CLEWER—WINDSOR—ETON AND ITS COLLEGIANS—DATCHET—LANGLEY AND THE KEDERMINSTERS
Between Dorney and Eton stretches an out-of-the-way corner of land devoted chiefly to potato-fields and allotments bordering the river. Here stands Boveney church, or “Buvveney,” as it is locally styled, a small building so altered at different periods as to be quite without interest. The river glides past, between the alders, that dark, strong current the subject of allusion by Praed in his “School and Schoolfellows”:
“Kind _Mater_ smiles again to me, As bright as when we parted; I seem again the frank, the free, Stout-limbed and simple-hearted: Pursuing every idle dream, And shunning every warning; With no hard work but Boveney stream, No chill except Long Morning.”
A circle of tall elms closely surrounding the church casts a perpetual shade upon the building; Windsor Castle looking down from the opposite shore in feudal majesty upon it and the humble activities of these level fields.
That majestic pile indeed overlooks some remarkably mean surroundings which on close acquaintance derogate strangely from its dignity. Thus, resuming the road on the Berkshire side, from Bray to Windsor, the long, straight, uninteresting miles lead directly to Clewer, a village of disreputable appearance, now, to all intents, a Windsor slum; and what was a rustic churchyard has become something more in the likeness of a cemetery. In the roads, strewn with rubbish and broken glass, dirty children play.
Besides an inscription to “ye vertuous Mrs. Lucie Hobson, 1657,” who was, we learn, “a treu lover of a Godly and a Powerful ministry”—_i.e._ probably of a preacher who could bang the pulpit and punish the cushions—there is little of interest in Clewer church, with the one exception of a curious little brass plate, inscribed,
“He that liethe vnder this stone Shott with a hvndred men him selfe alone. This is trew that I doe saye The matche was shott in ovld felde at Bray. I will tell yov before yov go hence That his name was Martine Expence.”
Local history tells us nothing of this hero, who apparently did not really shoot himself, as the inscription states, but seems at some period to have won a particularly hard archery contest, which was ever after his title to fame in this locality.