ST BOTOLPH. Norman W tower rebuilt in 1865. The lowest parts are said to have had Saxon long-and-short work. This was exposed in 1865. Early C12 arch towards the nave with scallop capitals. The pointed arch is a re-modelling. Arches also to N and S. These have the original thick roll mouldings. The tower turns octagonal at the clerestory level. C14 bell-openings. Very short spire with one tier of lucarnes. Of the early C13 the S arcade of two bays with circular pier and circular capitals and abaci. Round arches with two slight chamfers. Mid C13 N arcade with octagonal pier and double-chamfered pointed arches. Then c.1300 the chancel and the E bay connecting it with the arcades. The chancel arch has filleted shafts. Original also the SEDILIA and PISCINA, and on the original lines the E window. The other chancel windows are strange replacements of 1609 (date on one of them). Tall, of two lights, straight-headed, with a pointed quatrefoil at the top of each light. Early C13 S doorway with one order of colonnettes and one waterleaf capital and one with upright leaves. Pointed arch. In spite of this, the doorway could go with the S arcade. The porch entrance is early C14. Early C14, i.e. Dec, also the pretty S aisle E window. - PLATE. Cup, 1768 (?); two Patens, 1828; Flagon, 1830.
Arthur waxes lyrical.
HELPSTON. The Romans were here and the Saxons after them, and after the Saxons the Normans, but it is not for antiquities that we come: it is for poor John Clare. Here he was born; here they laid him to rest after 70 years of one of the saddest lives in human annals.
The village in which he saw the light is not very far from the Lincolnshire border, where the level meadows of the Fenlands stretch into the distance broken by nothing but a spire or the great willow fringes of the dykes. The Clare cottage on the Castor road is one of a humble group; it was two houses when the poet was born, but became three, and when he married he took the house next door and was able to remain under the same thatched roof. The third doorway has been blocked up again; it is whitewashed and a tablet was placed on it in 1921 by the Peterborough Museum Society.
This was home to Clare for 40 years; he grew up among these woods and heaths, and here he heard the nightingale. The house is much as it was. He found it roomy and comfortable, though they paid for it only forty shillings a year. It nearly broke his heart when after 40 years he left it for the new house built for him at Northborough, and all the time he was there his thoughts were here, and he wrote:
The old house stooped just like a cave,
Thatched O’er with mosses green;
Winter around the walls would rave,
But all was calm within.
Here they brought him from Northampton. Then they laid him in his grave, and on a stone put these words: “Sacred to the memory of John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet. Born July 13, 1793. Died May 20, 1864. A poet is born, not made.”
Shaded by the tall trees that surround the churchyard are two farms on which we found witnesses of the ancient history of this village. On one farm a 15th century archway had just been found when we called, and in the garden were many ancient coffins of Barnack stone. In the other farmyard we came upon a colossal rounded stone, weighing probably two tons, which had been brought in from the cross-roads on the ancient Ermine Street. In the centre of this stone is a square opening apparently cut for a wooden pillar, and it is believed that the stone was the foundation stone of a gibbet.
A beautiful thing poor John Clare would know is the village cross which has thrown its shadow towards the old church tower for 600 years. It is one of the most delightful we have seen, rising from four circular stone steps to a height of 30 feet. The solid pedestal of the cross, set on the top step, has eight sides, carved with slender pilasters and pointed gables of lovely tracery, and round the top of the pedestal is embattled ornament. There is no cross in the usual sense, but a thin tapering shaft which well matches the rest of the monument. Near by is a curiously ornate cross which John Clare would not know, for it was erected in his memory. It stands on a small green in the same wide and picturesque street as the ancient cross, and on its panels are quotations from the poems. Near these crosses, divided from the road by gay flowerbeds are the almshouses built for his old village by James Bradford.
There are nobler churches to look at than this, but there are only one or two churches in all England which take us back to Norman, Saxon, and Roman days. The church was refashioned by the medieval builders, but it has Norman and Saxon stones in its walls, and it may be said that the way to the altar is older than the Christian Church in England. Saxon work is seen in pilaster strips on the tower, in a tiny Saxon coffin lid with a fine cross in a splay of the west window, and in carved Saxon stones inside the tower above the doorway to the turret. Norman work is in three arches of the nave arcades, and Roman work is part of a pavement recovered from a Roman villa in the neighbourhood. It is made up of tiny pieces of tessellated paving, which must have been a jig-saw puzzle to put together and have been relaid outside the altar rails. They are laid in the form of two rectangles about five feet by one, inset with circles, the colour of the little stones being red and yellow, and some of them adorned with trefoils and quatrefoils.
The tower of the church, with its octagonal upper stage and its dumpy spire, has been taken down and rebuilt within living memory, its stones being numbered and reset as in the 14th century. The 15th century porch leads to a 13th century doorway with foliage capitals, in which hangs a door dated 1708 but still on the original hinges. There are two mass dials.
The nave has round and pointed arches, a 15th century clerestory, and a lofty 13th century chancel arch has clustered columns. In each wall of the chancel is a 15th century doorway, and the priest’s door on the south is hung on the original hinges. On one wall are three medieval recesses facing the 13th century sedilia; and the chancel has curiously carved stone heads, an ancient piscina, and two square peepholes from the aisles.
There is a beautiful little gravestone, with flowers in the spandrels, which has been brought indoors and rests against the moulded base of the tower arch; it is to William Salisbury who died in 1693. A blue marble stone nine feet long in the nave floor has a Norman French inscription to Roger de Hegham, who died about 1320. On the wall hangs a great frame containing a painting of the Royal Arms of James the First, unusual for this county. The unicorn has a very bushy tail, the lion is a very furious beast, and there is a cherub in each (upper corner, with good scrollwork round the royal motto. The frame has a double arch at the top. We found this striking painting looking very smart, fresh from its cleaning by the village school teacher, a lady.
Poor John Clare
THE histor of literature is strewn with tragic tales of immortal strugglers and genius that failed to bear full fruit, of men who starved in attics and left behind them better things than gold; but few of these tales touch the heart more deeply than John Clare’s. The poetry of Burns is more vigorous than Clare’s, but it could hardly be more wistful, and it was produced by the same sort of battling with life against the poverty of the countryside. Clare was born almost a pauper, yet as a boy he would buy paper instead of sweets so that he might hide himself away and write on it.
He would sit in the hedges writing poetry, and was already a poet when he met Martha Turner, the faithful struggling partner of the rest of his life. She was 17 and he was 24. They married, and she lived all through his strange eventful life, the same Patty through all the years. It was his love for her that urged him on. He sat in a lane and wrote a letter to a bookseller appealing for 300 subscribers for a book of poems he proposed to publish. He could not afford the stamp and walked with it to Stamford. Only seven people responded, the headmaster of Stamford Grammar School being the first. But when the book came out 3000 copies were sold and it made him the talk of the town. It was then that he married Patty, and he seemed like a new star appearing on the horizon. He came up to London and great people took an interest in him. He just missed meeting Keats, but met fashionable people who raised a fund for him and got him a cottage to live in. They found him rustic and as simple as a daisy, as one of them said, and indeed this shy and nervous John Clare was actually afraid to walk down Chancery Lane, and offered a watchman a shilling to take him another way to Fleet Street.
He went back home and wrote more poems, worked on the farm for a labourer’s wage, and would come back to London again, meeting such men as Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Tom Hood, Coleridge, and Hazlitt. Yet somehow it was all unsatisfactory, for he did not fit into the scene. His half-helpful friends urged him to remain a peasant and not to “spoil himself,” and the harvest he reaped from their friendship was scanty enough.
He would walk about London streets almost penniless when his songs were being sung at Covent Garden. He never had more than a labourer’s .wage to live on, including the £40 a year which came from the fund. He was uncertain of himself, too nervous for company, and the great people who invited him to their houses and patronised him would send him to the servant’s hall for dinner. Once the Bishop of Peterborough’s wife took him to a theatre, and he stood up in the middle of the play loudly cursing Shylock as he called for his pound of flesh. He was fuddled in his brain by poverty and drink. At times he was reduced to hawking his poems about the countryside, yet he would be entertained at a public dinner, and at one of these functions at Boston he contrived to disappear, escaping from the friends who had just put £10 into his bag.
All this time Patty was struggling at their little cottage, where she became quite used to footmen in splendid livery calling to ask John Clare to visit this nobleman or that, or to strangers stopping at the door to ask if John Clare lived there. She would call the Nine-Days Wonder from the fields to be looked at by grand people from London; yet Patty had hardly enough to live on, and could barely feed and clothe her seven children. John himself had not enough to eat, and his health had been visibly weakening for years. At last he broke down, and designed his own gravestone, on which he put “Here rest the hope and ashes of John Clare.”
Patty’s seventh child had just been born when a friend took John and housed him in a mental home. He escaped, and Lord FitzWilliam, who had long been his friend and gave him his cottage free, paid eleven shillings a week to keep him in Northampton Asylum, where he lived 22 years. Patty could not bear to go to see him, and never did see him again, yet Northampton people would see him day after day sitting in the portico of All Saints Church, for he was harmless at times, and allowed to go out like this.
Once in London he had stood in Oxford Street and seen Lord Byron’s funeral pass by; now in Northampton they gave him a seat from which he watched Queen Victoria and Prince Albert pass by; and it is curious for us to read what John Clare did not know that Wordsworth was watching the procession too.
He had wished to lie on the north side of Helpston churchyard where the morning and evening sun could linger longest on his grave, and they laid him there after 71 years of troubled life which had brought him strange fame and ceaseless poverty. Yet he had asked very little of life, for his chief love was in the fields - the primroses and violets and cowslips, the brook that mirrored the blue sky, the bird that sang on bush or tree, the wild flower dancing in the wind. They were all the riches he ever had, and it can hardly be said that they brought him happiness. His life was melancholy and its flashes of enchantment could in no way make up for the dreary years of hopeless poverty and muddling through.
We give the beginning and the end of the poem that represents him best, for it is true to a life lived on a stormy sea, shipwrecked all through, except for some few passages of smooth water and dazzling sunshine that were just enough to show what might have been:
I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am tossed.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.
Flickr.
The village in which he saw the light is not very far from the Lincolnshire border, where the level meadows of the Fenlands stretch into the distance broken by nothing but a spire or the great willow fringes of the dykes. The Clare cottage on the Castor road is one of a humble group; it was two houses when the poet was born, but became three, and when he married he took the house next door and was able to remain under the same thatched roof. The third doorway has been blocked up again; it is whitewashed and a tablet was placed on it in 1921 by the Peterborough Museum Society.
This was home to Clare for 40 years; he grew up among these woods and heaths, and here he heard the nightingale. The house is much as it was. He found it roomy and comfortable, though they paid for it only forty shillings a year. It nearly broke his heart when after 40 years he left it for the new house built for him at Northborough, and all the time he was there his thoughts were here, and he wrote:
The old house stooped just like a cave,
Thatched O’er with mosses green;
Winter around the walls would rave,
But all was calm within.
Here they brought him from Northampton. Then they laid him in his grave, and on a stone put these words: “Sacred to the memory of John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet. Born July 13, 1793. Died May 20, 1864. A poet is born, not made.”
Shaded by the tall trees that surround the churchyard are two farms on which we found witnesses of the ancient history of this village. On one farm a 15th century archway had just been found when we called, and in the garden were many ancient coffins of Barnack stone. In the other farmyard we came upon a colossal rounded stone, weighing probably two tons, which had been brought in from the cross-roads on the ancient Ermine Street. In the centre of this stone is a square opening apparently cut for a wooden pillar, and it is believed that the stone was the foundation stone of a gibbet.
A beautiful thing poor John Clare would know is the village cross which has thrown its shadow towards the old church tower for 600 years. It is one of the most delightful we have seen, rising from four circular stone steps to a height of 30 feet. The solid pedestal of the cross, set on the top step, has eight sides, carved with slender pilasters and pointed gables of lovely tracery, and round the top of the pedestal is embattled ornament. There is no cross in the usual sense, but a thin tapering shaft which well matches the rest of the monument. Near by is a curiously ornate cross which John Clare would not know, for it was erected in his memory. It stands on a small green in the same wide and picturesque street as the ancient cross, and on its panels are quotations from the poems. Near these crosses, divided from the road by gay flowerbeds are the almshouses built for his old village by James Bradford.
There are nobler churches to look at than this, but there are only one or two churches in all England which take us back to Norman, Saxon, and Roman days. The church was refashioned by the medieval builders, but it has Norman and Saxon stones in its walls, and it may be said that the way to the altar is older than the Christian Church in England. Saxon work is seen in pilaster strips on the tower, in a tiny Saxon coffin lid with a fine cross in a splay of the west window, and in carved Saxon stones inside the tower above the doorway to the turret. Norman work is in three arches of the nave arcades, and Roman work is part of a pavement recovered from a Roman villa in the neighbourhood. It is made up of tiny pieces of tessellated paving, which must have been a jig-saw puzzle to put together and have been relaid outside the altar rails. They are laid in the form of two rectangles about five feet by one, inset with circles, the colour of the little stones being red and yellow, and some of them adorned with trefoils and quatrefoils.
The tower of the church, with its octagonal upper stage and its dumpy spire, has been taken down and rebuilt within living memory, its stones being numbered and reset as in the 14th century. The 15th century porch leads to a 13th century doorway with foliage capitals, in which hangs a door dated 1708 but still on the original hinges. There are two mass dials.
The nave has round and pointed arches, a 15th century clerestory, and a lofty 13th century chancel arch has clustered columns. In each wall of the chancel is a 15th century doorway, and the priest’s door on the south is hung on the original hinges. On one wall are three medieval recesses facing the 13th century sedilia; and the chancel has curiously carved stone heads, an ancient piscina, and two square peepholes from the aisles.
There is a beautiful little gravestone, with flowers in the spandrels, which has been brought indoors and rests against the moulded base of the tower arch; it is to William Salisbury who died in 1693. A blue marble stone nine feet long in the nave floor has a Norman French inscription to Roger de Hegham, who died about 1320. On the wall hangs a great frame containing a painting of the Royal Arms of James the First, unusual for this county. The unicorn has a very bushy tail, the lion is a very furious beast, and there is a cherub in each (upper corner, with good scrollwork round the royal motto. The frame has a double arch at the top. We found this striking painting looking very smart, fresh from its cleaning by the village school teacher, a lady.
Poor John Clare
THE histor of literature is strewn with tragic tales of immortal strugglers and genius that failed to bear full fruit, of men who starved in attics and left behind them better things than gold; but few of these tales touch the heart more deeply than John Clare’s. The poetry of Burns is more vigorous than Clare’s, but it could hardly be more wistful, and it was produced by the same sort of battling with life against the poverty of the countryside. Clare was born almost a pauper, yet as a boy he would buy paper instead of sweets so that he might hide himself away and write on it.
He would sit in the hedges writing poetry, and was already a poet when he met Martha Turner, the faithful struggling partner of the rest of his life. She was 17 and he was 24. They married, and she lived all through his strange eventful life, the same Patty through all the years. It was his love for her that urged him on. He sat in a lane and wrote a letter to a bookseller appealing for 300 subscribers for a book of poems he proposed to publish. He could not afford the stamp and walked with it to Stamford. Only seven people responded, the headmaster of Stamford Grammar School being the first. But when the book came out 3000 copies were sold and it made him the talk of the town. It was then that he married Patty, and he seemed like a new star appearing on the horizon. He came up to London and great people took an interest in him. He just missed meeting Keats, but met fashionable people who raised a fund for him and got him a cottage to live in. They found him rustic and as simple as a daisy, as one of them said, and indeed this shy and nervous John Clare was actually afraid to walk down Chancery Lane, and offered a watchman a shilling to take him another way to Fleet Street.
He went back home and wrote more poems, worked on the farm for a labourer’s wage, and would come back to London again, meeting such men as Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Tom Hood, Coleridge, and Hazlitt. Yet somehow it was all unsatisfactory, for he did not fit into the scene. His half-helpful friends urged him to remain a peasant and not to “spoil himself,” and the harvest he reaped from their friendship was scanty enough.
He would walk about London streets almost penniless when his songs were being sung at Covent Garden. He never had more than a labourer’s .wage to live on, including the £40 a year which came from the fund. He was uncertain of himself, too nervous for company, and the great people who invited him to their houses and patronised him would send him to the servant’s hall for dinner. Once the Bishop of Peterborough’s wife took him to a theatre, and he stood up in the middle of the play loudly cursing Shylock as he called for his pound of flesh. He was fuddled in his brain by poverty and drink. At times he was reduced to hawking his poems about the countryside, yet he would be entertained at a public dinner, and at one of these functions at Boston he contrived to disappear, escaping from the friends who had just put £10 into his bag.
All this time Patty was struggling at their little cottage, where she became quite used to footmen in splendid livery calling to ask John Clare to visit this nobleman or that, or to strangers stopping at the door to ask if John Clare lived there. She would call the Nine-Days Wonder from the fields to be looked at by grand people from London; yet Patty had hardly enough to live on, and could barely feed and clothe her seven children. John himself had not enough to eat, and his health had been visibly weakening for years. At last he broke down, and designed his own gravestone, on which he put “Here rest the hope and ashes of John Clare.”
Patty’s seventh child had just been born when a friend took John and housed him in a mental home. He escaped, and Lord FitzWilliam, who had long been his friend and gave him his cottage free, paid eleven shillings a week to keep him in Northampton Asylum, where he lived 22 years. Patty could not bear to go to see him, and never did see him again, yet Northampton people would see him day after day sitting in the portico of All Saints Church, for he was harmless at times, and allowed to go out like this.
Once in London he had stood in Oxford Street and seen Lord Byron’s funeral pass by; now in Northampton they gave him a seat from which he watched Queen Victoria and Prince Albert pass by; and it is curious for us to read what John Clare did not know that Wordsworth was watching the procession too.
He had wished to lie on the north side of Helpston churchyard where the morning and evening sun could linger longest on his grave, and they laid him there after 71 years of troubled life which had brought him strange fame and ceaseless poverty. Yet he had asked very little of life, for his chief love was in the fields - the primroses and violets and cowslips, the brook that mirrored the blue sky, the bird that sang on bush or tree, the wild flower dancing in the wind. They were all the riches he ever had, and it can hardly be said that they brought him happiness. His life was melancholy and its flashes of enchantment could in no way make up for the dreary years of hopeless poverty and muddling through.
We give the beginning and the end of the poem that represents him best, for it is true to a life lived on a stormy sea, shipwrecked all through, except for some few passages of smooth water and dazzling sunshine that were just enough to show what might have been:
I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am tossed.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.
Flickr.
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