Cumnor Place was never more than a modest country residence, and bore no resemblance to Scott’s description; nor had it the imposing towers described in Mickle’s ballad, which concludes with— “Full many a traveller oft hath sigh’d, And pensive wept the Countess’ fall, As wand’ring onward they’ve espied The haunted towers of Cumnor Hall.” It stood to the south of the church, and was in its last years a ruinous malthouse, finally converted into labourers’ cottages. The stones of it were removed chiefly for the building of Wytham church; and there, at the entrance to the churchyard, an archway remains to this day, bearing the inscription by the pietistic Forster: “Verbum Domini Janva vitae.” It only remains to once more remark that Scott’s novel, _Kenilworth_, enshrining many of these things, is full of the grossest perversions of known facts, and not for one moment to be relied upon, historically. Raleigh figures in it, and in its pages is knighted by Queen Elizabeth, in 1560; but he was only eight years of age at the time. Lady Dudley is represented as the Countess of Leicester; but she met her tragic end three years before Dudley was created Earl. She is also made to figure in the grand festivities at Kenilworth, although she had been dead fifteen years when these great doings took place. There was no “Black Bear” inn at Cumnor at that time; nor could there reasonably have been such a sign, for Dudley, whose device it was, did not then own property at Cumnor, and was not directly associated with the village. The Richard Varney, co-villain with Forster in the story, was derived by Scott from Ashmole’s gossipy _Antiquities of Berkshire_, and is not to be readily identified. CHAPTER VII WYTHAM—THE OLD ROAD—BINSEY AND THE ORATORY OF ST. FRIDESWIDE—THE VANISHED VILLAGE OF SEACOURT—GODSTOW AND “FAIR ROSAMOND”—MEDLEY—FOLLY BRIDGE. The river makes a great semicircular bend, as between New Bridge and Oxford, so that although but six miles between the two, measured in a straight line on the map, it is fifteen miles by water. Cumnor stands roughly in the middle of the projecting part of Berkshire enclosed within this bend, and Wytham almost at the farthest northward fling of it, just below where Eynsham Bridge (otherwise styled Swinford Bridge) carries the great highway from Oxford across the Thames towards Witney and Gloucester. Eynsham, a quaint old village, is one mile distant. [Illustration: EYNSHAM.]