Coventry

“ The tourist will show his wisdom by not going too far afield in his sight-seeing; the three churches and S. Mary's Hall will, with a passing look at many a picturesque narrow street, carved gable, or interesting relic of old Coventry, furnish him with some hours' occupation. Those, of course, who possess indomitable physical and mental energy may ascend S. Michael's spire for the view's sake, or brave a walk through the somewhat dreary environs of Coventry to the historic but commonplace-looking strip of land known as Gosford Green. ”

“ Coventry has three fine old churches, whose tall needlelike spires form a landmark from almost any point of view in Warwickshire, and give to the town the appellation by which it is often known—"The City of the Three Spires." Nor could we well have forgotten Coventry's unique legend, for high up on one of the gables of our hotel was a wooden figure said to represent Peeping Tom, who earned eternal ignominy by his curiosity when Lady Godiva resorted to her remarkable expedient to reduce the tax levy of Coventry. ”

“ A thoroughly corrupt borough in the worst days of municipal corruption, rigidly Puritan under the Stuarts, loyal under Elizabeth, steady for hereditary right at Mary's accession—but Protestant, as witness its martyrs—Lollard in the hey-day of Lollardry, patriotic and Talbot-worshipping in the Hundred Years' War—as England was, so was Coventry. In art and letters, also, the city recalls what is most characteristic in the achievements of the English people. ”

“ The ancient city of Coventry—situated amidst sylvan scenery of great beauty, should if possible be approached by the wayfarer from Kenilworth along the unrivalled avenue which is also the high road—is of great antiquity and of very considerable interest to the archæologist. Seen from a distance, on account of its many church spires, it presents a wonderfully picturesque appearance; and with its old–world survivals in the shape of timbered houses and the exquisite architecture of its churches, is one of the most interesting towns of the Midlands. ”

“ That it was foolishness to go on a pilgrimage to the image of Our Lady of Doncaster, Walsingham, or the Tower of Coventry, for a man might as well worship by the fireside in the kitchen as in the aforesaid places, and as well might a man worship the Blessed Virgin when he seeth his mother or sister, as in visiting the images, because they be no more but dead stocks and stones. ”

“ In Coventry, as elsewhere, the rich merchants and craftsmen set carvers to carve the miserere seats—enjoying the grim humour these sometimes display, a quality which crops up everywhere in the fifteenth century, even now and then in legal documents—and bade the engraver commemorate the dead by tracing their effigies on brass, or the mason by fashioning their portraits in stone. ”

“ The sight of these houses, grandly planned and strongly built, with lovely gables where barge-board and finial are marvels of the house-carver's art, is a fitting close to a day in Coventry. Let us hope that no restorer, modern builder, well-meaning or enterprising commercial man will ever rob us of the loveliness of Bond's Hospital and Wheatley's School at Bablake. ”

“ But how did the men live who inhabited Coventry, who were neither warriors nor monks, but the rank and file of the townsfolk, the mere tillers of the ground and retailers of food and clothing, farmers, bakers, butchers, shoemakers, weavers, and the like? These men owed fealty, according to the position of the land they held, either to the prior or the Earl of Chester. ”

“ Henry V. seems to have been much beloved in Coventry, if we may judge by the hearty welcome given to him on his coming thither on March 21, 1421. The mayor and council ordered that £100 and a gold cup worth £10 should be presented to the King, and the same to the Queen "in suo adventu a Francia in Coventre," for those times a truly magnificent gift. The citizens never thereafter beheld the King. ”

“ Gone, too, is the splendid conduit in the Cross Cheaping, S. Nicholas' Hall in the West Orchard, meeting-place of the Corpus Christi guild; and S. Nicholas' Church, out to the north beyond Bishop Street, which fell to ruin soon after the Reformation. But the "proud pyramidès," the "three spires," remain yet, and give greeting to all who approach Coventry, dominating the flat midland country for many a mile, changing their relative position as the spectator moves, and their colour in the shifting lights. ”

“ It is fitting that the chief literary interest of Coventry should centre in a woman's name. George Eliot went to school at a house in the south-west end of Warwick Row, 1832-5. Coventry is said to be the original of Middlemarch, and S. Mary's Hall is described in the trial scene in Adam Bede.
In coming from the station down Warwick Row, as you pass the angle of Greyfriars' Green, look at the modern statue of Sir Thomas White, merchant, Lord Mayor of London in 1555, founder of S. John's College, Oxford, and benefactor of the city of Coventry. ”

“ Mean streets cover the site, and of the cathedral nought remains but a few bases of clustered shafts in Priory Row and a portion of the North-West tower converted into a dwelling-place. But the outline of S. Michael's spire [131] built by the people is still the wonder of Coventry, and the guild-hall of S. Mary with its glorious roof and window has behind it five hundred years of continuous civic life.
Coventry was now a free and independent corporate borough. ”

“ Few cities in England, in a word, will present to the visiter so many features of interest as Coventry. It has played its part conspicuously in the history, literature, and industry of the kingdom, and it contains several of the most impressive monuments of the architecture of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. The romantic lore of legends and poetical fictions has illuminated its actual history, and made it stand out with attractive features of interest. ”

“ Women have always been to the fore in Coventry; the names rise of S. Osburg, Godiva, Isabella, Margaret of Anjou, of the virgin sisters Botoner, who built the spire, and of Joan Ward, the first Coventry Lollard martyr. ”

“ The sunshine may be excessively hot, but an overshadowing cloud or the shade of a tree or of a building at once affords relief; and if the slightest breeze stirs, you feel the latent freshness of the air.
Coventry is some nine or ten miles from Leamington. The approach to it from the railway presents nothing very striking,—a few church-towers, and one or two tall steeples; and the houses first seen are of modern and unnoticeable aspect. Getting into the interior of the town, however, you find the streets very crooked, and some of them very narrow. ”

“ At Coventry again we had more than an hour to wait, and therefore wandered wearily up into the city, and took another look at its bustling streets, in which there seems to be a good emblem of what England itself really is,—with a great deal of antiquity in it, and which is now chiefly a modification of the old. The new things are based and supported on the sturdy old things, and often limited and impeded by them; but this antiquity is so massive that there seems to be no means of getting rid of it without tearing society to pieces. ”

“ It might save a repetition of the misery which the Coventry people brought upon themselves formerly—by their tenacity about protective duties, and their opposition to steam power—if they would, before it is too late, ponder the facts of their case, and strive, every man in his way, to yield respect to the natural demand for the great commodity of his city; and to take care that the men of Coventry shall be fit for something else than weaving ribbons. ”

“ Prior's-half and Earl's-half
In Coventry we now enter upon a period where the townsmen not only sought to make good the privileges they had already won, but strove to gain, either by fair means or foul, such fresh concessions as they deemed necessary for their comfort and prosperity. The story of the struggle for liberty in English towns, though little known, is one of great interest. Though the whole thing is on a small scale, yet the narrative of events is no less stirring than the account of the revolt of a great nation. ”

“ Henry VIII. and Catherine of Arragon visited Coventry in 1510, and witnessed three magnificent pageants; and it is possible that the prosperity of the town, which was popularly attributed as chiefly owing to the magnitude and wealth of its monastic institutions, may have suggested to the King’s mind the idea of the ultimate suppression of these foundations. ”

“ SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST
COVENTRY
Smithford Street, which reminds us of the early activity of the workers in iron, leads to Bablake, and by the bridge there tradition says that there grew a great tree "that from the strangeness of the fruit was called Quient" (quaint) , an imaginary etymology of the name Coventry. Modern scholars are, however, agreed that it was from some memorable (and possibly sacred) tree that the earliest form of the word "Cofantreo" is derived. ”

“ Castle and monastery have been destroyed in Coventry, and, after all, nobles and monks had very little to do with the making of the city, which, in 1381, was the fifth, and about seventy years later the fourth, among the cities of the kingdom. A fortunate junction of high roads, and the enterprise of the inhabitants, accounts for the great riches and large population during those seventy years. ”

“ It was once the ecclesiastical centre of England. Parliaments have sat there and great things have been done in Coventry. Many curious and valuable papers are seen in the hall. There is the order of Queen Elizabeth to her truly and well-beloved Mayor of Coventry, directing him to assist Earls Huntingdon and Shrewsbury in good charge of Mary Queen of Scots. There is a mace given by Cromwell to the corporation. You see that ruler of men could bestow maces as well as order his troopers to "take away that bauble" when the commonwealth required nursing. ”

“ Fabulous may be that beautiful legend of the Lady Godiva, but the men of Coventry believe it still: and still, on every Friday in the week of Holy Trinity, its annual fair is opened with a commemorative procession, in which a fair boy, dressed in well-knit hosiery, but apparently naked, rides through the ancient streets, with long and golden hair flowing from head to foot, and covering his body, as the representative of the sweet bride of Earl Leofric, who made the burghers of Coventry toll-free, and “gained herself an everlasting name.” ”

“ After Cheylesmore and the Earl's-half became a royal manor, kings and princes very frequently visited the city; for as Coventry had by this time become an important place—already accounted the fifth city in the kingdom—its wealth was an attraction to needy kings, who desired to be on good terms with burghers who were becoming a power in the land. It was this wealth which enabled the citizens to establish their position in the reign of Edward III. and his grandson by the purchase of fuller and yet fuller charters of liberty ”

“ Other buildings equally old in various towns have been faced and refaced, so that the outside walls are comparatively smooth and trim, having had all their wrinkles ironed out of them by the hand of renovation. All amateurs of antiquity owe Coventry for much enjoyment in its thus preserving such venerable buildings unaltered, with all their centuries eaten into their faces. ”

“ Though England was rid of Suffolk, who, after his impeachment and banishment, was killed on board the Nicholas of the Tower by some political enemies, affairs in 1451 prospered no better under the guidance of Somerset and the Queen, and the whole kingdom was uneasy with foreboding of the coming strife. Doubtless the news of the good order which prevailed in Coventry, and of the great military efforts the citizens had made, reached the ears of the King, as he made a progress [Pg 116] through the Midlands in the late summer of that year. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An unmistakable sign of the times was to be found in the fact that the nobles were quietly arming; and acting probably on a hint from the Court, the Coventry men made ready to equip a goodly number of men for the city's defence. Every man that had been mayor was commanded by order of leet to provide 4 jacks, with as many sallets, habergeons, and sheaves of arrows for this purpose; while late bailiffs, chamberlains, and all commoners able to bear the cost were respectively required to furnish three, two, and one of these several parts of an archer's accoutrement. ”

“ There were frequent consultations in the chapter-house, and on Sundays, before Prime or Tierce, the abbot sat in the cloisters to hear the monks' confessions, and appointed to each the penance due for his fault. Now and then the coming of an important stranger—a royal guest, perhaps, such as William the Conqueror, who passed, it is supposed, through Coventry on his way from Warwick to Nottingham in 1068—would furnish the brethren with a topic for many weeks' conversation.
Sometimes the brethren were suffered to have a glimpse of the great world without the convent with their own eyes. ”