Name what a Wife should be,
And She was that.
DAVENTRY MARKET-PLACE.
Daventry Priory once stood hereby, but many years have passed since its last fragments were cleared away to provide a site for the town gaol in front of this ugly church. The Priory itself was, with others, suppressed by Wolsey, that ambitious Cardinal, for the purpose of seizing its funds, towards the endowment of his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He is charged with having sent five of his creatures to pick a quarrel with the house, and, causing the dispute to be referred to himself, of having dissolved it by fraud. The story of what happened to his five emissaries and himself, and the moral drawn from their fate, are quite in keeping with the superstitious spirit of those times. Thus, one learns that two of the five quarrelled, and one slew the other, the survivor being hanged; that a third drowned himself in a well; that a fourth, formerly well-to-do, became penniless and begged till his dying day; and that the remaining one “was cruelly maimed in Ireland.” This series of “judgments” is then carried on to the Cardinal, whose miserable end is historic; to his colleges, of which one was immediately pulled down, and the other finished under other patronage; and to the Pope who permitted Wolsey’s high-handed doings, and who was besieged and long imprisoned. Unhappily, for the sake of a poetic completeness of vengeance, Henry VIII.—who dissolved more religious houses than any one, and, moreover, appropriated their revenues and lands to his own uses—flourished amazingly for years afterwards. Like the wicked whoso good fortunes are bitterly lamented by the Psalmist, his eyes swelled out with fatness, and he was well filled.
TOWN SEAL, DAVENTRY.
The old pronunciation of “Daintry” goes back certainly to the sixteenth century, when it was probably responsible for the device of the old town seal, adopted at that time, representing a figure intended to picture a Dane at odds with an indeterminate kind of a tree. Pennant, on the other hand, derives the name from “Dwy—avon—tre,” “the dwelling of the two Avons”: and indeed the town is placed, as it were, at the fork of the Nen, sometimes called the Avon, and another insignificant stream; but this is looked upon with an almost equal contempt, and mystery still enshrouds the real origin and the significance of the name.
Whips were made at Daventry a hundred years ago, but it is now a boot-making town, not altogether unpicturesque, in the slatternly sort. Besides its “Wheatsheaf,” there are the “Peacock,” the “Dun Cow,” the “Bear,” and the “Saracen’s Head”—all old; but the palm must be given to the last, containing much black oak, and altogether a great deal more interesting than a casual glance at its commonplace plastered front would disclose. Its courtyard is especially quaint; in red brick, with a large building to one side, now practically disused, but once the busy dining-room of the coaches. It was built probably about 1780: the upper part ornamented with grotesque wooden figures of Jacobean date, evidently the spoils of some demolished building. The whole, overhung with grape-vines, makes a very pretty picture.
