FORD’S HOSPITAL.
Coventry is a city by ancient right of the time when there were Bishops of Coventry and Lichfield. The style of the See was afterwards reversed, and the scanty ruins of Coventry’s Abbey Church or Cathedral alone tell of that ancient dignity. The encircling walls, too, of Coventry are gone. They kept out many unwelcome visitors in their existence of three hundred years, and behind them the citizens withstood the Royalists of 1642 with such effect that the memory of it rankled twenty years later, when the Restoration brought the Stuarts back again, and Charles II. ordered the fortifications to be destroyed. It was to the Civil War that the expression of “sending to Coventry” any objectionable person owes its origin. Every one knows that this means the social ostracism—the “cutting”—of those thus punished; but its original meaning is not so commonly understood. It derives from Birmingham, where the townspeople took up a hostile attitude towards the Royalists, overwhelming scattered parties and sending them prisoners to Coventry. A very excellent reason for not keeping them at Birmingham was that, the town had no defences and no prisons, while Coventry was a fortress-city and had both.
“True as Coventry blue” would, in view of this old attitude, seem a saying ill-applied to a place of Puritan politics; but it referred to a dye then used here. When Ogilby came to Coventry in the compilation of his great road-book, he noted its position “on the little river Sherborne, whose water is peculiar for the Blue Dye.” Even then, it will be seen, the city was beginning to recover from the decay of a hundred years before.
XLII
Romance did not leave Coventry with the passing of mediæval days. It merely changed its aspect; doffed the “armour bright” the romancists love to tell of, and went clad instead in russet; put away helm and pike and broadsword, and sat the livelong day at the loom; changed indeed the Romance of Warfare for that of Industry, so that it was possible for old travellers to remark “the noise of the looms assails the passengers’ ears in every direction.” Coming in later years upon its discarded old warlike panoply of steel, Coventry has fashioned it anew, in the form of bicycles, for the needs of a peaceful age.
Tennyson, in Godiva, writing—
We, the latest seed of Time,
New men, that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past,
seems to foreshadow the bicycle, but the early period at which that poem was produced forbids any such allusion. We must needs, therefore, look upon those lines as prophetic, especially since, regarded in any other way, the phrase “the flying of a wheel” appears meaningless. But, even in the light of a prophetic inspiration, is not the cut at the “new men” who “cry down the past” an ill description of the typical cyclist, who uses his flying wheel as a means of communing with Nature and antiquity?