| He | } | fell asleep Ano. Dni. | { | 1629 | } | being aged | 63 | } | yeares. |
| She | 1619 | 59 |
| For ye fruit of their | { | labours | } | they left | { | ye new inn twice built at their own charge. |
| bodies | one only son and two daughters. |
Their son being liberally bred in ye University of Oxon thought him-
self bound to erect this small monument
| of | { | their | } | piety towards | { | God |
| his | them |
Ano. Dni. 16....
Epitaphs in this form are by no means uncommon; but it would be difficult to find one of quainter conception. Even the surname of the worthy proprietors of the “New Inn” has a Dickens-like grotesqueness. Bensington is interesting to lovers of English literature as having belonged to the Chaucers, from whom it descended to the De la Poles. Bensington Lock is below the village, and oarsmen pulling up to Oxford have learned to beware of the dangerous cross-current at the weir. Near the lock the tow-path crosses again to the Berkshire shore. Hence away to Wallingford the country becomes much more picturesque. The Oxford bank is most profusely wooded; groves of willows and alders edge the stream; while farther ashore glades of elm and chestnut perfume the air. Overshadowed by trees, whose branches intertwine, is a pretty red-brick boat-house, into which as we pass disappears a gaily-freighted boat, seeming to pass from brilliant sunshine and rippling river into the dark recesses of some dusky cavern. Then the woodland opens out, the scenery becomes park-like, and through the clumps of oak which stud the foreground we get glimpses of Howberry Park, a more than usually handsome Elizabethan house, the successor of a hardly more picturesque Jacobean building destroyed a century ago by the flames which await every country-house, be it soon or be it late. Howberry Park, once the seat of the Blackstones, lies in the parish of Crowmarsh Giffard, almost opposite the town of Wallingford. The vestry-door of Crowmarsh Church is riddled with bullets—reminders, it is said, of the last siege of Wallingford, at which time this door hung in the west entrance to the church. The first view of Wallingford is not very prepossessing. Against the bridge rises the tall and unutterably inelegant spire of St. Peter’s Church, the hideous product of a mind unhappily diverted from law to ecclesiology.
