I left Banbury one sunshiny morning, shaking "the very dust" of the town from my wheels "as a testimony against it," and driving by its modern cross I took the road before me, letting it lead me where it would. Out of Banbury I would go the nearest way. The road climbed Wickham Hill and then dropped sharply down to the quiet old-world village of Bloxham, that boasts of one of the many "finest parish churches" in the kingdom. How many are there, I wonder? Certainly it is a fine church and has a fine spire; this all must grant. I thought it worthy of inspection. I found its windows guiltless of stained glass excepting for two in the chancel, but this was not a matter to grieve about, for I much prefer plain glass to the rubbishy modern stained variety one too often comes upon, and that so offends the cultured eye by its garish crudity. A peep of the blue sky, of green trees and of even the rain, framed by the graceful tracery of a Gothic window, is more to my mind than visions of stiffly posed angular saints with ill-fitting halos round their heads; I have always an uneasy feeling that the halos may tumble off. Not that all modern stained and painted glass is bad, but most of it is—hopelessly bad; its drawing when rarely correct is spiritless, it lacks inspiration; its colouring lacks richness; so unlike the lovely medieval stained glass, it has no gem-like qualities whatever. I honestly find difficulty in worshipping in a church with angular saints in ill-fitting robes and halos askew staring at me! It seems more the idea of a sinner doing penance than a saint glorified.
I noticed in the church a carved and coloured screen with some faded figures on it, and on the wall of a side chapel hung two old helmets and breastplates, somewhat rusty. I love to see ancient armour hanging in our churches, it takes the mind back to the days of knightly chivalry and recalls the never-returning romance of them—not the romance of fancy, but the romance of a past reality. Outside the church I found some open stone steps leading to two priests' chambers, one chamber over the other, but what interested me most was its richly sculptured west front; at the top of this are some good but unfortunately much weather-worn grinning gargoyles, for Time has been at work on these and has supplemented the carving of the monks with his, even, it may be, adding to their grotesqueness. Over and round the top of the big doorway is a quaint and gruesome representation of the resurrection, showing dead men rising from their coffins, one man being represented as lifting the lid of his and peering out with a look of genuine surprise as though he did not realise what was happening; others had risen and were kneeling on the ground with hands folded in the attitude of prayer, and all looked very much aghast. Skilful indeed was the hand of the medieval sculptor to obtain these expressions. It was a nightmare in carving, crudely done but startlingly effective. I am glad I do not attend that church and have to face each Sunday that terrible story in stone; it is enough to wish death the end of all. When men could not read the monks talked to them in carving, though rarely so horribly as this; mostly those monks were in a jovial mood, and so I prefer them, as witness their grinning gargoyles, their merry devils, and frequent mirthful representations of men in the dumps; they were artists of no mean order, and verily, I believe, in their hearts loved a joke better than a sermon: truly they joked far better than they preached, for their preaching seems forced—not so their jokes! To the right of the doorway there is a curious carving of a man entering the jaws of some unearthly monster; the drift of this was wholly beyond me—surely it could not have been intended for Jonah being swallowed by the whale, for the monster's head, and that was all there was of him, bore no resemblance to that of a whale or to any creature that ever walked the earth or swam the sea, unless doubtfully in the prehistoric ages. A local rhyme perpetuates the character of the spire of this church with two of its near neighbours thus:
Bloxham for length,
Adderbury for strength,
And King's Sutton for beauty.
The next village of South Newington, a village of stone-built cottages with thatched roofs, had by way of contrast a very small and poor church with square-headed windows, not those of the usual pointed Gothic type. I did not trouble to inspect it, though generally the poorest little country church can boast of some architectural feature more or less interesting. I came to a country church with only one point of interest, and that was a narrow priests' doorway gracefully designed; I presume it served the priests of past times, but I was told there was one parson of the good old Georgian days who could not use it because he was too fat! So he could not enter by the "narrow way," but had to go through the porch like any sinner.
Doorways in human habitations are often the keynote to the character of the house, and I was tempted in some of the country villages I passed through to photograph a few of their ancient doorways, for they interested me; two of these photographs, reproduced, will be found in pages farther on. The one of the fourteenth century is noteworthy, for it is a rare thing for so ancient a doorway to belong to a dwelling-house. I gathered the house had originally been a pre-Reformation vicarage; now it makes a quaint and picturesque home, with its low stone-slated roof, its mullioned windows, and its ivy-clad walls, boasting too the bloom of age that so beautifies a building. The other shows a simple type of Tudor doorway with steps up to it from the village street, but, though so simple and devoid of ornament, it is so well proportioned that it both pleases and satisfies the eye. I am rather fond of photographing architectural bits that take my fancy, and the English country abounds in such bits, apart from the larger features of buildings. It is curious to note how different districts afford and abound in special subjects: here you find ancient pigeon-cotes, often centuries old, of some pretence, and frequently most picturesque; here the minor items of sun-dials and of artistically wrought weather-vanes are most in evidence; at another spot you discover interesting "lion-guarded" gateways and picturesque doorways; again, it may be, it is the inn signs, with their crudely painted signboards and their elaborate scroll-work of wrought iron that surrounds them, that attract your attention; here a gazebo, and there an ancient roofed-in village fountain, claims your notice; anon a quaint conceit in carving on church or house, and so forth, not to waste space in needlessly enumerating the many and varied architectural tit-bits the wanderer by road constantly comes across, nor need he keep his eyes very wide open to discover them.
THE PRIEST'S DOORWAY.
After South Newington we had another long stretch of very lonely road, but charming on account of its loneliness; the country we passed through was elevated and undulating and afforded us many fine and far-reaching prospects. There were wide margins of grass by the sides of our road, so wide in places as to be almost fields; on these multitudes of silly sheep were grazing—I say silly, for when they heard the car approaching they would quietly cross the road in front of us, first one, then another, then the whole flock in slow procession, causing us to make many a stop, for sheep and cattle are lords of the road; they used even to stop a king's mails in the days of yore. These sheep really seemed to do it out of sheer perversity, and it was the more provoking as the otherwise forsaken road was so tempting to speed along, and occasionally, when all is safe, a turn of speed is a very inspiriting thing; it wipes the cobwebs from the brain, it drives the good fresh air into the lungs, it stimulates the mind, and braces the body. Not that I am an advocate of speed, except as a rare indulgence on lonely roads when there can be no hurt in it, and so you may test the mettle of your car.