The little fellow for once received a washing, contrary, no doubt, to his wish. After he had dried his face with the ragged remains of a dirty sleeve, he found his way back to the green—I expect his mother would scarcely know him—and I went for a stroll down “Spectacle Lane,” where gipsies formerly tented and camped in large numbers.
Down this pretty country lane there was a pleasant recess, a little higher than the road, under the trees, evidently formed by the gipsies on purpose to have their “tents high and dry.” Several tents could be nicely sheltered and partly secluded under the trees in each recess. Water and game would be plentiful in these lanes a century ago; in fact, I should imagine such was the case now.
At the bottom of “Spectacle Lane” stood a large, fine, old Gothic archway, called by the inhabitants in the neighbourhood “Spectacle Tower.” The object and purpose for which it was built has never been clearly made out. Judging from all the surrounding circumstances, it appeared to me that it had at one time been intended as a gateway to a mansion, abbey, or nunnery which has not been built; or, what is still more probable, it may have been erected as a flag-tower for Fairfax’s army on its way from Oxford through Northampton to the battle of Naseby, and from thence to Leicester. Prince Rupert had gone as far as Daventry to meet General Fairfax and his army, expecting, of course, that they would come by Daventry; instead of which Fairfax left Daventry to the left, and pushed on his way through Northampton and to Boughton Green, hoping to arrive in Leicester before Prince Rupert and the King. Fairfax may have expected that the memorable battle would have been fought in the neighbourhood of Boughton; if so, he, at any rate, reckoned without his host, as both armies came together at Naseby, and with what result any schoolboy knows.
Report says that Boughton Green church was razed to the ground by Cromwell’s army.
The fact of gipsies flocking to this, which was once a fine old Roman Catholic church, and nestling in tents under its shadows, together with the fact that old, monastic-looking farm-houses are to be seen in the neighbourhood, confirms the idea I set forth in my “Gipsy Life,” p. 146, viz., that on the gipsies landing in Scotland, about the year 1514, from the continent, some of them hypocritically professed the Roman Catholic faith in order to inveigle themselves into the good graces of the nobility, so that their pockets and pouches might be filled with as little trouble as possible; in fact, righteous gipsy Smith having come from India, he knew well, and does so still, how to turn religious sentiment to advantage, and hence he landed in Scotland from France as above instead of Dover and London, and wended his way through the Midland counties and southward; and hence we find Northamptonshire, in times later on, a central camping ground for these lawless tribes of aimless vagabonds.