THE TWO SPIRES FROM TOP OF BISHOP STREET
Such a medley is Coventry that the great steeple over-shadows quiet, memory-haunted places, and streets filled with the clamour of traffic, pleasant houses rich men have lately built, and squalid courts, that occupy the site of many an ancient burgage croft and garden. It is a typically English city, whose history might serve as the "abstract and brief chronicle" of England. A thoroughly corrupt borough in the worst days of municipal corruption, rigidly Puritan under the Stuarts, loyal under Elizabeth, steady for hereditary right at Mary's accession—but Protestant, as witness its martyrs—Lollard in the hey-day of Lollardry, patriotic and Talbot-worshipping in the Hundred Years' War—as England was, so was Coventry. In art and letters, also, the city recalls what is most characteristic in the achievements of the English people. Here flourished mediæval architecture, an art wherein Englishmen have excelled greatly, and the mediæval religious drama, foundation of Shakespeare's greatness; while chance, and the sojourn of George Eliot, have given the city associations with the literary outburst of the Victorian time.
The doings of Coventry folk or the happenings within the city must have impressed the minds of generations of English folk, since the name has entered into folk rhymes[1] and flower names, and proverbial English speech. Old botanists speak of "Coventry bells" and "Coventry Marians," where now we say "Canterbury bells"; children play card-games called "Peeping Tom" or "Moll of Coventry"; and we still, by silent avoidance of our friends, "send them to Coventry," a reminiscence maybe of the uncivil treatment the city Roundheads gave to imprisoned Cavaliers what time the bitterness engendered by the Civil War was abroad in the land.
Interesting too—albeit scanty—are the relics of legendary lore and heathen custom which ofttimes perplex the student of the city's history. Here was played the Hox-Tuesday play, survival, say folklorists, of the struggle to gain possession of a victim for the sacrifice; here the national legend of Godiva grew up; and here, men fabled, S. George, patron of England, was born.
In the country round about Coventry two Englands meet, one a land of green woods and well-watered pastures, the other black with the toil of the coal-fields. The city turns its most prosperous side southwards, and the common view of the spires is the one from the south, where the tree-bordered road from Kenilworth, whereon so many kings and queens have travelled, slips into Coventry, past a fringe of ample, comfortable houses, that the well-to-do have raised in our own time. This was Tennyson's view of the spires, and George Eliot must have seen it daily in her school-life, which she passed in the house that is farthest from the town in Warwick Row. It is the common view, but not the most interesting, since the octagonal Decorated steeple of Christchurch, recased in fresh stone, last remnant of the now demolished church of the Greyfriars, is the least commanding of the three, and by its nearness somewhat dwarfs the rest. The Greyfriars of Coventry, be it said, have gained by a scribe's error, a probably quite unmerited fame as producers of the noted Corpus Christi plays; in reality, this honour should belong to the lay-folk and craftspeople of the city.
It is well—so the journey is made from the south—to gain a more distant view of the "proud pyramidès" over the flat fields from the Stoneleigh Road, where Christchurch falls into its proper place. The trees make the way through Stoneleigh a lovely one, and the village church, redolent of eighteenth century peace, with a magnificent Norman chancel arch, furnishes a fine excuse for delay. Nearer to Coventry the way winds on over Finham Bridge, shadowed by poplars, and through Stivichall, a hamlet the widow of Earl Ranulf of Chester gave to the Bishop of Lichfield for the welfare of her husband's soul. Allotment gardens and newly-built streets occupy the land to the south-east of the city, formerly known as the Little Park, once part of a royal estate. It is a commonplace-looking site nowadays, albeit thronged with memories. Here Lollard sermons have been preached and miracle-plays played, and hither Laurence Saunders and others were led out to be burned in 1556, on ground now occupied by a factory, where once long after men discovered charred fragments of a stake. They are building streets over the Park area by the station nowadays; but this was a practice inaugurated long ago when Much Park Street (vicus parci maioris) and Little Park Street (vicus parci minoris) were built on ground cut out of the royal estate. The east end of Little Park Street may be reached by Park Road, past a newly-raised memorial to the Coventry martyrs.
8 Much Park ST