Still about our route clung, like a silver mist, Shakespeare traditions. In the now perished church of Luddington, two miles south of Stratford, the poet, it is said, married Anne Hathaway; but the same bridal is claimed for the venerable church of Temple Grafton, about a mile distant, and again for the neighbouring church of Billesley. Long Marston, "Dancing Marston," believes its sporting-ground was in the mind of the prentice playwright, a little homesick yet in London, when he wrote:
"The Nine-Men's Morris is filled up with mud;
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable."
At Lower Quinton stands an old manor-house of whose library—such is the whisper that haunts its folios—Will Shakespeare was made free. A happy picture that—of an eager lad swinging across the fields and leaping stiles to enter into his paradise of books.
We were well into Gloucestershire before this, that tongue of Gloucestershire which runs up almost to Stratford-on-Avon, and were driving on in the soft twilight, now past the old-time Common Fields with their furlongs divided by long balks; now over rolling reaches, crossed by low stone walls, of sheep-walk and water-meadow and wheat-land, with here and there a fir plantation or a hazel covert; now through a strange grey hamlet built of the native limestone. Our road was gradually rising, and just before nightfall we came into Chipping Campden, most beautiful of the old Cotswold towns. We had not dreamed that England held its like,—one long, wide, stately street, bordered by silent fronts of great stone houses, with here and there the green of mantling ivy, but mainly with only the rich and changeful colouring of the stone itself, grey in shadow, golden in the sun. Campden was for centuries a famous centre of the wool trade; the Cotswolds served it as a broad grazing-ground whose flocks furnished wool for the skilful Flemish weavers; its fourteenth century Woolstaplers' Hall still stands; its open market-house, built in 1624 midway of the mile-long street, is one of its finest features; its best-remembered name is that of William Grevel, described on his monumental brass (1401) as "Flower of the Wool-merchants of all England." He bequeathed a hundred marks toward the building of the magnificent church, which stood complete, as we see it now, in the early fifteenth century. Its glorious tower, tall and light, yet not too slender, battlemented, turreted, noble in all its proportions, is a Cotswold landmark. As we were feasting our eyes, after an evening stroll, upon the symmetries of that grand church, wonderfully impressive as it rose in the faint moonlight above a group of strange, pagoda-roofed buildings, its chimes rang out a series of sweet old tunes, all the more poignantly appealing in that the voices of those ancient bells were thin and tremulous, and now and then a note was missed.
TOWER OF CHIPPING CAMPDEN CHURCH
The fascinations of Campden held us the summer day long. We must needs explore the church interior, which has suffered at the hands of the restorer; yet its chancel brasses, wrought with figures of plump woolstaplers, their decorous and comely dames, and their kneeling children, reward a close survey. I especially rejoiced in one complacent burgher, attended by three wimpled wives, and a long row of sons and daughters all of the same size. There is a curious chapel, too, where we came upon the second Viscount Campden, in marble shroud and coronet, ceremoniously handing, with a most cynical and unholy expression, his lady from the sepulchre. There was a ruined guildhall to see, and some antique almshouses of distinguished beauty. As we looked, an old man came feebly forth and bowed his white head on the low enclosing wall in an attitude of grief or prayer. We learned later that one of the inmates had died that very hour. We went over the works of the new Guild of Handicraft, an attempt to realise, here in the freshness of the wolds, the ideals of Ruskin and Morris. We cast wistful eyes up at Dover's Hill, on whose level summit used to be held at Whitsuntide the merry Cotswold Games. "Heigh for Cotswold!" But it was the hottest day of the summer, and we contented ourselves with the phrase.
Other famous Cotswold towns are "Stow-on-the-Wold, where the wind blows cold"; Northleach in the middle of the downs, desolate now, but once full of the activities of those wool-merchants commemorated by quaint brasses in the splendid church,—brasses which show them snugly at rest in their furred gowns, with feet comfortably planted on stuffed woolpack or the fleecy back of a sheep, or, more precariously, on a pair of shears; Burford, whose High Street and church are as noteworthy as Campden's own; Winchcombe, once a residence of the Mercian kings and a famous shrine of pilgrimage; Cirencester, the "Capital of the Cotswolds," built above a ruined Roman city and possessing a church of surpassing richness. How we longed for months of free-footed wandering over these exhilarating uplands with their grey settlements like chronicles writ in stone! But Father Time was shaking his hour-glass just behind us, in his marplot fashion, and since it had to be a choice, we took the evening train to Chipping Norton.
I regret to say that Chipping Norton, the highest town in Oxfordshire, showed little appreciation of the compliment. It was not easy to find lodging and wellnigh impossible to get carriage conveyance back to Campden the next day. It is a thriving town, ranking third in the county, and turns out a goodly supply of leather gloves and the "Chipping Norton tweeds." The factory folk were, many of them, having their holiday just then; their friends were coming for the week-end and had one and all, it would seem, set their hearts on being entertained by a Saturday drive; the only victoria for hire in the place was going to Oxford to bring an invalid lady home; altogether the hostlers washed their hands—merely in metaphor—of the two gad-abouts who thought Chipping Norton not good enough to spend Sunday in. Before we slept, however, we had succeeded in engaging, at different points, a high wagonette, a gaunt horse, and a bashful boy, and the combination stood ready for us at nine o'clock in the morning.