It would be as vain to seek the old potteries that gave its name to Potterspury as it would be to enquire for any living representatives of the Paveleys who provided Paulerspury with style and title. The potteries vanished in times beyond the memory of man, and the sole relics of the Paveleys are the thirteenth-century wooden effigies of Sir Laurence de Paveley and his dame in Paulerspury Church.
At some little distance beyond Potterspury, Potterspury Lodge and its lime avenue come in sight, on the right side of the road. A wonderfully picturesque old mansion it is, recently restored by the retired tradesman who has purchased the property. At the rear of the house stands the historic “Queen’s Oak,” whose story has already been told.
The remaining four miles into Towcester, though hilly, had much of their difficulties disposed of when Telford came this way with theodolite, chain, and spirit-level. Plumb Park Hill is not what it was, thanks to this fifteen-foot cutting and the forty-four high embankment in the hollow of Cuttle Mill, where the road goes nowadays on a level with the chimney-pots of old roadside cottages.
At the crest of one of these rises stand Havencote Houses, which it pleased the compilers of old road-books to name “Heathencott,” and beyond come the lodges of Sir Thomas Hesketh’s domain—Easton Neston Park, an originally fine, but now somewhat dreary parade of classical stone columns forming an open screen, with stone stags couchant, and a central display of a coat-of-arms supported by weary-looking lions. The motto, “Hora e Semper”—“Now and Always”—bids a futile defiance to irresistible change.
The lodges on either side are deserted, and their windows boarded up. Somewhere within the park stand the “great house” and the manorial church, with monuments of the Fermors, successively Barons Lempster and Earls of Pomfret, to whom the estates came so long ago as 1527. Those titles, duly engrossed on their original patents in that manner of spelling, derive from the towns of Leominster and Pontefract, and prove the local pronunciation to have been the same then as now. They prove, in addition, that there was no person then at the Heralds’ College who could correctly spell the names of those places; but my Lords Lempster and Pomfret had to take and use the illiterate forms, just as the Earl of Arlington, whose title, conferred in 1663, came from Harlington in Middlesex, was made by those ’eralds to write himself with every signature an ’Arry.
XXVI
Where the park-wall of Easton Neston ends, Towcester—“vulgo Tosseter,” as Ogilby says, on the Towe, and once the Lactodorum of the Romans—begins. It is not the best of beginnings, or one calculated to favourably impress the stranger with the town. On the left hand rises a terrace of dingy brick houses, whose age is certified by the inscription, “Jubilee Row, 1809”; their height masked by the raising of the road in front, in Telford’s improvements of 1820, their social status evident in the notice on their frontages, “Lodgings for Travellers”—tramping travellers being understood. Beyond, Towcester unwinds its one long street of brick, stone, and plaster, with roofs, tiled, slated, and thatched: a very miscellaneous street. Among the houses, ancient, modern, and middle-aged; among the few dignified old stone mansions of golden russet stone, and the older, but more familiar, gabled plastered houses, that nod as though they could tell a thing or two worth the hearing; among these and the less interesting brick dwellings stand the Bickerstaff Almshouses, “rebuilt in the year 1815,” brick themselves and wholly uninteresting, except for the tablet preserved from the older buildings:—
Hee that earneth Wages By labour and
care By the Blessing of god may
Have Something to Spare. T. B.