Great Tew, Oxfordshire

Narrow gateway, wide world

Just opposite the vicarage in my previous post is this grandiose gateway, through which one walks along a path to the parish church. You may well feel that there’s something odd about this structure. It seems vastly out of proportion to the low wall on either side of it, and the opening itself looks disproportionately narrow in relation to its height. I think the reason for this is that the gateway has been moved from elsewhere – probably one of the entrances to Great Tew Park – and rebuilt on a smaller, narrower scale to serve as this eye-catching prelude to the churchyard.

What remains is certainly imposing, and the ornament is very much redolent of the first half of the 17th century, when Inigo Jones and his followers were starting to introduce their disciplined and scholarly form of classicism to Britain. The masonry is carved with horizontal bands of vermiculation – the ornamental motif that is supposed to create the effect of the stone having been eaten away by worms – and each pier has a large niche topped with an arch in the form of a shell. Above each niche is a smaller oval indentation. The lintel is carved with festoons of fruit on either side of a central keystone. The use of banded vermiculation reminds me a little of the much more elaborate gateway in London’s Embankment Gardens, another 17th-century gateway that has lost its original purpose and that looks stranded but still magnificent in its current setting.

This carving from perhaps the 1620s takes us back to a time when the manor house at Great Tew was owned by one of the most remarkable figures of the time, Lucius Cary, who became 2nd Viscount Falkland and subsequently Chancellor to Charles I. One of my readers (see the Comments section to the post on the vicarage) has already mentioned Falkland, who invited to Great Tew a stellar group of his contemporaries, men who relished the intellectual discussions on offer, gatherings compared by contemporaries to those convened by Erasmus.* Many of those present came from Oxford (only about 12 miles away), but Falkland had friends from further afield too. In his Brief Life of Falkland, John Aubrey mentions some of the period’s most celebrated writers who were guests at Great Tew: ‘For learned Gentlemen of the Country, his acquaintance was Mr Sandys, the Traveller and Translator; Ben. Johnson [sic]; Edmund Waller, Esq.; Mr Thomas Hobbes, and all the excellent of that peaceable time.’  Falkland, says Aubrey, was not a great writer himself, quoting Dr Earles who said that ‘he wrote not a smoth verse, but a great deal of sense’.

Falkland died young, when the peaceable times had ended and he was fighting for the king at Newbury. It was said that he threw his life away, riding rashly into the fray when he need not have done so, and various reasons have been suggested for this, from his pessimistic analysis of his side’s chances in the war, to his deep grief at the death of the woman he loved.

Whether or not he actually had it built, this gateway, with its design that seems at home here but derives from a wide world of culture and scholarship, is no doubt the sort of thing Falkland would have appreciated. His house has been rebuilt and he has only a modest, 19th-century monument in the church, but such architectural fragments as this can act as his memorials.

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*It was Clarendon who made the comparison, and he also compared Falkland to Cicero, the great Roman consul, philosopher, orator, and letter-writer, who was as it happens an important character for Falkland’s friend Ben Jonson too.

Monnington on Wye, Herefordshire

Through the lychgate

One of the rewarding aspects of maintaining a blog like this is the interesting feedback one receives. Among the responses to the previous post about Monnington on Wye was an email reminding me of the tradition that Owain Glyndwr is buried there and an enquiry about the 19th-century clergyman and diarist Francis Kilvert: didn't Kilvert go to Monnington? He certainly did.

Kilvert's sister Thermuthis† (known as Thersie) was married to the Rev William Smith of Monnington and the diarist often visited them. Several entries towards the end of the diary mention Monnington. On one occasion, on 6 April 1876, Kilvert records visiting the church:

Mr. James went with us to the Church which is light and pleasant and cheerful within and seemed well cared for. He told us that in the great flood of February 6, 1852, he and the present Sir Gilbert Lewis of Harpton (then Rector of Monnington) had punted in a flat-bottomed boat across the Court garden, in at the Church door, up the Nave and into the Chancel.

Later the same month, Kilvert recalls a Sunday visit, when the three bells are rung and he goes through "the old slanting mouldering lych-gate" to the church. The Rev William Smith preaches the sermon, Thersie plays the harmonium, and Kilvert reads prayers. 

Even today, Kilvert's descriptions ring true. The place is certainly low-lying and watery: there is a stream nearby, the Wye is not far away, and one can quite believe Kilvert's punting story. The wooden lychgate – in my photograph above – is still there, but not, I'm pleased to say, slanting or mouldering. Its 17th-century timbers and quadruple gables have been given some loving care since Kilvert's time and it makes a fitting entrance to the churchyard. 

The church itself is still light and pleasant too, thanks in large part to the clear glass in the windows. The 17th century, when the nave and chancel were built, was not a great age of stained glass, and while one can regret the acres of medieval stained glass that were smashed by iconoclasts elsewhere in England during the Commonwealth period, the clear glass in this building of 1680 works well and is at one with the plain wooden benches and stone-flagged floor. With the door left open on the day I went there, the light pouring in through the windows, and birds singing outside, it couldn't have been that different from when Kilvert visited. 

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† Kilvert's sister was named after her mother. In the account of Josephus, Thermuthis was the name of the Egyptian princess who rescued the infant Moses from the rushes.

Monnington on Wye, Herefordshire

Hidden England

I left the main road behind and turned down one of those narrow, high-hedged Herefordshire lanes. Behind the hedges were cider apple orchards and somewhere near a motor was quietly humming as an elevator loaded apples into a deep trailer ready to be taken to Hereford to be pressed. With a few more bends the lane petered to a halt by a sign saying "Private" and a drive leading to a big house. There was no sign of the church, and nowhere else to go, apparently, so I pulled up on a verge, got out, and took my bearings. Then I saw another sign, smaller, shaded by trees, pointing up a green lane between two hedges: "To the church". Off I went, past trickling water and buzzing insects, as the path got less green, more muddy, then more tree-enclosed.

And then there was the tiny timber-framed lychgate, with its four gables and the church beyond. The church was almost entirely built in the late-17th century. Inside, sunlight poured through the mullioned, domestic-looking windows, on to white walls, wooden benches, a screen with barley-sugar-twisted uprights, a communion table, and a font, carved with the initials of the couple, Uvedale and Mary Tomkyns, who paid for the building in 1680. Oil-lamps hung from the plastered ceiling and the brightly painted arms of Charles II (the only brightly coloured object in the place) were displayed on the nave wall. Apart from a gaggle of Calor gas heaters, c 1980, it could almost have been 1680. A bit of hidden England that I shared for half an hour.

Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire

Tradition and change

During my recent stay in Leicestershire a friend I’d visited gave me directions from his house back towards the county town. “And keep an eye on your mirror as you go through Kibworth Harcourt. There’s a house there that you'll like,” he instructed me, tantalizingly. What I saw when I got there had me stopping and reaching for the camera.

The Old House, it’s called, and it’s a lovely house of 1678. Its form – hipped roof and dormer windows, symmetrical front, central doorway with classical porch, quoins, pediment, double-pile layout (two rooms deep) – is one of the quintessential English building types, a kind of house that proved enduring, from its beginnings in the mid-17th century well into the Georgian era. In the world of grand country houses, this kind of design stretches back to buildings like Coleshill House, Berkshire, built in around 1650 to designs by Sir Roger Pratt for the architect’s cousin, Sir George Pratt. Coleshill (which was destroyed in a fire in 1952) was seriously large, with 17 windows on its entrance front. It was much admired and by the end of the century, lesser gentry, especially in southern England and the counties around London, were building smaller versions for themselves.

The Old House was probably built for a local gentleman, William Parker, who died in 1699 – a Parker coat of arms forms part of the decoration. Whoever designed it lavished much care on it – details such as the curvy little pediment and the carefully formed window surrounds show a painstaking hand. And the fact that the house was built in 1678 is interesting too – as the listing text for the building points out, this is quite early for this kind of classical house in the Midlands – most such houses in Leicestershire date from the 18th century. The designer must have had an eye on more advanced architectural fashions in southeast England, where houses like this were more common.

So although this house looks typically English, a representative of the order and elegance of its period, it would not have seemed that way to contemporaries. As course upon course of bricks was laid (and bricks themselves were unusual in this area in 1678), the neighbours would have been shocked at the difference from the traditional stone or timber-framed houses – asymmetrical, low-slung, with small windows and often thatched roofs – of the area. Architecture was changing, before their eyes.