Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide -
Stanton Harcourt,
Map: Stanton Harcourt
Stanton Harcourt is well said to be one of the ideal villages of the county of Oxfordshire. Its situation on a little plain, its sheltering trees, its wealth of architectural interest and poverty in shops all combine to make it rurally ideal. And then the name; one of those decorative double titles with which so many of the villages of the Valley are endowed! It has been explained, with a rather low humour, to have arisen from an exclamation alleged to have been addressed in battle to a former Harcourt: "Stand to 'un, Harcourt! " But (I hazard it on my own responsibility) may it not really refer to the three standing stones known as the Devil's Quoits? The Saxon Stan-tun, stone enclosure, seems to warrant the conjecture.
The manor was one of the large estates that fell to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, half brother of the Conqueror. St. Michael's is a handsome church, lately restored, with a good deal of the Norman still happily left in it. There is much also of the cold beauty of Early English; notably the east end with its very early triplet of lancet windows. But the door is kept locked; the good woman waits with well feigned patience while you endeavour to look round, and ordinarily you get no dream; the vision the Norman and the first Pointed builders can still compel is withheld. Yet one Sunday morning before service my eyes were opened, and the old days dawned upon me there.
[In his Additions and Corrections Fred added: The screen is of thirteenth century work, and retains its original hinges, lock and bolt. The painting is perhaps of the Blessed Virgin, or one of the portraits mentioned in Keyser's Mural Paintings. A monastery probably existed here, judging from the Monk's Kitchen and the fishponds. There was also possibly a royal palace; a small canopied tomb of Purbeck marble, bearing the royal arms, being thought to be a tomb of some royal child. Adeliza, queen of Henry I, gave part of her lands in Stanton Harcourt to Reading Abbey at its foundation; and afterwards the patronage and revenues of the church. It was wholly appropriated to that abbey in 1506; perhaps the conjectured monastery was a mere country residence of Reading's. Had the child's tomb any connection with the queen? ]
The rood screen is judged to be the oldest left in England; though there is one at Sharncott, far westward, not so well known to fame. The still sound wood is pierced in several places with the queerest irregular, amateurish patterns, attributed, the vicar told me, to Cromwell's soldiery, except the largest circle, which he thinks was officially cut to allow people, not permitted within the chancel, to view the celebration of the holy sacrament: a hagioscope, in short. At the extreme right is a dim old painting, of some prioress I imagine, done across a panel and a half of the screen. The rood stairway is plain to see, but is locked. These screens originally began to be erected, I think, because, the chancel being the parson's property and the nave the people's, parish meetings with or without the priest's consent or sympathy could be held in the nave, and no doubt a substantial partition was sometimes desirable; the older have much less open work about them than the modern. Starting with this utilitarian idea, their increase and elaboration followed as their capacity for ornament became evident. This same view of expediency accounts also, perhaps, for the priests' doors into the chancel, sometimes on the south side, sometimes on the north, now so frequently walled up. You will find ancient specimens at Amney Crucis and Somerford Keynes, and at other places in the River country.
Without the south wall Pope's epitaph on two young people killed by lightning is set up on a tablet:
JOHN HEWET & SARAH DREW
AN INDUSTRIOUS YOUNG MAN &
VIRTUOUS MAIDEN OF THIS PARISH
CONTRACTED IN MARRIAGE
Was it necessary by the size of the lettering to arouse quite such furious speculation? for the poor creatures were subjected after their death to much scandalous talk. Pope wrote in a letter that "a young man and woman were lately destroyed here by lightning; and the country people are hardly in charity with their minister for allowing them Christian burial. They cannot get it out of their heads but it was a judgment of God. " Just beneath this too protesting memorial the vicar has lately cleared the ivy from a sundial, the figures of which are just discernible scratched on the stone of the wall. The man who stripped off the ivy found the iron gnomon, but threw it irretrievably away in ignorance of its use. In the churchyard is an interesting stone which may be part of a cross.
There were formerly two separate entrances for women into this church, one for each transept. Their outer door on the north side can still be seen; the southern is quite obliterated. Internally the newly faced walls shew but little sign of these entrances, though on the north side the holy water stoup still remains. Hall, and Thorne in his Rambles, both write as though this ancient custom still existed in the middle of the nineteenth century.
You may view the Harcourt chapel through a locked grille, if you wish. It is of early Perpendicular work. Dame Margaret's is one of the very few existing effigies of women that display the Order of the Garter, Another is that of Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, in Ewelme church, away beyond Wallingford; and a third was that of Lady Constance Grey de Ruthven, on her tomb once in St. Katharine's-by-the-Tower, now in its successor at Regent's Park. This last, however, was so disfigured long before its removal that the Order could no longer be recognised; and the arm that bore it is now "restored" into mere undistinguished masonry.
The remains of the old manor house stand in an adjoining garden; which you enter through a doorway in the churchyard wall. They date from about 1450. There is a square tower, fifty four feet high, which from the road from West End you may easily mistake for the church. Its ground floor was the private chapel of the Harcourt family. The next was the priest's living room, with his bedroom above. All three seemed very neglected and dirty when I saw them. The fourth and top room is wainscoted and better kept; and it was here that in 1718 Pope completed his translation of the fifth book of the Iliad. He was at Stanton Harcourt the greater part of two summers; Gay also was a visitor at the same time, and the only person, they say, who ever dared to intrude upon his brother poet. There would be a splendid view from the top were it not for the spreading elms that screen the landscape.
After the square primness of the tower you get a thrill on entering the magnificent old kitchen of the manor house, like a cave of the mountains where gnomes might fitly inhabit. It is finer than the Christ Church kitchen; and is said to be very similar to the abbot's kitchen at Glastonbury. It has no chimney; the fires were made against the walls, and the smoke escaped through a series of shutters in the sloping roof like huge Venetian blinds, which could be opened or closed according to the direction of the wind. This gave occasion for a somewhat laboured antiquarian jest of, I think, Dr. Plot's: that it might be called a kitchen within a chimney, or a kitchen without one. A very dark and narrow stairway in the wall leads on to the battlements, where however the landscape is again hidden by masses of foliage. Hawthorne speaks of a letter of Pope's as "playful and picturesque, with fine touches of humorous pathos, and dashing off the grim aspect of this kitchen, which he peoples with witches, engaging Satan himself as head cook, to stir the infernal cauldrons that seethe and bubble over the fires. " He also refers, with a rather scornful patronage, to the poet having used the old tower and peeping of summer mornings,"poor little shrimp that he was," through the embrasures of the battlement. The Harcourt family has not resided here since the death of Sir Philip Harcourt in 1688.
The old stocks are still standing on a strip of greensward opposite the school. And out southwest beyond the village are the Devil's Quoits, three monoliths of brown conglomerate which, says the legend, Apollyon tossed from Cumner height as a wager for the soul of a man. They are some distance apart, and you can never see more than two from any standpoint when the crops are standing. The nearest to the village is in a long narrow hayfield, and is about five feet high and wide, and eighteen inches thick. It was taken down, many years ago, and used for a roadside bridge, and shews on one face the groove where the traffic ran over it. So a merry-eyed, one-armed rustic out "birdstarvin" informed me. The second is perhaps a little larger, and stands about three hundred yards away southwest. The flat sides of these two face each other. Due south is the third and largest, eight feet by six by two, as nearly as I could judge from the edge of the oats that surrounded it. The plane of its flat side is parallel with the line between the other two; and my judgement is that it was a Druidic circle of about nine hundred yards in circumference; though local tradition pronounces the stones a monument set up to commemorate a battle long ago, possibly the one between British and Saxons at Bampton in 614 when Cwichelm of Mercia gained his great decisive victory. Why, however, should it have been erected so far from the scene of the fight? Dr. Plot suggested a Roman origin for the stones, as having perhaps been erected as trophies according to their custom at the extreme limit of one of their victories. It is interesting to notice that the word "devil" may quite probably be the British dubbalia, that is, Druidical stones, which if correct confirms my opinion of their origin. But I will base no argument upon the quagmire of Celtic philologies; one cannot forget Dean Swift's oat-stealer. There are other stones called by the same name southward near Hackpen, it is said. A barrow once stood near these Quoits, which however no longer existed even in Boydell's time, in 1794. The removal of it was begun by a tenant of the spot, but when the work was about half completed the whole village was alarmed by a violent storm of rain and hail and thunder, which so worked upon their rural superstitions that nothing more was then done. A few years later, however, they managed to remove the remainder without any further protest from the elements.
Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide -
Stanton Harcourt,
Map: Stanton Harcourt