(An article by Mrs Peggy Inman, written for ‘Cumnor and Thereabouts’, CHS, 1995)
I recently found in Reading’s Local Studies Library a book with the above title by Alfred Crowquill (the pseudonym for an artist named A.H.Forrester) and F.P. Palmer. Published in 1846, it includes accounts of visits to Cumnor, North Hinksey and other places around Oxford, with sketches. The Bodleian has parts VI-Vll of the book, with some pages on North Hinksey, but I can find no copy of the whole book in Oxford libraries. An account of the relevant contents may therefore be of interest. (Oxford libraries do, however, have Edward Walford's 'Pleasant Days in Pleasant Places', written in the 1860s, which lifts whole phrases from the first book, without acknowledgement, in what purports to describe his visit to Cumnor as an undergraduate in the 1840s). Crowquill and Palmer say their material is taken 'from the memory of the recent journey, and from the irregular entries made at the time in the pages of the notebook'.
They were attracted to Cumnor by its association with Sir Walter Scott's 'Kenilworth', published in 1821. The book rendered the village 'now and for ever, whilst stone can rest upon stone .... classical ground'. Travelling from Oxford over numerous bridges - the road was known as Seven Bridges Road - they left the Cheltenham road on their right for 'the chalked road of an ascending country'. (The new turnpike road, now Cumnor Hill, was opened in 1827)'Our path', they wrote, ' was in tranquillity, only ~ever and anon, when the highway presented more level footing, and the boundary was shadowy and green .... we read to each other in turn, passages from 'Kenilworth' '.
There follows an account of Cumnor's connection with Abingdon abbey and -much overwritten- of Leicester's neglect of Amy Robsart and of her murder, as described in Scott's novel. The authors, however, have a problem in reconciling the virtuous Forster, as described on his tomb in Cumnor church, and the villainous accomplice to Amy's murder. They tell us that Sir Walter, to acquire material for the book, visited Cumnor 'where he is well remembered', (see also the innkeeper, quoted below). Whether this is their invention or the villagers' we cannot say but Sir Walter was almost certainly never in Cumnor. In his preface to 'Kenilworth' he refers to Mickle's ballad and Ashmole's 'Antiquities of Berkshire' as his inspiration. 'I like', he wrote from Abbotsford to his publisher in Edinburgh, 'to be as minutely local as 1 can' and asked for any material about Cumnor from Lyson's 'Magna Brittanica', or elsewhere. Scott was friendly with Dr Thomas Hughes, the vicar of Uffington and with his son John of Donnington Priory near Newbury, and their respective wives. Mrs Thomas Hughes told Scott that 'if you had been in every part of the country you could not have drawn it more accurately'. She also said that crowds visited Curnnor in consequence of the publication of 'Kenilworth' and that she had heard that lord Abingdon had been 'ready to hang himself for flinging away' an asset like Cumnor Place, pulled down in 1810. There were traditions current in the village about the building. Even after Amy's death, our book says, 'the spectre of poor Amie Leicester attired in courtly apparel, pearls and brocade, was seen to linger in faint coloured beautiful light upon the great stairs at nightfall. The place was abhorred, even until it was forsaken'. In fact for much of the time the building had been occupied, in one way or another, right up to the end. Scott wrote to Mrs Hughes that he was amused by 'the hasty dexterity of the good folk of Cumnor .... getting all their traditionary lore into such order as to meet the taste of the public'. William Clarke said that when he visited Cumnor in 1817 there were no traditions about the Place among the villagers. By his account they were invented, rather than organised, after 1821 to please the likes of our authors!(1)
The book also describes the village and some of its inhabitants. 'You enter the village of Cumnor from a deep and narrow road with an only footpath to the right of the causeway, a lengthened wall upon your left defending the gardens, etc. in the rearward of the rectory, a similar stone fence opposite forming a mossy boundary to pleasant orchards terraced by nature above the main road'. 'The clustering hovels and cottages and small farms of the village are upon the diverging road. The residences in the centre of the place are mostly clean-thatched buildings, of considerable age, and they have plots of flower-garden before them, adorned with clematis and huge hollyhock, jasmines, passion-flowers and roses.’ The visitors sauntered through the whole village, 'threaded its lanes and foredroughs and intricate footpaths'. They looked at 'the ancient ivied grange with its ornarnented casements' (the present Bear and Ragged Staff) and 'the carved portico of a humbler building'.
They had a humble repast at the Bear and Ragged Staff opposite the church, 'a snug tavern, kept in clean good order by our friend Mr Capel, who is also a timber merchant and wheelwright'. The low-ceilinged parlour was 'hung round with generals and dames, done in the coloured engravings of the last century. A fox- tail is the handle of the bell-rope'. In one corner they noticed an old sign of the inn and the innkeeper said that after Sir Walter was here .... some of 'the scholars' insisted upon having it hoisted' with the name 'Giles Gosling' (Scott's innkeeper) attached to it. In fact this is how a visitor from Abingdon saw it some years earlier. He too found the village ‘very charming’, different from its description in 1906, in the depth of the agricultural depression, as 'dispiriting and woebegone(2).
The most interesting detail from a long description of the church is a reference to a bench end on a seat ‘near the rails in the north aisle’, the eastern end of which had 'an enclosed space formerly a small chapel‘. This is illustrated and is clearly the one with two seraphims (or St Michael) back to back and standing on dragons, now in the chancel. Reading Library has a collection of material on 'Abingdon Hundred' (i.e. Hormer) by Emma Thoyts, dated 1890, which includes undated pen and ink drawings of the bench ends and also describes the St Michael one as being in the north aisle, so it may have been moved when the church was repewed in 1859.
In 1833 Cumnor had four daily schools, and a Sunday school. The parish register recorded the death in 1805 of John Smith, parish clerk and schoolmaster (3). Possibly the tradition was carried on for our authors visited the cottage of the parish clerk 'by the wayside where the single main street ... branches off into contrary directions .. at the western extremity'. He was in his dotage, but, apart from some grandchildren of the family, 'a school of four yawning and srnock-frocked urchins lolled and yerked about indolently upon a swi .ng bench'. There were school books around, including one setting forth:
'The naughty boy who steals the pears
Is whipped as well as he who swears'.
The visitors remarked to the children's mother that there were very few scholars and she replied that 'we be very shart o' scholards in the summer time 'cos then they be wanted to goo a vielding .... they mostly edicates, Zur, in the cold weather, Zur!' ( The 1841 census shows James King, aged 82,Clerk, living with William and Martha Davies and their two children).
On the following day the two travellers drove to Stanton Harcourt via Cutts End and Eaton and the ferry at Bablock Hythe. They admired the distant view of the upland and the rows of elms and rugged poilards, but complained about the primitive road and the ditch (the Anglo-Saxon boundary still there on the Appleton Road) 'which by twilight it would have been a clever thing to have avoided'. There were also tedious latched gates every 50 or 100 yards.
On another occasion they walked across the fields from Oxford to the Ferry House at North Hinksey, 'the Sunday resort of the middling classes when the weather is bright and the days are long'. They ate their sandwich on the way, sitting on the base of one of the many mutilated stone crosses to be found around Cumnor. At someone's recommendation they visited a farm upon the adjoining hill (Swetman's?) to see the statue of Queen Elizabeth, now in Cumnor church, in its garden - 'a mossy dame, carpeted upon sweet garden flowers and garlanded from knee to hip with sportive briar, and the nodding buds of woodbine and the rose'. Yet they managed to draw the lady without a flower in sight. In the preface they say that there is 'little of exaggeration to be found in the whole'and such as there is would belong to 'the dressing over of the legends'. If their fanciful language sometimes sounds like an embroidery of the truth, it has a certain charm; and the book does add something to our knowledge of Cumnor's history.
Peggy Inman
1. H.J.C.Grierson, ed.: The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, London, vol.VI, pp.265-6 and vol.XI,
1936, pp.5-6 and Inman P.: Amy Robsart and Curnnor Place, revised, 20002. Curnnor History Society: Cumnor in Victorian Times, 1995, p.3: J.E.Vincent: Highways and Byways In Berkshire, 1906, p.21.
3. J.E.Oxley: The Story of Cumnor School, 1987,p. 1