From this point of view Caldecote is disappointing, for nothing Roman is visible there. It is just a tiny village, with a modernised Hall, and in the Park, less than a stone’s throw from the house, the little church. But it is a place with a story; for it was here, on August 28th, 1642, that an attack was made upon the Hall, then the residence of Colonel Purefoy, a noted Republican. The Colonel was at Coventry, and the house in charge of his wife, Dame Joan, and his son-in-law, Master George Abbott, when a raiding-party, said to have been under the command of Prince Rupert, appeared and demanded its surrender. Fortunately the inmates had warning of their approach, and when they would have forced an entrance, the soldiers found doors and windows barred. In the affray that followed, Dame Joan fired first, bringing down her man, and the garrison of men and women servants, headed by Master George, gave so good an account of themselves that the Royalists drew off with a loss of three officers and fifteen soldiers killed. Caldecote Hall was not molested again. Memorials of Dame Joan and Master George still remain in the little church. XXXII Beyond Caldecote comes Mancetter—the Roman Manduessedum—on the Warwickshire side, and Witherley, in Leicestershire. Between the two, an earthwork named “Castle Bank,” a rectangle measuring six hundred by four hundred feet, seems to have been the site of the Roman camp. Across the road flows the pretty river Anker, with trees densely overhanging it, and framing with their boughs a charming view of Witherley’s graceful crocketed spire. Mancetter—how nearly it escaped from being another “Manchester”!—is thought to have derived the first syllable of its name in Roman times from some historic or remarkable stone, “maen,” in the British tongue; but, however that may be, no such stone has ever been found. It is now a pretty village, a little distance retired from the road, with a very fine old church, and a churchyard remarkable for its illiterate tombstones and odd epitaphs, from the merely misspelt to the quaintly conceived:— Here lies the Wife of Joseph Grew, a Tender Parerent And a Vertious Wife. She died February 1782. Another, weirdly ungrammatical and savagely cynical, hides the identity of those who lie beneath by initials, and by the omission of any date:— HERE LIETH INTERR’D THE BODY’S OF H. I. M. What E’re we was or am it Matters not To whome related, or by whome begott. We was but amnot: Ask no more of me ’Tis all we are And all that you must be. Another, to Sarah and Mary Everitt, 1720, and others of that family, puts a truth in a quaint guise:—