The A40 is one of my favourite roads, based in parts on an old Roman road and once the link between London and Fishguard. The stretch I find most attractive cuts through the Cotswolds en route to Oxford.
We travelled it often and were always intrigued by the village of Burford twenty miles west of the dreaming spires. Recently, we took the left to Burford and spent an hour or two exploring it.
The village is typically Cotswold, one long street with some interesting pubs (could spend a happy day there) gift shops and tea rooms. Off the main street are several interesting lanes, a car park that floods when the river Windrush overflows, and a very impressive church: St John the Baptist.
Inside the church is a tomb, which illustrates the beautiful complexity of history—that of the 'establishment' as opposed to folk history.
The picture below shows St Peter's Chapel, once the private pew of the local Tanfield family.
here hosting a Christmas Nativity scene
A close up of the chapel altar,
And a fascinating history of St Dorothy, whom I'd never heard of before.
For me, the centre piece of the church was not the high altar or the strangely arranged chairs in place of pews
but the gorgeously ornate tomb of Lord and Lady Tanfield.
At the head of the tomb is a coloured sculpture of their only child, Elizabeth Tanfield.
At the foot of the tomb is Elizabeth's son, Lucius Carey
And here is what the tomb says of Lawrence Tanfield
Clearly, the man was a saint—an establishment panegyric that would however cut little ice with St Peter. In reality, as a leading Treasury official, Sir Lawrence Tanfield was notoriously corrupt, and both he and his wife were hated as harsh and exacting landlords. Not a whiff of that here.
Soon after their demise, according to local folk lore, a fiery coach carrying the two of them could sometimes be seen flying through the streets and lanes of Burford—those unfortunate enough to see it cursed on the spot. The legend may have arisen years after an earlier tradition that began after their death—the burning of their effigies by the local people. Mercifully, the curse of the fiery coach carrying the two malevolent sprites ended after an exorcism. During it, the local vicar captured the ghost of Lady Tanfield and placed it into a bottle, which he promptly corked and threw into the river Windrush. During droughts, so desperate were the locals to prevent the bottle ever surfacing, they would attempt to fill the diminishing river with buckets of water. The question though arises, what recourse did they have when the river flooded?
Not everything about the family was bad.
Their only child, Elizabeth, was something of a prodigy, her talent nurtured by her parents. She was forbidden candles, unless it was to read by night; a French tutor was hired when she was five years old and in just over a month she was speaking fluent French. From there she went on to learn Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hebrew and Transylvanian. At fifteen, she was contracted in marriage to Sir Henry Carey, and when her new mother-in-law told her she was not permitted to read, she developed a gift for poetry instead—in between having eleven children. When, in Ireland, her eldest daughter Catherine saw a vision of the Virgin Mary on her deathbed, Elizabeth converted to Catholicism shortly after. As a result she was banned from court, her father disinherited her, her husband tried to divorce her, and when her four daughters also converted to Catholicism, they were taken from her. Elizabeth however fought back. The boys had been put in the care of her eldest son, Lucius, a staunch protestant. She instigated their escape and led by example. By the time of her death in 1639 six of her children had followed her into the Catholic Church, four of them becoming nuns.
Elizabeth's son, Lucius was a gifted intellectual who took an active part in the turbulent politics of the day. He fought for the king, whilst despairing at the intransigence of both sides and was killed at the battle of Newbury. There, his body was stripped and left until recognised by a servant and taken home and buried in an unmarked grave in the village church yard of Great Tew—which we have yet to visit.
3 comments:
That's a heck of a lot of water. Hope you were able to get around safely.
re: statues
I've always had a fondness for painted statues. It lends a touch more humanity than cold, white marble chiseled by demi gods. The painted statue makes you feel that much closer to the artist.
The paddling was fine, Maria. The carpark was on lower ground, and we were soon out of it. Ref statues, it must have been glorious in a medieval church before the Reformation destroyed a visual culture, wall paintings—sometimes columns, colourful statues and the stained glass.
In fairness to the ancient world, I believe those cold marble statues were usually painted too, the traces long since gone before the Renaissance got to work on them.
That's true. Roman and Egyptian statues were often painted, but I was thinking more of Michaelangelo's work.
His work is without equal, but marble is still marble.
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