The more rural part of Redbourne is quite away from the road, across a wide common traversed by a noble elm avenue. Beyond this, and in a hollow where a quite unsuspected street of ancient cottages is found, the exquisitely picturesque church stands. One may look in vain in the guide-books for any mention of its beauties of colour and quaintness of detail that instantly capture the affections of the artist. Long may the restorer be kept at a proper distance, and the delicate silver-grey hues of the old plastered tower, the crumbling “clunch” stone, the patches of black flint and Roman tile and the unconventional beauty of the sixteenth-century brickwork be suffered to remain untouched. [Illustration: TOM AT LIBERTY] [Illustration: REDBOURNE CHURCH.] Redbourne seems to have found favour in the eyes of sturdy Cobbett; but rather on negative than positive grounds, and on account of what it did not possess. “No villainous things of the fir tribe here,” he observes, looking upon the landscape with approval. He missed a point though, at Friar’s Wash, where the recurrent Ver or Verlam is seen to cross the road again, by the “Chequers” inn, where a hilly bye-lane goes off in a north-easterly direction to Flamstead. But doubtless Cobbett missed the name, else we might well have heard him characteristically lashing out, something in this sort: “Friars’ Wash! indeed. Good God, when _did_ friars _wash_? Everybody knows, or _ought_ to know that they did nothing of the sort, and counted personal uncleanliness as not merely next to godliness, but a constituent part of it. They were as dirty physically as Mr. Pitt and his stock-jobbing and funding, fawning and slavering creatures are morally. Aye! and I tell you, poor down-trodden victims of an arbitrary government,” etc., etc. Something of that kind Cobbett would have written in his _Rural Rides_. Indeed, the “friars austere, unwashed and unpleasantly yellow,” as they were, by all accounts, might well have resented that naming of the ford as an unwarrantable aspersion upon their well-earned reputation for an ancient and invincible dirtiness. [Illustration: REDBOURNE.]