Interesting too--albeit scanty--are the relics of legendary lore
and heathen custom which ofttimes perplex the student of the city's
history. Here was played the Hox-Tuesday play, survival, say
folklorists, of the struggle to gain possession of a victim for the
sacrifice; here the national legend of Godiva grew up; and here, men
fabled, S. George, patron of England, was born.
In the country round about Coventry two Englands meet, one a land of
green woods and well-watered pastures, the other black with the toil of
the coal-fields. The city turns its most prosperous side southwards,
and the common view of the spires is the one from the south, where
the tree-bordered road from Kenilworth, whereon so many kings and
queens have travelled, slips into Coventry, past a fringe of ample,
comfortable houses, that the well-to-do have raised in our own time.
This was Tennyson's view of the spires, and George Eliot must have
seen it daily in her school-life, which she passed in the house that
is farthest from the town in Warwick Row. It is the common view,
but not the most interesting, since the octagonal Decorated steeple
of Christchurch, recased in fresh stone, last remnant of the now
demolished church of the Greyfriars, is the least commanding of the
three, and by its nearness somewhat dwarfs the rest. The Greyfriars
of Coventry, be it said, have gained by a scribe's error, a probably
quite unmerited fame as producers of the noted Corpus Christi plays; in
reality, this honour should belong to the lay-folk and craftspeople of
the city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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