No one ever reads architectural descriptions, and so let it suffice to say that the interior of Bampton church is very well worth seeing; notably for its fine Saxon and Transitional-Norman chancel-arch. The monuments include one with a mutilated stone effigy of George Tompson, dated 1603. It could never have been a good example of the sculptor’s art; and time and unsympathetic hands have conspired to reduce it to something the appearance of an almost shapeless log, but the rhymed epitaph, cast in characteristic early seventeenth-century form, has a certain prettiness of imagination: “Heavne hath my sovle in happiest ioye and blisse; Earthe hath my earthe, whear bodie tomed is. Poore have my store, for ever to their vse; Frendes have my name, to keepe withovt abvse. Heaven, earth, poore, frendes, of me have had their parte, And this in lief was chefest ioye of harte.” [Illustration: A THAMES-SIDE FARM.] [Illustration: GATEWAY, COTE HOUSE.] There stands in the flat country between Bampton and Northmoor, amid the level meadows, washed, and not infrequently severely flooded, by the Charney Brook, by the Windrush, and by many mazy rills, the picturesque old mansion, now a farmhouse of a superior residential type, of Cote. It was built in the reign of James the First, between the years 1608 and 1612, by one Thomas Horde, and was originally surrounded by a moat. Alterations, apparently undertaken in 1704, the date of the fine wrought ironwork of the old gates secluding it from the road, abolished the moat; but a squat tower at one end of the grey, many-gabled mansion still discloses the old ideas of defence. It was at one time some twenty feet higher. At that period, when Thomas Horde built his house at Cote, times were, in fact, still unsettled, and one never knew into what dangers one might be drawn. The very year when he began building was the year of the Gunpowder Plot; and when such things could be, a man did well to stand upon the defensive. Beyond Cote, towards the river, lies Shifford, secluded and rarely visited. The old church of Shifford fell down in 1772, and a new building took its place. This was removed in 1863. Shifford is traditionally the scene of a Parliament, or Witanagemot, held here by Alfred the Great about A.D. 890: “There sate at Shifford many thanes, many bishops, and many learned men, wise earls, and awful knights: there was Earl Elfrick, very learned in the law; and Alfred, England’s herdsman, England’s darling; he was king of England; he taught them that could hear him how they should live.”