Old Windsor, whatever may have been the state to which it attained when young or middle-aged, is now only a village, and not, so far as appearances go, a very old one. Like the schoolboy’s knife, which had first a new blade, then a new spring, then another new blade, and then a new handle, it has been transformed by successive renewings. It is by a new road from New Windsor that this Old Windsor, which is much the newer of the two, is reached. We pass the Prince Consort’s model farm to get at the one bit of antiquity. This is the church. It is very picturesque, and derives a certain venerable suggestiveness from the yews and other old trees surrounding it. But it is not of remarkably early date; and restorations have robbed it of more age than it could well afford to lose. Trees are the best friends that Old Windsor can boast. They keep it warm and green and comely. The by-road leading to the church is not often trodden, except by those who really deserve the name of church-goers. It is not a show-place; that is one thing in its favour. It has a green and tranquil churchyard; that is another. The name best known to people who have read the modern history of Old Windsor Church is a whispered name; the tomb which bears it is a neglected tomb; few go out of their way to pace that little cemetery; fewer still find the grave of Mary Robinson. Hush! it is a name that the kind will be kindest to forget. No loving care kept the tomb from being overgrown with nettles for fifty years; and it is too late now, even were it seemly, to vex the ghost of poor “Perdita.” That was the lady’s romantic designation. She had played the character in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. There was a Prince Florizel who wore a chestnut wig, a frogged and fur-collared frock-coat, tight breeches, and silk stockings, and cut a very elegant figure on the throne of England—“George the Magnificent,” he is called by Mr. Thackeray. He invented a new shoe-buckle. It was five inches broad, covering almost the whole instep, and reaching down to the ground on either side of the foot. “A sweet invention!” exclaims the satirist. And a pretty Prince Florizel, truly, whose head was so full of such matters as these, and whose heart was so choked with egregious vanity that, having “kissed and fondled poor Perdita on Monday, he met her on Tuesday and did not know her.” She sleeps, now, peacefully in the tree-shaded churchyard of Old Windsor—she and her daughter, Maria Elizabeth Robinson, both of literary fame, the inscriptions tell. What did they write? Poetry, was it? There is a tombstone also here to the memory of a shepherd, named Thomas Pope, who died half a century ago, aged ninety-six, having been “cheerfully laborious to an advanced age.” On the same stone is recorded the death of “Phoebe, wife of the above,” aged ninety years. Their fame was not literary, nor their work of the poetical kind. Their bodies, nevertheless, are buried in peace, and their names, merged, it may be, in “the long pedigree of toil,” live for evermore.
But though Old Windsor is reduced to an insignificant suburb of New Windsor, it was the royal dwelling-place when all was forest around, and when the solitary chalk hill, standing up from a tree-covered clay tract on the riverside, was uncrowned by feudal masonry. That was before the Norman took hold upon England. At the Conquest, Old Windsor was a manor belonging to the Saxon kings, who are conjectured to have had a palace here from a very early period. We may fancy theirs to have been a less splendid court than that of “George the Magnificent.” When Edward the Confessor—who afterwards presented the manor to his newly-founded monastery of Westminster—ruled England from this spot, a few serfs and swineherds dwelt sparsely in huts among the thick woods. The site of the Saxon palace can only be guessed; but antiquaries have surmised that an old farmhouse which stood west of the church, and near the river, surrounded by a moat, probably marked the place. When the Conqueror, having obtained the land from the monastery, by fair bargain, as appears, built a fortress on the eminence which we now call Castle Hill, the palace at Old Windsor remained a palace. It is probable that the first Norman castle on the neighbouring mound was simply a defensive work, with no convenient residence, till Henry I. completed additional buildings. Thenceforth Windsor Castle was Windsor Castle indeed; and little is heard in history of Old Windsor. The manor passed from hand to hand, each tenant for a time holding from the king by service. One man, with lance and dart, for the royal army, was all required. Since the fourteenth century, the holding has been on lease from the Crown. Tapestry works, which of old were maintained at Windsor, and fell into disuse, have in late years been revived. Looms were set up in buildings specially adapted to the industry, which was initiated by foreign workmen, the art of tapestry-weaving in England having quite died out. One of the artists engaged in supplying designs was the late Mr. E. M. Ward, R.A., and the application of the modern tapestries to household decoration was mainly encouraged by Messrs. Gillow and Company, who have employed these hangings with great effect in the royal pavilion, each succeeding year, at the South Kensington exhibitions. Keen interest in the revival of this artistic and dignified class of manufacture was taken by the late Duke of Albany, under whose patronage an exhibition in furtherance of the scheme was held in Windsor Town Hall. An early and munificent encourager of the work was Mr. Christopher Sykes, M.P., whose town mansion was richly adorned with the Windsor tapestries.
THE “BELLS OF OUSELEY.”
No traveller bids farewell to Old Windsor without paying his respects to one of the best of the riverside taverns, the time-honoured “Bells of Ouseley.” Perfectly free, at present, from modern revivalism, and from all manner of conscious style, is this genuine old inn, separated by the high road from the river bank. Its quaint bow-windows, one on either side of a porch entered by way of a steep flight of steps—the wholesome dread of unsteady topers—are just of the period and fashion to captivate an artist in search of the picturesque; nor can we look on this unspoilt hostelry without thinking of Mr. Leslie, Mr. Boughton, or Mr. Tissot. In France, a village cabaret or auberge, humbler than this, would yet be far more advanced in the art of public entertainment. “They cook very well at these places,” is a remark you frequently hear in Normandy, Picardy, or Champagne, from the lips of culinary judges, versed in all the intricacies of Parisian gastronomy; and if the unpretending inn be near a trout-stream, be sure you may have a dish fit for a prince, and within the means of a woodcutter. Were some enterprising cook to lease a cosy tavern like the “Bells of Ouseley,” and introduce a really high-class cuisine on a choice but simple scale, the place would be talked about in a month and spoiled in a year, at the end of which time the proprietor might be either a rich man or a bankrupt. Let us take our pretty, rustic riverside resort, for rest and refreshment, as we find it. Fine cookery would drive out honest companions whom old Izaak—who had a face like an elderly pike, but was a right good fellow for all that—would have drawn into profitable talk; for at the “Bells of Ouseley” you meet anglers and bargemen from whom much is to be learnt, if you go the right way to get hold of them. On the left as you enter is the tap, often crowded; on the right a bar-parlour, in which the company is more select. Of old the “Bells” had the reputation of being a house of call for “minions of the moon,” as Falstaff called them, or “knights of the road,” to choose a later phrase, such as the authors of “Paul Clifford” and “Rookwood” would have applied to the same order of gentry. But the landlord does not, in these days, give stall and fodder to nags of suspicious character, like bonny Black Bess. The old stone stable is oftener occupied by steeds that consume neither oats nor hay; and the highwaymen are not such as wear crape over their faces, or carry pistols like demi-culverins, or dance minuets with ladies they have plundered, but are in fact only members of a bicycle club. Under that old roof with its odd chimneys, standing against a background of greenery, there are jolly ghosts, you may be sure; for the grimmer goblins that have haunted the “Bells” in time when gibbets were plentiful, and when every one of these evil trees bore its rotting fruit, that swung and creaked in the night-wind, were laid long ago in a red sea of steaming punch, by boon companions of those who, as the phrase was, “suffered.” The fishing at the “Bells” is good. Capital chub and dace are taken with the fly, and gudgeon are plentiful as blackberries.
MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND.