’s; and even those were greatly battered during the siege. The last named is that whose fantastic white masonry steeple is prominently seen from the river. It was built, together with the body of the church, in 1769. In its churchyard lies Sir William Blackstone (died 1780), Lord Chief Justice, and author of the most famous Commentaries since Julius Caesar. But Blackstone’s work is of quite another kind than that of the “noblest Roman of them all.” It is, of course, a work of legal erudition.
WALLINGFORD: TOWN HALL, AND CHURCH OF ST. MARY-THE-MORE.
St. Mary-the-More, whose name carries with it allusion to another St. Mary’s—St. Mary-the-Less, united with St. Peter, so long ago as 1374, is in the market-place, grouping finely with the curious seventeenth-century Town Hall that stands supported on an open arcade, affording space for the market. It is so fine and so entirely satisfactory a Town Hall, and so imbued with architectural grace and distinction, that no one will be in the least surprised to see it some day improved off the face of the earth, in the usual manner of provincial authorities with such. The prominent gallery above was, and is, used for proclaiming public events, from the accession of a Sovereign down to the result of a municipal election.
For the rest, Wallingford is a quiet town, with a workhouse and the gasworks as the chief architectural features of one end; and a very fine stone bridge of fourteen arches, rebuilt in 1809, at the other. Some solid, comfortable-looking seventeenth- and eighteenth-century residences somewhat ennoble the quiet streets, and the George Inn is picturesque.
Crowmarsh Gifford is a little village on the Oxfordshire side of the river.
Newnham Murren stands beside a steep and exquisitely-wooded road that leads on past Mongewell, where it loses that lovely woodland character and goes undulating over chalky switchbacks to come eventually to North Stoke, South Stoke, and Goring.
Mongewell church stands in a beautifully-wooded park, on a lawn-like expanse close to the river bank. It has, unfortunately, been entirely rebuilt. Shute Barrington, Bishop-Palatine of Durham, who possessed a country residence here, and died in London in 1826, aged ninety-three, is buried in the building.