“their assigned and native dwelling place.”
Art and Nature seem both to have stopped short of all “improvement;” there has been no need of the one to disturb the renown which the locality receives from the other; even the “stocks” that stand under a group of “Patrician trees” at Hampton Lucy, are suffered to die of natural decay; and it is as certain that the “bonny sweet Robin,” whose song we heard from the hawthorn in the churchyard is the progeny of him who sung there when Elizabeth was queen, as that the lord of the mansion is the descendant of that very Sir Thomas Lucy who sat in judgment upon the youth who
“obscur’d his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness.”
This unity of character has been most carefully preserved in the new buildings erected on the estate, of which the annexed wood-cut will afford evidence.
It is difficult to descend to simple facts while describing a neighbourhood so suggestive of thought—so redolent of fancy. The Lucys, who occupy to-day the manor in which they lived three hundred years ago—“good old English gentlemen” of the present, as of the olden time—have inherited, without break, from father to son; adding little to their hereditary property, and losing no part of it by carelessness, profusion, or vice; generally, they seem to have been peaceable and liberal manorial lords, studious to make their tenantry prosperous and their dependants comfortable; dwelling apart from the bustle of action, and the stir of contentious life, even rumours of “oppression and deceit” seem rarely to have reached them; “exempt from public haunt,” they passed their days happily and slept together—a long line of kindly, if not great, men—under the roof tree of the little church where monuments loftier than their own ambitions have been raised to perpetuate their names.[59]
The history of Charlecote and its Lords, is given with great minuteness by Dugdale. Charlecote, Cherlecote, or Cerlecote, as it is written in Domesday Book, was, previous to the Conquest, in the possession of one Saxi, but afterwards became the property of the Earl of Mellent, and doubtless came from him to Henry de Newburgh, Earl of Warwick,
From a drawing by F.W. Hulme. Day & Son, Lithʳˢ. to The Queen.