This “shire of squires and spires” is also in old folk-rhyme that of “spinsters and springs,” and of “pride, poverty, and puddings,” ascriptions not readily to be understood, unless they be merely examples of a rustic passion for alliteration reduced to an absurdity; for spinsters abound in other shires, and no one surely would seriously contend that Northamptonshire was favoured above the ordinary in the matter of springs, conceit, pauperism, and puddings. But the spires are, at any rate, an indubitable and a beautiful architectural fact.
Passing through Horton, we make a first acquaintance with them at Piddington, a village of the smallest dimensions with a church of the largest. Both are situated a few hundred yards off the road, the Early English church spire peaking up magnificently among the trees, with a peculiar richness of outline. Restoration recently in progress with the particularly vivid yellow-brown stone from the Duston quarries, two miles from Northampton, makes the restored patches stand out with glaring offensiveness; but Time will remedy that—as all other ills.
PIDDINGTON CHURCH.
HACKLETON
Hackleton, a large but rather characterless place, quickly follows upon Horton and Piddington, and is the last village before reaching Northampton, five miles away. Its position, the next place out of the town on the road to London, made it, in the days before railways a very special halting-place for drovers and the humbler wayfarers, and its inns were many. Superior to the rest was the “New Inn,” now a private residence, but for long years after it had retired from trade bearing on its front the legend “Wines and Spirits: Entertainment for Man and Beast”; with the not unnatural result that the privacy of the occupants was frequently invaded by seekers after that entertainment.
Little more than one mile from Northampton town, near by the junction of the road to Stony Stratford, where the highway assumes a magnificent breadth, stands on a grassy bank the finest of the famous Eleanor Crosses, raised by Edward the First to the memory of his Queen, Eleanor of Castile, who died of a lingering fever at Harby, in Nottinghamshire, November 28th, 1290. It is placed in a solitary position, on a grassy selvedge of the road, at a spot in the parish of Hardingstone, close by the grounds of what was once the Abbey of Delapré, or De Pratis, the Abbey of the Meadows, founded for an establishment of Cluniac nuns by Simon of Senlis, the crusading Earl of Northampton, in the late Norman period.
The dearly loved Queen of Edward the First died in what was then the remote district of Sherwood Forest, but the King decided that her body should rest at Westminster Abbey, and so, with impressive deliberation, the long journey was made.
QUEEN ELEANOR