Grain and Chaff from an English Manor Part 1

Grain and Chaff from an English Manor.

by Arthur H. Savory.

PREFACE

As a result of increased facilities within the last quarter of a century for the exploration of formerly inaccessible parts of the country, interest concerning our ancient villages has been largely awakened. Most of these places have some unwritten history and peculiarities worthy of attention, and an extensive literary field is thus open to residents with opportunities for observation and research.

Such records have rarely been undertaken in the past, possibly because those capable of doing so have not recognized that what are the trivial features of everyday life in one generation may become exceptional in the next, and later still will have disappeared altogether.

Gilbert White, who a hundred and thirty years ago published his _Natural History of Selborne_, was the first, and I suppose the most eminent, historian of any obscure village, and it is surprising, as his book has for so long been regarded as a cla.s.sic, that so few have attempted a similar record. His great work remains an inspiring ideal which village historians can keep in view, not without some hope of producing a useful description of country life as they have seen it themselves.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge with grateful thanks the kind help of friends and correspondents which I have received in writing this book.

Mr. Warde Fowler was good enough to look through the chapters while still in ma.n.u.script, and I have also received great help from Mr.

Herbert A. Evans, who has read through the proofs. The help of others--besides those whose names I give in the text--has been less general and mostly confined to some details in the historical part of the first chapter, and to portions of the subject-matter of the last.

Mr. Hugh Last, Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, most kindly gave much valuable time to the examination of the Roman coins and a.s.signing them to their respective reigns; he contributed also the notes on the Emperors, with special reference to the events in Britain which occurred during their reigns. Mr. Dudley F. Nevill of Burley helped me in a variety of ways, and Mr. C.A. Binyon of Badsey supplied some of the historical details and information about the ancient roads.

Looking back over the years I spent at Aldington, I see much more suns.h.i.+ne and blue sky than cloud and storm, notwithstanding the difficulties of the times. It is a continual source of pleasure to go over the familiar fields in imagination and to recall the kindly faces of my loyal and willing labourers. I trust that what I have written of them will make plain my grateful remembrance of their unfailing sympathy and ready help.--ARTHUR H. SAVORY.

BURLEY, HANTS.

_January_, 1920.

"Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!

Gives not the hawthorn-bush a sweeter shade To shepherds looking on their silly sheep, Than doth a rich embroider'd canopy To kings that fear their subjects' treachery!"

_3 King Henry VI_.

"When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers."

--Th.o.r.eAU.

"Life is sweet, brother.... There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?"

--BORROW: _Jasper Petulengro_.

GRAIN AND CHAFF FROM AN ENGLISH MANOR

CHAPTER I.

ALDINGTON VILLAGE--THE MANOR HOUSE--THE FARM.

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends."

--_Hamlet_.

"Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns."

--_Morte d'Arthur_.

In recalling my earliest impressions of the village of Aldington, near Evesham, Worcesters.h.i.+re, the first picture that presents itself is of two chestnut-trees in full bloom in front of the Manor House which became my home, and their welcome was so gracious on that sunny May morning that it inclined me to take a hopeful view of the inspection of the house and land which was the object of my visit.

The village took its name from the Celtic _Alne_, white river; the Anglo-Saxon, _ing_, children or clan; and _ton_, the enclosed place.

The whole name, therefore, signified "the enclosed place of the children, or clan, of the Alne." There are many other Alnes in England and Scotland, also Allens and Ellens as river names, probably corruptions of Alne, and we have many instances of the combination of a river name with _ing_ and _ton_, such as Lymington and Dartington.

The Celtic _Alne_ points to the antiquity of the place, and there were extensive traces of Roman occupation to which I shall refer later.

The village was really no more than a hamlet ecclesiastically attached to the much larger village of Badsey. In addition to Celtic, Roman, and Anglo-Saxon a.s.sociations, it figured before the Norman Conquest in connection with the Monastery and Abbey of Evesham, the Manor and the mill being mentioned in the Abbey records; and they were afterwards set down in Domesday Survey.

The Vale of Evesham, in which Aldington is situated, lies at the foot of the Cotswold Hills, and when approached from them a remarkable change in climate and appearance is at once noticeable. Descending from Broadway or Chipping Campden--that is, from an alt.i.tude of about 1,000 feet to one of 150 or less--on a mid-April day, one exchanges, within a few miles, the grip of winter, grey stone walls and bare trees, for the hopeful greenery of opening leaves and thickening hedges, and the withered gra.s.s of the Hill pastures for the luxuriance of the Vale meadows.

The earliness of the climate and the natural richness of the land is the secret of the intensive cultivation which the Vale presents, and year by year more and more acres pa.s.s out of the category of farming into that of market-gardening and fruit-growing. The climate, however, though invaluable for early vegetable crops, is a source of danger to the fruit. After a few days of the warm, moist greenhouse temperature which, influenced by the Gulf Stream, comes from the south-west up the Severn and Avon valleys, between the Malverns and the Cotswolds, and which brings out the plum blossom on thousands of acres, a bitter frost sometimes occurs, when the destruction of the tender bloom is a tragedy in the Vale, while the Hills escape owing to their more backward development.

The Manor House had been added to and largely altered, but many years had brought it into harmony with its surroundings, while Nature had dealt kindly with its colouring, so that it carried the charm of long use and continuous human habitation. Behind the house an old walled garden, with flower-bordered gra.s.s walks under arches of honeysuckle and roses, gave vistas of an ample mill-pond at the lower end, forming one of the garden boundaries. The pond was almost surrounded by tall black poplars which stretched protecting arms over the water, forming a wide and lofty avenue extending to the faded red-brick mill itself, and whispering continuously on the stillest summer day. The mill-wheel could be seen revolving and glittering in the sunlight, and the hum of distant machinery inside the mill could be heard. The brook, which fed the pond, was fringed by ancient pollard willows; it wound through luxuriant meadows with ploughed land or cornfields still farther back.

The whole formed a peaceful picture almost to the verge of drowsiness, and reminded one of the "land in which it seemed always afternoon."

The s.p.a.ce below the house and the upper part of the garden immediately behind it was occupied by the rickyard, reaching to the mill and pond, and a long range of mossy-roofed barns divided it from the farmyard with its stables and cattle-sheds.

The village occupied one side only of the street, as it was called--the street consisting of two arms at a right angle, with the Manor House near its apex. The cottages were built, mostly in pairs, of old brick, and tiled, having dormer windows, and gardens in front and at the sides, well stocked with fruit-trees and fruit-bushes, and this helped the cottagers towards the payment of their very moderate rents, which had remained the same, I believe, for the best part of half a century.

Throughout all the available s.p.a.ce not so occupied, on either side of the two arms of the street, and again behind the cottages themselves, beautiful old orchards, chiefly of apple-trees, formed an unsurpa.s.sed setting both when the blossom was out in pink and white, or the fruit was ripening in gold and crimson, and even in winter, when the grey limbs and twisted trunks of the bare trees admitted the level rays of the sun.

The farm consisted of about 300 acres of mixed arable and gra.s.s land on either side of two shallow valleys, along which wandered the main brook and its tributary, uniting, where the valleys joined, into one larger stream, so that all the gra.s.s land was abundantly supplied with water for the stock. These irregular brooks, bordered throughout their whole course with pollard willows, made a charming feature and gave great character to the picture.

In the records of Evesham Abbey we find the Manor, including the lands comprised therein, among the earliest property granted for its endowment. The erection of the Abbey commenced about 701, and William of Malmesbury, writing of the loneliness of the spot, tells us that a small church, probably built by the Britons, had from an early date existed there. In 709 sixty-five manses were given by Kenred, King of Mercia, leagued with Offa, King of the East Angles, including one in Aldinton _(sic)_, and Domesday Survey mentions one hide of land (varying from 80 to 120 acres in different counties) in Aldintone _(sic)_ as among the Abbey possessions at the time of the Norman Conquest.

Abbot Randulf, who died in 1229, built a grange at Aldington, and bought Aldington mill, in the reign of Henry III., when the hamlet was a _berewic_ or corn farm held by the Abbey; and at the time of the Dissolution it was granted to Sir Philip Hoby, who appears to have been an intimate of Henry VIII., together with the Abbey buildings themselves and much of its other landed property. The Manor remained in the hands of the Hoby family for many years, and was one of Sir Philip's princ.i.p.al seats. Freestone from the Abbey ruins seems to have been largely used for additions probably made in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, for in some alterations I made about 1888, I found many carved and moulded stones, built into the walls, evidently the remains of arches from an ecclesiastical building, and Sir Philip Hoby is known to have treated the Abbey ruins as if they were nothing better than a stone quarry.

Leland, who by command of Henry VIII. visited Evesham very soon after the Dissolution, says that there was "noe towene" at Evesham before the foundation of the Abbey, and the earliest mention of a bridge there is recorded in monastic chronicles in 1159.

There is a notice of a Mr. Richard Hoby, youngest brother of Sir Philip, as churchwarden in 1602, and a monument, much dilapidated, is to be seen in the chancel of Badsey Church, erected to the memory of his wife and that of her first husband by Margaret Newman, their daughter, who married Richard Delabere of Southam, Warwicks.h.i.+re, in 1608. Aldington afterwards became the property of Sir Peter Courtene, who was created a baronet in 1622.

Another explanation of the origin of the carved and moulded stones mentioned above may be found in the former existence of a chapel at Aldington, for there is evidence that a chapel existed there immediately before the Dissolution. In an article in Badsey Parish Magazine by Mr. E.A.B. Barnard, F.S.A., brought to my notice by the editor, the Rev. W.C. Allsebrook, Vicar, details are given of the will of Richard Yardley of Awnton (Aldington), dated January 22, 1531, in which the following bequests are made:

To the Mother Church of Evesham, 2s.

To the Church of Badsey, a strike of wheat.

To the Church of Wykamford, one strike of barley.

To the Chappell at Awnton, one hog, one strike of wheat, and one strike of barley.

The chapel, however, disappeared, and seems to have been superseded by the a.s.signment of the transept of Badsey Church as the Aldington Chapel, and in 1561-62 the first churchwarden for Aldington was elected at Badsey. The a.s.signment may, however, have been only a return to a much earlier similar arrangement when the transept was added to Badsey Church about the end of the thirteenth century, possibly expressly as a chapel for Aldington.

That it was an addition is proved by the remains of the arch over a small Norman window in the north wall of the nave, which had to be cut into to allow of the opening into the new transept. A shelf or ledge is still to be seen in the east wall of the transept, probably the remains of a super-altar, and, to the right of it, a piscina on the north side of the chancel arch, and therefore inside the transept.