ST MARGARET AND ALL SAINTS. Brown cobbles and externally mostly Perp. The label-stops of the S doorway are specially pretty. However the following are not Perp. First the SW steeple, by Hutchinson, 1865-6 - rather starved. Then the priest’s doorway, with a little dogtooth, and the paired lancets in the chancel. They are early C13. A very little later is the N doorway, with stiff-leaf capitals looking c. 1230-40 and a keeled roll moulding. The doorway goes perfectly with the N arcade, which is a beautiful design. Four bays and two different pier shapes: octagonal, and four keeled shafts and four minor shafts. Deeply moulded arches, including keeled rolls. Very bold and animated stiff-leaf capitals, all different. The Perp roof-corbels of the nave deserve notice: foliage, grapes, a rose-sprig, heads. The three incongruously placed gargoyles in the outer wall of the N aisle come from the tower of 1846 which preceded the present one. - NORTH DOOR. With sparse C13 iron scrolls. - STAINED GLASS. In a N window Kempe glass of 1906.
WYTON. It has charming white cottages with thatched roofs, a 17th century inn with a finely carved beam in one of its rooms, a medieval church, and the memories of a famous and heroic woman and two famous and unheroic men.
The small church enshrined in trees is 13th century, with a 14th century chancel guarded by a fierce lion on its chancel arch, which has also two faces keeping watch. The fine chancel roof rests on embattled corbels carved with oak leaves and grapes, a king and an angel. The east window has a modern St George set among fragments of 16th century glass, with a sun and a castle in them.
It was in this church that one of the unheroic figures remembered here was married. He was Charles James Fox, the famous parliamentary orator who tried to regularise his scandalous life by a marriage here which he kept secret for seven years. He drank heavily and was a mad gambler, and about the time of his marriage his friends subscribed about seventy thousand pounds to pay his debts. He had a little deaf and dumb son, and one of the pathetic pictures in the history of those days is of this eloquent orator sitting at dinner talking to the little boy on his fingers.
The second famous man remembered here lived at the rectory; he was parson and politician too, and a very poor farmer, Horne Tooke. He was born a poulterer’s son and attracted the attention of the rich Mr Tooke of Purley by his opposition to an enclosure Bill in Parliament. He interfered too much in politics to be successful as a parson, and became notorious as a controversialist, finding himself ultimately in prison. He adopted his patron’s name, was debarred from practising as a lawyer, and was acquitted on a charge of high treason, and, though he won a seat in the Commons for Old Sarum, an Act was passed excluding him from the Parliament which followed.
The famous woman remembered here was Isabella Bird, who came with her father, rector for ten years in the middle of last century. She loved the garden, which goes down to the River Ouse on which she learned to row, and by which she wrote books. Here she slowly recovered from a serious illness, and from this quiet spot she went on her first voyage, little dreaming it was to be the beginning of a long life of travel far and wide.
The Woman Who Conquered Fate
THE life of Isabella Bird was one long triumph of mind and will over physical infirmity. Daughter of a clergyman whose duties took him into difficult parishes, she spent the first 16 years of her life with her stern father. Happily she gave herself a wide knowledge of Nature, an interest which counteracted the depression which a spinal complaint would otherwise have caused. In her schooldays at Birmingham she practised writing, and she carried on her studies in the quiet rectory at Wyton. At 23, her health still being feeble, she was sent for a sea voyage to America, where she took careful notes of all she saw, making a book of them on her return. With the help of her younger sister, to whom she was devoted, she spent part of her profits in providing fishing boats for the men of the western islands of Scotland, and furthering emigration schemes.
She found that her health was feeble at home but improved when she moved about the world, so she visited America again, where she made friends of Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, and other literary men.
Tiring of this, she began in 1873 that series of journeys in unfrequented parts of the world which she made famous by a succession of travel books which were read by thousands. The tumbling and tossing of the sea did her good and the hardships of weary journeys on horse, donkey, mule, and yak added years to the life of this frail little woman (who was under five feet high).
She gazed on the glowing crater of Kilanea in Hawaii; she climbed the Rockies alone with a scapegrace guide (whom she converted); she travelled in out-of-the-way districts of Japan and lived among the hairy Ainos on Yezo Island; she spent five weeks with the Malays and passed on to Egypt, where she fell ill with enteric fever and had to return to Scotland. In 1880 her sister died, and she then married Dr Bishop, who declared that he had only one rival in his wife’s heart, the high tableland of Central Asia. In 1888, three years after his death, Mrs Bishop, now keen on medical missions, set sail for India, and after a month’s hard travel from Kashmir she reached Tibet. Back in India, she persuaded an army oflicer to take her to Ispahan. Her caravan journey through Persia was appalling; she wrote that if there was a more devastating oppression on earth than that of the Turk it was that of the Shah. But she pressed on, sleeping in stables and in Kurdish houses, so that she traversed Persia, Kurdistan, and Armenia where no Englishwoman had been before. On her return she lectured before the British Association and was elected the first woman member of the Royal Geographical Society.
A wandering of 8000 miles at great personal risk from robbers next occupied her until 1897, and last of all; in her 70th year, she made a journey to Morocco, being landed by the ship’s crane and riding 126 miles in six days to Marakesh, “the noisiest, vilest, filthiest city she had seen.”
This most courageous woman, ever daring and never afraid, spent the last year of her life on her back, and passed into the realms where heroes go in 1904.
The small church enshrined in trees is 13th century, with a 14th century chancel guarded by a fierce lion on its chancel arch, which has also two faces keeping watch. The fine chancel roof rests on embattled corbels carved with oak leaves and grapes, a king and an angel. The east window has a modern St George set among fragments of 16th century glass, with a sun and a castle in them.
It was in this church that one of the unheroic figures remembered here was married. He was Charles James Fox, the famous parliamentary orator who tried to regularise his scandalous life by a marriage here which he kept secret for seven years. He drank heavily and was a mad gambler, and about the time of his marriage his friends subscribed about seventy thousand pounds to pay his debts. He had a little deaf and dumb son, and one of the pathetic pictures in the history of those days is of this eloquent orator sitting at dinner talking to the little boy on his fingers.
The second famous man remembered here lived at the rectory; he was parson and politician too, and a very poor farmer, Horne Tooke. He was born a poulterer’s son and attracted the attention of the rich Mr Tooke of Purley by his opposition to an enclosure Bill in Parliament. He interfered too much in politics to be successful as a parson, and became notorious as a controversialist, finding himself ultimately in prison. He adopted his patron’s name, was debarred from practising as a lawyer, and was acquitted on a charge of high treason, and, though he won a seat in the Commons for Old Sarum, an Act was passed excluding him from the Parliament which followed.
The famous woman remembered here was Isabella Bird, who came with her father, rector for ten years in the middle of last century. She loved the garden, which goes down to the River Ouse on which she learned to row, and by which she wrote books. Here she slowly recovered from a serious illness, and from this quiet spot she went on her first voyage, little dreaming it was to be the beginning of a long life of travel far and wide.
The Woman Who Conquered Fate
THE life of Isabella Bird was one long triumph of mind and will over physical infirmity. Daughter of a clergyman whose duties took him into difficult parishes, she spent the first 16 years of her life with her stern father. Happily she gave herself a wide knowledge of Nature, an interest which counteracted the depression which a spinal complaint would otherwise have caused. In her schooldays at Birmingham she practised writing, and she carried on her studies in the quiet rectory at Wyton. At 23, her health still being feeble, she was sent for a sea voyage to America, where she took careful notes of all she saw, making a book of them on her return. With the help of her younger sister, to whom she was devoted, she spent part of her profits in providing fishing boats for the men of the western islands of Scotland, and furthering emigration schemes.
She found that her health was feeble at home but improved when she moved about the world, so she visited America again, where she made friends of Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, and other literary men.
Tiring of this, she began in 1873 that series of journeys in unfrequented parts of the world which she made famous by a succession of travel books which were read by thousands. The tumbling and tossing of the sea did her good and the hardships of weary journeys on horse, donkey, mule, and yak added years to the life of this frail little woman (who was under five feet high).
She gazed on the glowing crater of Kilanea in Hawaii; she climbed the Rockies alone with a scapegrace guide (whom she converted); she travelled in out-of-the-way districts of Japan and lived among the hairy Ainos on Yezo Island; she spent five weeks with the Malays and passed on to Egypt, where she fell ill with enteric fever and had to return to Scotland. In 1880 her sister died, and she then married Dr Bishop, who declared that he had only one rival in his wife’s heart, the high tableland of Central Asia. In 1888, three years after his death, Mrs Bishop, now keen on medical missions, set sail for India, and after a month’s hard travel from Kashmir she reached Tibet. Back in India, she persuaded an army oflicer to take her to Ispahan. Her caravan journey through Persia was appalling; she wrote that if there was a more devastating oppression on earth than that of the Turk it was that of the Shah. But she pressed on, sleeping in stables and in Kurdish houses, so that she traversed Persia, Kurdistan, and Armenia where no Englishwoman had been before. On her return she lectured before the British Association and was elected the first woman member of the Royal Geographical Society.
A wandering of 8000 miles at great personal risk from robbers next occupied her until 1897, and last of all; in her 70th year, she made a journey to Morocco, being landed by the ship’s crane and riding 126 miles in six days to Marakesh, “the noisiest, vilest, filthiest city she had seen.”
This most courageous woman, ever daring and never afraid, spent the last year of her life on her back, and passed into the realms where heroes go in 1904.
No comments:
Post a Comment