From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.Bates, Katharine Lee
General
From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.
Bates, Katharine Lee
England -- Description and travel
Worcester, too, was familiar ground, and this time we gave but a few
hours to the "Faithful City," which paid so dearly for its steadfast
loyalty to Charles I. The unspeakable Parliamentarians proved nearly
as destructive as the Danes, who, in the ninth century and again in
the eleventh, had sacked it with fire and sword. The militant
Presbyterians wreaked their piety most of all upon the Cathedral,
leaving it roofless, its splendid glass all shattered, its brasses
wrenched away, its altars desecrated and torn down. We found the
red-brick town upon the Severn brisk and cheerful, with its proud
shop-window display of its own products, from the Royal Worcester
China to Worcestershire Sauce, with the deeply laden barges that
almost hid the river; its lively hop market; and its grunting sows,
each with her litter of recalcitrant little pigs, driven in a
meandering course through the main street by ruddy boys and girls. The
cathedral, whose memories embrace St. Dunstan and St. Wulfstan and
that stout-hearted old martyr of Oxford, Bishop Latimer--who had
himself once presided at the burning of a friar--uplifted our hearts
with its august vista of nave and choir. The crowned tenant of that
choir, King John, ought to be troubled in his gilded rest by the
proximity of a Prince Arthur, though not the Arthur to whom he did
such grievous wrong. The best of the cathedral is, to my thinking, the
solemn grace of the crypt, beneath whose light-pillared arches stand
about various stone figures of rueful countenance. After their
centuries of sunlight, high-niched on the central tower, the Restorer
has scornfully dislodged them and dungeoned them down here.
Just below Worcester the Severn is augmented by the Teme, which has
valiantly cut its way through the line of western hills to join the
court of Sabrina, and at Tewkesbury, on the Gloucester border, it
receives its most famous affluent, Shakespeare's Avon. Tewkesbury was
new to us, and we lingered there two days, wishing we might make them
twenty. As it was we had to forego the delightful trip on the Severn
to Deerhurst, an old monastic town whose pre-Norman church is said to
be of extremely curious architecture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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