A skeleton form lay mouldering there,
In the bridal wreath of that lady fair.
Oh! sad was her fate! In sportive jest
She hid from her lord in that old oak chest.
It closed with a spring, and her bridal bloom
Lay withering there in a living tomb.
But who was the “Baron” and who “Lovel,” and where they resided, or when they flourished we are not informed. Curiously enough, however, a Viscount Lovel disappeared in something the same manner. This was that Francis, Viscount Lovel, who fought ex parte the impostor, Lambert Simnel, at Stoke, and disappeared after the defeat of the pretender’s cause on that day. His fate remained a mystery until 1708, when, in the course of some works in the ruins of what had been his ancestral mansion at Minster Lovel, in Oxfordshire, a secret underground chamber was discovered, in which was found the skeleton of a man identified with him. It was thought that he had taken refuge there, in that locked room, and was attended to by a retainer who, possibly, betrayed his trust and left his master to starve; or who, perhaps, was himself slain in some affray during those troubled times. The repetition of the name of Lovell is at any rate curious.
Now across the levels rise the distant houses of Bridgwater town, and the slim spire of its church. The long flat road, of undeviating directness, points directly towards the place. Hedgerow and other trees dispose themselves casually, without ordered plan, on either hand, and a railway crosses the highway, diagonally, on a bridge and embankment. The scene is absolutely negative and characterless: neither beautiful nor absolutely ugly: the very realisation, one would say, of the commonplace. As you proceed, a distant grouping of masts and spars proclaims the fact of navigable water being near at hand, and then groups of factory chimneys, smoking vigorously, loom up. These are the most outstanding marks of Bridgwater’s only prominent manufacture: the manufacture of “Bath bricks.” Every housewife knows what is meant by “Bath brick.” With this article of commerce and domestic economy knives are cleaned, brass fenders and candlesticks and coppers are scoured, and much other metal-work brought to brightness. But it is not made at Bath. At only one place in the world—and that Bridgwater—is the so-called “Bath brick” brought into being: the reason of this monopoly of manufacture lying in the fact that the material of which it is made is found only here in the mud of the river Parret. But only in a stretch of some three miles of that river’s course is found the peculiarly composed mud of which this aid to domestic cleanliness is compacted. Equally above and below the town, within those strictly-defined limits, the rise and fall of the tide amalgamates the river mud, and the seashore sand in just the right proportions for the scouring properties of “Bath brick.” At a further distance above the town, the mud that renders the Parret’s banks so unlovely becomes merely slime; while, as the sea is more nearly approached, the proportion of sharp sand in it destroys the binding character of the mud, and would render bricks made of the amalgam there found very destructive to cutlery and other ware unfortunate enough to be scoured by it.
Why these “bricks,” made only at Bridgwater, should be given the name of “Bath,” and not that of the town where they originate, is a mystery at this lapse of time not likely to be solved. The most plausible explanation offered is that when these bricks were first made they were stored and “handled,” as a commercial man might say, at Bath.
The mud from which the bricks are made is collected quite simply, but ingeniously, in pens carefully constructed along the Parret’s banks. These “slime-batches,” as they are named, are brick-built enclosures, so arranged that the mud-charged tide flows into them at every flood, the mud settling down during the interval of ebb. Thus with every recurring tide a new deposit is added; the “batches” being filled in the course of two or three months, according to the time of year. This accumulation, grown hard in all this time, is dug out, generally in the winter, and removed to the banks, whence it is taken as required to the pug-mills, in which it is mixed with water and thus tempered to a putty-like consistency. Then it is ready for the moulder, that is to say, the actual brickmaker, who, after the identical fashion followed by the moulder of ordinary bricks, takes his lumps of material, throws them into a wooden framework made to the gauge of a brick, scrapes off the surplus clay from the top and pushes the raw brick aside, as one of a rapidly growing row. The rapidity with which a moulder does his work is astonishing to the unaccustomed onlooker. A workman of average excellence can thus shape four hundred bricks an hour.