And so, passing the site of the old “Bowden” or Boughton Inn of coaching days, to Brixworth, meeting, possibly, on the way, a straining field of the Pytchley Hunt, in whose country we now are. You must be careful how you enunciate “Pytchley.” John Bright once mentioned it in the House of Commons. He called it the “Pitchley,” and stood aghast at the howl of derision which arose from the assembled fox-hunters masquerading as legislators. It was a fox-hunting House then, and “Labour” (i.e. well-paid agitators acting the part) was not dreamt of. Pytchley is your only way, although to be sure there are heretics who call it the “Patchley.” But they are worse barbarians than Bright, who knew no better.
Brixworth is an old, old place, truly “old arnshunt,” as the rustics say; but the latter-day discovery that it is profitable to work the ironstone beds situated here is just beginning to hustle the grey Roman and Saxon antiquity of it, with a fringe of red-brick cottages. Red brick in a country where building stone is of the plentifullest!
Many evidences of the presence here of the Romans have been discovered, and the great grim church of Brixworth, built largely of Roman brick and tile, has been thought by antiquaries to be, in fact, a Roman basilica. Roman coins have also been found in fairly large numbers; but history tells of no camp or town of that people here; and this is no Roman road. The church, locally said to be the “oldest in England,” appears to have been built or adapted by the Saxons so far back as A.D. 690, and thus “Briclesworde,” as it is styled in Domesday Book, was of a hoary antiquity even when that genuine antique, William the Conqueror, “came over.” The church was then a dependency of the great monastery of Medehamsted—the “Peterborough” of to-day—and until the vicarage was rebuilt, some fifty years since, remains of a monastic house were visible in its cellars.
BRIXWORTH CHURCH.
BRIXWORTH
The exterior and interior of the church are alike very striking, and the curious staircase tower added to the west side of the original tower is of particular interest, having been built on to the early Saxon tower in later and unsettled times, for the purpose of putting the church in a defensible condition against the forays of the Danish rovers then laying waste the country. The entrance was formerly by a door in the western face of the tower, but this semi-circular addition abolished all access that way. The upper stages and the spire are, of course, very much later, having in fact been built in the Decorated style of the fourteenth century. Rude masonry and irregularly disposed herring-bone patterns of Roman tile form the walls.
The interior, as of most other Saxon churches, is more curious than beautiful, however archæologically rare it may be. It consists nowadays of nave, chancel, semi-circular apse, and south chapel; but there were formerly narrow north and south aisles, as the walled-in nave arcades show. At what period these were destroyed does not appear. The apse is a modern rebuilding of the original, destroyed about 1460, but the ambulatory around it was not rebuilt. Large Gothic windows at various periods replaced the original Saxon small round-headed windows of the nave, but they have been abolished, and replicas of the Saxon work placed in their stead; which, however pleasing to sticklers for uniformity in matters architectural, was archæologically a crime demanding the penalty of peine forte et dure, or something especially excruciating. To destroy a genuine Decorated or Perpendicular window for the purpose of inserting a modern “Saxon” one—probably framed in with specially made “Roman” tiles—is distinctly Grimthorpian, and not playing the game according to the rules understood by the most enlightened. Recent excavations have brought to light the bases of Roman columns in the churchyard and in the church itself, and in short, ever since about a century ago, when people grow curious about antiquities, the building has been a kind of archæological lucky-bag. You scrape the plaster off a pier and discover a stone sculptured with a Roman eagle; disregarding spiders and immemorial dust, you thrust a hand into an ancient hole in the nave wall, and lo, out comes a reliquary containing the “Adam’s apple” that once waggled in the holy throat of Bishop Boniface. In fact, anything is possible at Brixworth:
More broken pans, more gods, more mugs,