TILE BURFORD RECORDS.* TEE little town of Burford has had
an eventful life, but an event in its life which deserves to be printed in red is the appear- ance of this book. The records of no small town in England, we suppose, have been treated with more patient and scholarly earethan Mr. Gretton has shown in this book. His work deserves the fair and ample form in type and production whioh has been given to it by the Oxford University Press. Travellers by road find it difficult to tear themselves away from Burford. Not • The Botsford Bawds: a Study in Minor Town Government. By it. it.
Bretton. M.B.E. Oxford: at the Clarendon Prose. 142e. net.]
only the main street but every little alley seems to contain something of interest, and few towns in England show on their faces such a patent and curious mingling of the domestic archi- tecture of many English generations. The attractions of Burford are helped by the attractions of the district. Who that has lived in the Cotswolds or even visited them does not retain for ever in his memory a picture of the cool grey villages lying in the trough or on the side of billowy slopes, and seeming rather to have grown up of their own accord than to have been built by the inhabitants of those airy roaming uplands ? Westwards are the wonderful vales of Evesham and Gloucester. The visitor to Bredon Hill, a true hill of romance, looks down upon Tewkesbury and Gloucester, seen in perpetually changing lights. Eastwards the Cotswolds slope gradually down to the valley where the Thames proper has its source. But the Thames is supplied from all the valleys of the Cotswolds—the Windrush, Lech, Coln, and Churn. Bath and Bristol are surely appropriate towns to be on the southern edge of the Cotswolds. The cold- ness of the uplands does not promise well for agriculture, though some of the hardiest sheep in England abound and thrive there ; nevertheless, barley-growing has been brought to a high pitch not unaided, let us believe, by the ministrations of the Agricultural College at Cirencester. Some of the more beautiful Cotswold towns—Broadway, for example, at the foot of its noble hill—have suffered a little from the sophistication of those seekers after beauty who, having found it, have not contributed to it by building certain kinds of houses on the fringes of the towns ; but Burford is little if at all spoilt.
Mr. Gretton's researches among the Burford records yield a study of genuine historical value. It is a study in minor town government which will bring many surprises to the ordinary reader. The original grant of liberties to Burford was of very early date ; it was indeed the earliest dated instance of a Gild Merchant. The first charter was apparently granted between 1088 and 1107. The grant was not of a Gild Merchant alone, for it included also the usual liberties in the setting up of a borough—an important concession to so small a town and one that was purely agricultural. The explanation apparently is that Robert FitzHamon, who received the first grant, had supported William Rufus against the rebellion of Bishop Odo. FitzHamon incorporated the manor of Burford into the Honour of Gloucester, and for some centuries Burford remained a manor of that Honour. The fact that Burford was a kind of outlying dependency of the Honour of Gloucester led to much confusion about the exact constitutional rights of the town. As it was an unimportant item in the possessions of a succession of great lords none of whom ever lived at Burford, the supervision was slight and constitutional perplexities were natural enough. From the first Earls of Gloucester it passed to the De Glares, then to the Despensers, and from them to the Earls of Warwick. At the end of the fifteenth century the manor came into the hands of the Crown.
The burgesses of Burford both in the earlier days and under the Crown believed themselves to be really free agents, and acted accordingly not without credit to themselves and to the management of their town. A storm began to brew when in 1601 the Crown alienated the town and manor to Sir John Fortescue, who had been Queen Elizabeth's Chancellor of the Exchequer. As Fortescue, like the earlier lords of the place, did not live at Burford the change made no great difference, but when his executors sold the town and manor in 1617 to Sir Lawrence Tanfield the storm burst. Tanfield became the first resident lord of the manor. Within two years of his arrival the burgesses, in the person of six of their number, were put on their defence in the Court of Exchequer on a charge of usurping certain liberties and privileges. The result of the trial was that the Court held invalid the plea of Charter with regard to a good many privileges. " The disaster," says Mr. Gretton, " was complete, but it enables us to see the manner of the advance in burghal activity during the sixteenth century and the com- parative lack of any such activity in the previous century." Although Burford was prosperous enough in the seventeenth century, the subsequent history of the corporation is a story of decline. In the eighteenth century we have a glimpse of the burgesses on trial for mismanagement of trust funds and for petty misdemeanours. The prime mover in the action was John Lenthall, one of the family—long associated with Burford
to which the famous Speaker of the House of Commons belonged. The end of the Corporation came in 1861 in a strangely humilia- ting way. It was not announced directly, but was referred to quite incidentally, yet none the less decisively, in a schedule of an Act confirming a scheme of the Charity Commissioners !
As regards an obvious feature of the architecture of Burford, Mr. Gretton says :- " The fact that the only freestone quarry was at later dates supplying stone for great buildings elsewhere is proof that it had not been very heavily worked for building in Burford. This supports the view that, even when stone began to be more freely used, it was not as a rule employed above the ground. floor storey, the upper parts of the houses being still of timber with wattle and daub filling. That would account for a certain architectural incongruity which must have puzzled observers in Burford, namely, the existence of fine old po archways in what are now insignificant positions. Th has been remarked by a distinguished architect, are the eat doorways of the larger type of burgage houses here. Nowadi they open only into narrow yards, or else into little alleys cottages ; while nothing in the buildings in which they are set is of an impressive character. The explanation, given the nature of the original houses, is not difficult to provide. The archways stood in the centre of the house frontages, with living rooms on either side and above, and led through the buildings to the gardens, closes, barns, wool-sheds, and workshops of their owners. Now, as increasing population necessitated division of the burgage tenements, a house of this kind offered itself pecu- liarly to the purpose. The entrances under the archway to either side of the original house would instantly facilitate division into two separate dwellings. At the same time ease of access through the archway to ground at the back would facilitate the building of rows of cottages there, on the courtyard or close. Once the tenement had been thus dealt with, the timber and plaster upper storey would, in later times when stone was more freely used, be very easily destroyed, and very likely to be de- stroyed, to make way for new ideas and a more complete par- tition of the building. It can be seen in this way how nothing of the original structure would remain except the arch ; and how, by the very nature of the case, the arch would survivb amid a number of small houses having nothing in common with its own character."
A very interesting section of the book deals with one of the risings of the Levelers, Cromwell's mutinous soldiers, and its suppression at Burford by Cromwell and Fairfax. It is an extraordinary story how Den, or Denne, who was among those sentenced to death, was reprieved at the last moment and was required to preach a sermon to the mutineers. The mutineers regarded Denne as having been a traitor to them throughout. A contemporary account says :-
" And to put an utter inconfidence and jealousie for ever amongst such upon all future engagements, they made that wretched Judas Den, to that end their pandor and slave . . they enjoyne Den to preach Apostacy to us in the pulpit of Burford Church, to assert and plead the unlawfulnesse of our engagement, as much as before the lawfulness to vindicate, and justifie all those wicked and abhominable proceedings of the Generall, Lieutenant Generall and their Officers against us, howling and weeping like a Crocodile, and to make him a perfect Rogue and villain upon everlasting Record."
Another writer of the time gives a singular account, moving in its quaint simplicity, of the executions :—
" This day Coronet Thompson was brought into the Church- yard (the place of execution). Death was a great terror to him, as unto most. Some day he had hopes of a pardon, and therefore delivered something reflecting upon the legality of his engagement, and the just hand of God upon him ; But if he had they failed him. Corporal Perkins was the next, the place of death, and sight of his Executioners, was so far from altering his countenance or diluting his spirit, That he seemed to smile upon both, and accompt it a great mercy, that he was to die for this quarrel ; and casting his eyes up to his Father and afterwards to his fellow-prisoners (who stood upon the Church-leads to see the execution) set his back against the wall, and bad the Executioners shoot ; and so died gallantly, as he had lived religiously. After him Master John Church was brought to the stake. He was as much supported by God, in this great agony, as the later • for after ho had pulled off his Dublet, he stretched out his Arms, and bad the Souldiers do their duties, looking them in the face, till they gave fire upon him, without the least kind of fear or terror."
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