Chapter II - Wolvercote and Godstow

Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide -
The Trout at Godstow, Godstow Lock, Godstow Nunnery, Godstow Bridge, Thames Bridge

Map: Godstow

Wolvercote village stands on a little rising ground above the River level; nearly all new red brick. If you come in from the Woodstock Road you get a fine profile view of Oxford from the railway bridge. The church of St. Peter, like St. Kenelm's at Minster Lovel, is wholly Perpendicular, with a low but massive tower. The chief thing in it is the tomb that Anthony à Wood describes: "a fair monument built almost brest high whereon lie the effigies carved in stone of a judge in his formalities, on each side a wife, all carved in stone and painted to the life. " The group was "miserably defaced" during the Civil War; and in place of four sons and four daughters there remain only three of each. It is a most curious and uncommon spectacle, these large figures that kneel at head and foot of the prostrate man and women; the pairs nearest you largest, while those behind decrease in size. They commemorate Sir John Walter and his wives and children. He died in 1630, the owner of the Godstow property; and Jesus College thought it an honour to be allowed to erect this monument.

You may see also the tub font, much older than the church it stands in; with a shallow diaper pattern cut upon it, possibly with an axe edge in the ancient way.

A fine road leads northwest from Wolvercote, with the Blenheim woods far ahead, and Wytham Hill looming parallel on the left hand, beyond the low white framework of King's weir. You may turn before long through hayfields into Yarnton, and see its church and manor house; always an uplifting joy to behold, and loveliest when flooded with the golden pomp of an evening sun in June.

Chapter III

Ancient River, changing never,
Symbol of eternity;
Gliding water, lapsing ever,
Mirror of inconstancy.

GODSTOW lock lies almost full upon the River as you steer round a sharp bend northwards. One of the alluring glimpses of Thames scenery is the vista of wood and meadow and stream up the wide Trout backwater. They say you can avoid two tolls by voyaging therealong and coming out just above King's weir; but it is barely worth while, considering the terribly hard going. And immediately beyond the lock there is much to linger and muse over; a scene of varied and romantic history. A Benedictine nunnery was built here by Editha, the widow of Sir William Lamelyne, directed by a heavenly vision, and was consecrated in December, I I 38, in the presence of King Stephen and his queen, and a brilliant assembly of knights and churchmen. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist, and became the school and ultimately the refuge and tomb, after her Woodstock romance, of Rosamund de Clifford, a daughter of Walter, of that ancient Welsh family. And now

The wild-flower waves, in lonely bloom,
On Godstow's desolated wall:
There thin shades flit through twilight gloom,
And murmured accents feebly fall.
The aged hazel nurtures there
Its hollow fruit, so seeming fair,
And lightly throws its humble shade,
Where Rosamonda's form is laid.

So sang Thomas Love Peacock in his rambling, gem strewn poem, The Genius of the Thames, now scarce and almost forgotten; first published in 1810. I have the second edition of 1812, in its original grey-green boards, uncut, and materially differing, it is said, from the earlier version. Peacock must have known the Norman's bridge at Oxford. He knew, too, a palefaced youth named Shelley, and made him quit vegetables and eat mutton chops liberally sprinkled with cayenne pepper and drink porter from pewter pots, and harden his white hands tugging against these very currents. But Shelley and Peacock survive only in their books; Folly Bridge has been rebuilt; and the deceptive hazel no longer exists to delude anyone with her fair show of hollow nuts. (Mr. Taunt says that as a lad he often tested the nuts of this tree, and always found them hollow. They had no kernels because the tree was planted over Rosamund's grave, ) And these ruins also are minished and brought lower still; for a modern road has been made over the site of the church where Rosamund first lay, no stone of which is left amongst the ruins that survive. The ground enclosed by the walls has been converted to the homely uses of a poultry run and orchard; and there is but one little ivy clad gable left, that of the nuns' private chapel wherein Rosamund finally rested, in and out of which the summer swallows dart, to bear witness to all the ample roofs that once covered so much splendour and so much piety.

"At the dissolution of the monasteries," says a local writer,"the landed gentry," and the very visitors themselves, says Hallam,"besought Henry VIII to spare Godstow, on the ground of its strictness of life and the education of their daughters"; though this does not quite accord with certain scandalous remarks attributed to the Oxford students in the Victoria History. "But it was in vain; the infamous commissioner, Doctor London, visited the priory to destroy it in November, 1538. The abbess of the time, Katherine Bulkley, by her influence at court got the demolition postponed for a whole year. " Her letter to Cromwell illuminates London's methods: "I trust to God, that I have never offendyd God's Laws, neither the King's, wherbie that this poore Monasterie ought to be suppressed. Dr. London, whiche was agaynst my Promotion, like my mortal Enemye, is sodenlie cummyed unto me, with a greate Rowte with him, and here doth threten me to suppress this House, spyte of my Tethe. And here tarieth and contynueth, to my great Coste and Charges. And notwithstand that Dr. London, like an untrew Man, hath informed your Lordship that I am a Spoiler and a Waster, your good Lordship shall know that I have not alienatyd one halporthe of Goods of this Monasterie, but have rather increased the same. " With much more natural protest: "he corrupted many nuns," they said. But in November, 1539, the king went into possession, and the nuns and their superior were all summarily ejected. The common preamble in the articles of these forced surrenders ran that: "upon full deliberation and of their own proper motion, for just and reasonable causes moving their consciences, they did freely give up their houses to the king. " There resided a fine sardonic humour in this Supreme Head of the Church upon Earth.

A monkish Grundy wrote up his screed, his Hic jacet, over Rosamund's little body. Read the stern old croak he carved upon the tomb.

Hic jacet in tumba Rosa mundi, non Rosamunda;
Non redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet.

Which old Stow, antiquary and tailor, unctuously expands into:

The Rose of the World, but not the cleane Flowre,
Is now here graven, to whom Beauty was lent;
In this Grave full darke now is her Bowre
That by her Life was sweet and redolent.
But now that she is from this Life blent,
Though shee were sweete, now foully doth shee stinke,
A Mirrour goode for all Men that on her thinke.

Pardonable they, however, compared with Hugh Bishop of Lincoln, who in 1191, fourteen years after her death, had her bones cast out of the church lest religion should suffer. The same Stow translates the dramatic moment from an earlier chronicler. "Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, came to the abbey of nunnes called Godstow; and when he had entered the church to pray, he saw one tombe in the middle of the quire, covered with a pall of silke, and set about with lights of waxe; and demanded whose tombe it was, he was answered that it was the tombe of Rosamund, sometime leman of Henry the Second, who for love of her had done much good to the church. 'Then, ' quoth the bishop, 'take out of this place the Harlot, and bury her without the church, lest Christian religion should grow into contempt, and to the end that, through example of her, other women being made afraid may beware, and keep themselves from unlawful and advouterous conversation with men. '" And he was obeyed with shuddering, the iron man. There may have been much piety; there was certainly a suspicion of policy in the deed. Geoffrey, Rosamund's second son by Henry II, was Archbishop of York at the time, and particularly obnoxious to Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, vice-regent of England during the absence of Richard I; and Hugh was no doubt entirely conscious that this particular manifestation of zeal would be well received at court.

But afterwards the indomitable nuns collected her bones into a silken scented bag, and reburied them in honour where the one surviving gable stands, writing up on her tomb her name and praise, and evading Hugh of Lincoln; as they knew how, even bishops! He might have guessed they would; was it not one of his like wrote of their sex: "Fallere, flere, nere, Dedit Deus in muliere"?

Rosamund's death in 1177, in spite of the picturesque alternative of poisoned cup or dagger traditionally offered by Henry's jealous queen, was probably quite natural. The gypsies in Oxfordshire, even as late as 1870, told you how that Fair Rosamund was turned into a "holy briar," which bled if you plucked a twig. Requiescas in aeternum! "Let joy," sings old Tickell, her encomiast:

Let joy salute fair Rosamunda's shade,
And wreaths of myrtle crown the lovely maid
While now perhaps with Dido's ghost she roves,
And hears and tells the story of their loves,
Alike they mourn, alike they bless their fate;
Since Love, which made them wretched, made them great.

And as for the royal lover,"a man of a low stature and fat of body, of a fresh colour, and of good expression in his speech," you may read in the old chronicles that "after the death of this Rosamund he took privily the daughter of Lewis King of France (that should have been marryed to his son Richard Erle of Poytow) for his Leman. Whereupon followed great discord between the King of England and of France, but King Henry sayling over into Normandie, the King of France and hee, hadde talke together, and entred into amitie. "

"Les pauvres morts! . . . Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrates! "

Godstow Bridge lies just above the ruins of the nunnery, spanning the navigation with two new brick arches, and the Trout backwater with two smaller arches of stone, the further of which is pointed and looks the most ancient of all. Backwards through the bridge you get as in a frame a miniature of Christ Church spire.

Leland, or his commentator, noted a stone on the bridge which is no longer there. The inscription he saw upon it seems to indicate that it may once have been the base of a cross:

Qui meat hac oret, signumque salutis adoret;
Utque sibi detur venia Rosamunda precetur.

This Godstow Trout is a pleasant house, with its shady alleys, waterside bowers and rustic bridge. The original building was perhaps a guest house for visitors to the priory.

In the strawberry season all Oxford resorts to Wytham, whose name has been shortened down from the old spelling Wyghtham, meaning, perhaps, the village at the bend. It lies but three quarters of a mile from Godstow Bridge, and has an abbey, the seat for centuries of the Earls of Abingdon, originally erected under Henry VI, but now mainly Elizabethan. The Harcourts once held it, between the present lords and the de Wightham family, who died out under the first Edwards. Much of the stonework is said to have been brought from Godstow Priory; and Lysons says it was formerly moated. Lord Williams of Thame, the ancestor of the Earls of Abingdon who purchased the estate, was the principal co-adventurer with Sir Walter Raleigh in his Guiana expedition.

[In his additions and corrections Fred added: There is a curious little story told about the passing of this estate from the possession of the Harcourts. Robert Harcourt, after the heavy failure of the Guiana venture, in which he also was involved, had to sell his properties; and having parted with Ellenhall in Staffordshire vowed that, if he had to sell anything further, he would let loose a pigeon and dispose of whatever lands the bird flew over. When released it circled above Wytham Hill, which thus passed from him. ]

On Wytham Hill, five hundred and thirty-nine feet high, are the mound remains of a castle built by Kinewulf, King of the West Saxons, in his long running fight with Offa, him who built the great dyke along the Welsh marches, and, say some, the ancient wall of Oxford. He was King of Mercia: "the vague Mercian land whence we get our weights, our measures, and the worst of our national accent. " Kinewujf had just lost a strong fort down at Bensington to Offa, in 777, before he built this one, whence also in 779 did Offa expel him, scaring away the nuns from Wytham at the same time, and destroying the nunnery; though some will have it that the nuns demolished the place themselves, the castle so disturbing their sense of propriety. This battle was probably fought in the meadow valley between the Wytham and Cumner hills, which the armies respectively occupied. There used to be a place-name Holderfield, the field of corpses; no doubt a reminder of this old baresark fight. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records a battle at Wytham earlier still, in 571, between the British and the West Saxons under Cuthwulf, the first outbreak of the latter after their great victory at Mount Badon in 520. This battle was, however, probably fought from the neighbouring Beacon Hill, on which signs of a British camp are very plain to see. This hill is said to have borne one of the beacons that signalled the approach of the Spanish Armada.

I will not omit an account of this Kinewulf's death in 784, because of the example it affords of the splendid devotion of comradeship that compelled these ancient men. Kinewulf had gone thinly attended to visit a lady at Merton (was it in Surrey? ), and his enemy Cyneheard, hearing of his coming, collected a band and broke into the lady's bower upon the king, who defended himself bravely, and seeing his chief enemy hurled himself upon him and wounded him, but was forthwith slain. The lady's cries meanwhile brought up Kinewuif's slender guard of thegns,"each running as fast as he could," to whom Cyneheard, having no quarrel with them, offered peace. But they would have no peace, nor follow a man who had killed their captain; and the fighting continued, but against such odds that all these thegns took death rather than fail in their loyalty, however unavailing. His murder occurred, by an ironic stroke, during the very year in which he had been in conclave, with Offa, upon the business of a papal legation "to renew the faith and the peace which St. Gregory had sent us by the Bishop Augustin. "

As you walk from Godstow Bridge Wytham nestles like a pretty quakeress under its green hill, alluring in saintly grey and russet red. At a cattle gate in the lane an ancient lunatic beggar woman droned her chant at every footfall: "My brudder was a-psalm singin' in der church; my brudder was a-" ... "Dea magna, dea Cybebe, dea domina Dindymei, Procul a mea tuos sit furor omnis, era, domo Alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos. ' Not that she is violent; the poor old creature looks even more ruinous than the priory itself.

A raised plank footway for flood time borders the lane across the meadows; and a little grey bridge spans the County Stream, which, rather than the main stream, here divides Berkshire from Oxfordshire, laving the feet of the Wytham flower gardens that lean down to its waters. This little stream seems at one time and another to have been almost by way of becoming the main channel. Turning over some old papers I came upon a report of a committee of the House of Commons, printed in 1793, wherein one Josiah Clowes "thinks the Navigation ought to have gone down the Witham Stream, but he can't speak with certainty, not having surveyed it himself. " Another Witness was of the same opinion; thought "it would have been much better, and less expensive, to have gone by the Witham Stream. "

The village itself is a miniature of gables and thatch, of ivied walls and curiously clipped yews. The church was originally built about 1480; if not, as some say, in the eleventh century. It was small, and had in 1801 a boarded roof; you may see a print, if you wish, in the Bodleian. The Lord Abingdon of 1811 almost entirely rebuilt it with material from Godstow Nunnery and Cumner Place. Close by the gate, in the lane, is a pointed archway brought from Godstow, and bearing the date 1372. And the entrance arch to the churchyard bears, in the stately Roman characters: JANVA VITAE VERBVM DOMINI. This is from Cumner; as also are the delightful old painted glass in the various windows (a piece in the north of the nave contains portraits of Edward II and his queen Isabella, placed there perhaps by pilgrims on their way to the monarch's shrine at Gloucester-" he who," says Fuller,"being no saint in his life became half a saint after his death"); the fine grotesque corbel of a piper towards the northwest corner; and the east and some of the smaller windows.

Under the matting by the chancel rail are two brasses of a man in armour and a woman; and on an adjacent stone is engraved:

Robert de Wightham marryed Juliana
daughter of Sir John Golaifre of Fyfield in this county
by whom he had issue Richard and seven daughters.
He / She } died in the yere { 1406 / 1408

This "John Golaifre" cannot be that John Golafre who founded the chantry in Fyfield church- he of the skeleton Death, of whom I will tell you later. He died in 1442; and this "daughter" thirty-four years earlier after bearing eight children. The pious founder was perhaps a grandson of her father, and nephew to herself. There is the human touch seldom far to seek under similar details. Alice Denton, a daughter of one of the eight children, and a relation of the Harcourts who succeeded the de Wighthams, set up these brasses and a circumscription; which Montague, Earl of Abingdon in 1735, seeing to have become much mutilated and hardly legible, and touched with her filial piety and affection, generously replaced with the present stone telling the whole story.

During a further search of the church floor I discovered what I had not seen mentioned elsewhere: a slab, partly covered with pews, to Edward Purcell, the "eldest son of Mr. Purcell of the Royal Chapel, and brother of Mr. Henry Purcell so much renowned for his skill in music. " He," after sundry good service,"was gradually advanced to the honour of lieutenant-colonel," was under Rooke at Gibraltar; and when "decayed with age and broken with misfortunes he retired to the house of the right honble. Montague earl of Abingdon and died June 20, 1717. Aged 64 years'; living thus to just twice the age of his more famous brother. One would like to know the history of the fine, broken gentleman; and what ground he had for relying upon the munificence of Lord Abingdon.

A tablet within the altar rails on the north wall has the finest bit of illiterate spelling I have seen on stone:

1617
HEARE LIES
BURIED THE BO
DIE OF JOHN RA
YNTON WHICH
DECESED THE 4
OF FEABEARARY.

Chatting with a fine old yeoman,"born and bred in the place," quoth-a! I found he knew nothing of the Saxon castle. "But there's Godstow Bower below here, you know," said he; "and over at Cumner Hall Amy Robson used to be. " He dared say I had read all about her.

Under the blaze of a mid-September sun I climbed Wytham Hill to see the woods and find the "castle. " All the land lay drowsy in heat. I caught a side view along the front of Wytham Abbey; and then, looking back, beheld through foliage Oxford in the valley with all her towers and spires. Presently I was crossing a huge stretch of meadow, a quarter of a mile square, and surrounded with tall elms. And here were high mounds, running long and wide across the field; and I wondered if these were the castle of Kinewulf. They are not; they are probably, however, the remains of a quarry worked by Offa to build his "terrible fortress or castle not farre from the great ashe which is a land mark. " I entered the woods by what was once a well kept drive, now left wild; a circular woodland route of about six miles for the abbey family's pleasure-taking.

There stood the quaint toy milestones by which they measured their distance. And then I came out of the wood, and beneath me lay the illimitable west country, from Cumner sitting upon its hill amongst the trees round to Kidlington spire gleaming white northwards in the haze. In the foreground Eynsham Bridge spanned the Thames; as tiny as a baby's hand across a thread of water. Beyond were little curves and gleams of the Stripling; and with a secret thrill I discerned Pinkhill still islanded in immemorial verdure.

As I left the wood and set foot upon the open common there were other mounds and hollows, more abrupt and cramped than those in the meadow, yet commanding these great tracts of country; while those others give now no soldier's outlook at all, whatever they once afforded. Let experts decide if this was the castle I do not think there is much doubt about it. Conjecture, and the burst of westward landscape, summed up all Wytham Hill for me.

If you are curious you may read an old chapbook in the British Museum entitled The Berkshire Tragedy, or the Whittam Miller. The terrific woodcut on the front is worth the effort. Early in the eighteenth century one John Mauge, a miller, slew his sweetheart Annie Knite, and men printed and reprinted the sordid old story, as a warning to youth.

My tender Parents brought me up,
provided for me well,
And in the Town of Whittam then
Did place me in a Mill
By chance I met an Oxford lass,

and she yielded to John's blandishments; and not the only one, I gather. She and her mother besought him to marry her, but in vain; and then

About a month since Christmas last
(O cursed be that Day)
The Devil then did me perswade
To take her Life away.
I called her from her Sister's House
At eight a Clock at Night
Poor Creature, she did little dread
I bore her any Spight.
He does her to death; and
"Then Home unto my Mill I run,
But sorely was amaz'd;
My Man he thought I'd Mischief done,
And strangely on me gaz'd;

and his end was as you may behold in the woodcut, whose hideousness resembles that of the original as nearly as I could compass it.

Just above Godstow Bridge, on the right bank, stands the black boundary stone of Oxford city. Here is the outfall of the County Stream, dividing Oxfordshire from Berkshire. A little higher can be seen from the towpath the spire of Cassington church away in the northwest. And the wide emerald meadows on the left bank are not devoid of ancient interest. Following on Port Meadow, first Pixey Mead and then Oxey Mead border the River, divided by the stream that leaves the Thames opposite King's weir. The Yarnton farmers still draw lots as of old, every returning July and early on a Monday morning, for the various portions of mowing grass in these meads, the ballot balls being kept at Mead farm near Yarnton church. When the grass is short the pegs dividing the various lots become easily visible. The arrangement, however, does not appear to work altogether satisfactorily, as it often happens that one purchaser's plot is quite spoiled by the trampling of a neighbour's horse and waggon across it for another load further on. The names of these two meads are said to be derived from pigs'-hay and ox-hay; perhaps the respective first syllables may be correct.

WHERE THAMES SMOOTH WATERS GLIDE - The Trout at Godstow, Godstow Lock, Godstow Nunnery, Godstow Bridge, Thames Bridge

Map: Godstow