BURFORD PAST AND PRESENT.*
THE picturesque little town of Burford in Oxfordshire with its great church has attracted a good many writers and artists, and not least William Morris, and its history has been outlined more
than once. But it has had no chronicler so competent as Mrs. Gretton, who has described the town and recorded its changing fortunes in an interesting book based upon her husband Captain Gretton's exhaustive study of the Burford archives. The first thing to note about Burford is that it is five miles from a railway station. To this remoteness it owes its merciful preservation as a relic of the ages when men could build plain and sightly houses in tune with their surroundings. There is still a fair number of such little towns in England for those who care to seek them out, like Dunster under the shadow of its Castle, but Bur- ford is a particularly good example within easy reach of London. In the middle ages it was a centre of the trade in the cloth made from Cotswold wool, and its merchants prospered and spent their surplus wealth on the church and the chantry chapels thereto attached as well as on their substantial dwellings. When the cloth trade went elsewhere, Burford was known for its saddlers and its occasional race meetings. Later still, in the great coach- ing age, Burford flourished on the traffic which then passed through the town from London to Cheltenham, Gloucester, and Hereford. It was a fleeting prosperity which began with the improvement of the road to Oxford about 1760 and virtually ended with another road improvement in 1812 which diverted the coach route from the town itself to the ridge above it. Mrs. Gretton says that forty coaches used to pass through Burford in every twenty-four hours:
" About 9.30 in the morning the Magnet from Cheltenham would arrive, on its way to Oxford, and just behind it came the Berkeley Hunt--a green coach—working the same route. At 11 the Regulator from Gloucester would rattle in, and with it, or on its heels, the Retaliator, also from Gloucester. At 1 o'clock the Mazeppe. from Hereford, and its rival on the same road, the Rapid, would appear ; and soon after they had gone the down Magnet and the down Berkeley Hunt would be roaring up the narrow end of Witney Street. Later in the afternoon the down Regulator, Retaliator, Mazeppa and Rapid were due, and by 7 o'clock the first of the night coaches, the Champion from Hereford, came through, followed about 10.30 by the Paul Pry from Aberystwith. At 12.30 the down Champion, and soon after the down Paul Pry would be waking the night. Last of all, in the small hours, came the Gloucester Royal Mail, the up coach at 1.30 a.m. and the down at 4.30 a.m. Thus, without counting the less important coaches and those working only short dis- tances, eighteen of the through ` fliers ' were seen in Burford every day. The rows of hooks still visible in the beams under the archways of the George and the Bull must always then have • Br,rford Past and Present. By Al. /nurse Gretton. Oxford : 16s. 134.1
been laden with game and joints, and the yards, silent and slum- berous now, can never have been without clatter."
In the half-century the Burford inns throve and gave employment to many people. When the coaches passed by the top of the town, this industry waned. The introduction of railways did not kill the coaches at once, but the railway engineers, avoiding the hills which overlook the Windrush valley, left Burford on one side and thus preserved it, like a fly in amber, for our delec- tation. It is never safe to assume that any town will continue to escape the attentions of the modern jerry-builder and the manufacturer. Even Stratford-on-Avon has not been spared. But Burford after a succession of fortunate accidents ought now to be tolerably secure.
The perplexing history of Burford's local institutions is skil- fully summarized by Mrs. Gretton. Burford never was a borough in the ordinary sense. It had a merchant gild and market rights, and its leading burgesses evolved a corporation and acted for centuries as if Burford were incorporated. But when Chief Baron Tanfield bought the manor in 1617, he appealed to the courts against the usurping corporation and obtained a verdict. The burgesses, taking advantage of the transfer of the manor first to Lord Falkland and then to Lenthall, the Speaker of the Long Parliament, contrived to go on exercising many of their old privileges. When in 1861 there remained but one burgess and the corporation became extinct, its muniments, under the common law, passed to the solitary survivor, the late Mr. Cheatle. The old system of local government had become inadequate under the Georges, but it may be observed that Burford in 1820 had in some respects a more complete adminis- tration than the great town of Manchester which had not ad- vanced, in theory, beyond the manorial stage. In our political history Burford is best known as the place where Fairfax and Cromwell by prompt and decisive action suppressed the revolt of the Levellers in the Parliamentary Army in May, 1649. There is no saying what might have happened if, when Scrope's and Ireton's regiments mutinied at Salisbury and marched off to join Harrison's regiment at Abingdon, the Lord General and his colleague had not swiftly pursued and fallen upon them. The mutineers were surrounded and disarmed, and three of the ring- leaders were shot in Burford Churchyard in the presence of their comrades. The political revolution was thus prevented from becoming a social revolution, as a few crazy fanatics desired. Mrs. Gretton gives a lucid description of the church and of the many interesting old houses, and sketches the recent progress of the little town. It may be noted that the useful Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings was founded by William Morris as the outcome of a hot controversy with a vicar of Burford who had, in Morris's opinion, " restored " the church with more zeal than discretion. Mrs. Gretton takes the vicar's side.
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