181

A SUMMER DAY AT CUMNOR.

WHO that has read 'Kenilworth' can fail to remember Cumnor Hall and Tony Forster and the sad fate of Amy Robsart? And who that has read Percy's 'Reliques' can call to mind without a tear the ballad of Mickle, which begins

The dews of summer night did fall;

The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silver'd the walls of Cumnor Hall,

And many an oak that grew thereby?

And how many Oxford men have never forgotten the walk to Cumnor along the 'Seven-Bridge Road,' and the good-humoured face and nut-brown ale of the modern representative of old 'Giles Gosling,' whilom 'mine host' of the village inn of Cumnor, the 'Bear and Ragged Staff'? Among others, I remember the walk thither, and the church, and the inn, and the nut-brown ale too, as well as if I had gone on my pilgrimage there yesterday; so, with my reader's leave, I will act as his cicerone, in case he should like to pay Cumnor a visit whilst staying with

his old friends the Dons of St. Austen's College, on the banks of the Isis.

One fine morning in June, 18-, just before commemoration, my friend, Grey of College, and I set out for Cumnor. Turning our back on 'the High,' and leaving the old castle on our left, we passed what now is the site of two railway stations— there was no rail to Oxford in my day, nor would the 'dons' hear of the 'via ferrea' coming nearer than Steventon-and pursued the aforesaid 'SevenBridge Road,' till we reached the rising ground where the roads diverge, the right fork leading to Wytham and Ensham, while a sign-post on the left says, 'To Cumnor.' We left the long waste of meadows, on which we had so often skated in the winter, or skiffed about in flood times, and found ourselves on rising ground. Our path was a quiet, tranquil road, and wherever the path was more than ordinarily level, we read to each other, as we journeyed on, passages from 'Kenilworth,' about the home of old Robsart, Tresilian at the cave, his heart's dear lady, the pageant at the castle, and the tragical fate of poor Amy.

At the end of a walk of little more than three miles we entered the pretty village of Cumnor, and hailed it as classic ground, as having been visited and carefully reconnoitred from end to end by Sir Walter before he wrote his 'Kenilworth.' As Alfred Crowquill writes:

'Here prattled in the plenitude of their conceit

Giles Gosling and swaggering Mike Lambourne to the Varneys and Tresilians, who, in company with right merry master Goldthread of Abingdon, quaffed pottles of sack and malmsey and cinnamon ales, and flung down freely their clinking angels, to the support of the grim-looking bear clinging sulkily to his ragged club upon the sign-tree at the threshold. Here the invalided monks of Abingdon spent their holidays, to the gratification of the community, who profited by their purse and store; and here (when the monks were gone) came sad things! for which many tears have fallen. There stood Tony Forster in his good fame, bending basely to the vile counsel of his lord of Leicester, and standing mute in cold expectation, whilst miscreants, more savage than vultures or remorseless brutes, laid cruel clutches upon the Gentle Amie of Cumnor Hall.'

But to pass from poetry to plain prose. The village of Cumnor, or Cumnar, as it was formerly written, stands on the fertile brow of a hill which overlooks a large part of the west of Oxfordshire and the eastern parts of Gloucestershire. The local topographers say that it contains about a hundred houses in the main village and its outlying hamlets, and that it has a mineral spring, which was formerly much resorted to for its 'cooling and laxative virtues.' A fine eminence within the parish, on the Oxford side, not far from a conspicuous clump of fir trees, was chosen by the Government in 1799 for the trigono

metrical survey; and this station was used, with another on Shotover, for determining the place of the Observatory at Oxford.

The early history of the parish is much mixed up with that of the neighbouring Abbey of Abingdon, one of the earliest and richest of the old ecclesiastical foundations of our Saxon forefathers; and the abbots of that place made Cumnor their country residence probably as far back as a thousand years ago.1 Even after the Conquest, when the glories of this abbey had been eclipsed by those of Reading and other more recent foundations, the abbot of Abingdon was immensely wealthy, for he held broad lands in Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Berkshire, and at the suppression of the monasteries his rents were about 2,000l. a year. The last abbot was Thomas Rowland, alias Pentecost; he probably received the latter name on account of the date of his birth, just as in Catholic families it is customary to call children born about Easter by the name of Pascal. We find that, in the twenty-ninth year of Henry's reign, this Thomas Rowland and his monks resigned the Abbey of Abingdon to the King's Commissioners,

I The Abbey of Abingdon (Abbatis Oppidum) was founded about A.D. 675, by Heane, nephew to Cissa, the Viceroy of the Western Saxons. The monks forsook it in the time of Alfred, for fear of the Danes; but in A.D. 955 it was restored by King Edred and King Edgar, and under the care of Ethelwold, the abbot. The King of the Western Saxons, Cadwalla, gave twenty hides of land to the abbey, and of these a portion lay in Cumnor, or Comenore.

and that the former received the rationabilis annualis pensio of 200l. a year for life, with 'the whole capital mansion of Cumnor, its dwellings and stables, granaries, dove-cotes, and other buildings adjacent and appertaining thereto, and a close of ground also, called Cumnor Park.' Abbot Rowland resided at Cumnor-drawing his pension regularly, of course, but perhaps not very contentedly-until his death, in the reign of Edward VI.' The grounds which belonged to the great House or Hall at Cumnor are still green with turf and stately trees, and show that they once belonged to a fine country mansion. Some persons have imagined that the house was not what would now be called a mansion, but merely a monastic cell and place of retreat, in case the plague or the sweating sickness broke out at Abingdon; but although it may have served such a purpose as well, it is clear that old Cumnor House was built on too large a scale for any such purpose as that of a mere devotional cell. The monks of Abingdon, we may be sure, did not come to Cumnor for devotion alone, but for recreation too. They had a natural predilection for a healthy place, to which they could repair for change of air; and if that place was a park, and that park happened to be stocked with deer, and it

1 His will was proved April 21, 1540, in which he prayed that his bones might rest in the chancel of Cumnor Church. His arms, impaling those of his monastery, occur in the Harleian MSS. No. 1139, art. 6th. They are included in the Abbey seal, which is engraved in Dugdale's Monasticon.