When the author of _John Halifax, Gentleman_, who had many years before become Mrs. Craik, died, in 1887, a monument was fittingly erected to her memory in Tewkesbury Abbey Church, hard by the home of her hero.
The "Bell" inn is a beautiful old building, of strongly contrasted very white plaster and very black timbers. A blue and gold bell hangs out as a sign in front. At the left-hand side an addition has quite recently been made (not included in the illustration) to provide a billiard-room and additional bedrooms.
[Illustration: THE "WHEATSHEAF," TEWKESBURY.]
For the rest, Tewkesbury is a town full of ancient buildings, built in those dark times of the warring Roses, when men were foolish enough to fight--and to die and to lose all--for their principles. Savage, barbaric times, happily gone for ever, to give place to the era of argument and the amateur lawyer! In our own age you do not go forth and kill or be killed, but simply "passively resist" and await the advent of the bailiffs coming to distrain for the amount of your unpaid rates and taxes, confident that, in any change of government, your party will in its turn be able to enact the petty tyrant.
In those times, when men fought well, they built with equal sturdiness, and the memory of their deeds beside the Avon meadows, in the bloody Battle of Tewkesbury of 1471, survives, side by side with the fine black-and-white timbered houses they designed and framed, and will survive centuries yet.
Tewkesbury is a town of inns. The "Hop Pole," among the largest of them, is a Dickensian inn, and so treated of in another chapter; but besides it you have the great red-brick Georgian "Swan," typically a coaching hostelry, that is not quite sure of the titles "inn," "hotel," or "tavern," and so, to be certain, calls itself, in the boldest of lettering, "Swan Hotel, Inn, and Tavern," and thus has it all ways.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE "WHITE HORSE," MAIDEN NEWTON.]
[Illustration: THE "WHITE HORSE," MAIDEN NEWTON.]
Probably the oldest inn of Tewkesbury is the "Berkeley Arms." There it stands in the High Street, as sturdily as ever, and is in every timber, every casement, and in all the circumstances of uneven flooring and tortuous stairways, so indubitably ancient that men who fought on Yorkist or Lancastrian side in those contested meads by Severn and Avon in 1471 may well have slept beneath its roof the night before the battle, and considered the place, even then, "old-fashioned." Its age is so evident that for the sign to proclaim it, as it does, in the modern pseudo-antique Wardour Street style, "Ye olde Berkeley Arms," is an impertinent inadequacy, comparable to calling the Pyramids "large" or the Alps "hills." It is much the same tale with the "Wheatsheaf"; a little less hoary, perhaps, and certainly more susceptible to pictorial treatment. It latterly has become "Ye," instead of "The," Wheatsheaf, and has assumed a redundant "e" or so; but the equally old neighbouring "Black Bear" fairly revels in the antique, and on a quite new sign-board proclaims itself to be "Ye Olde Blacke Beare." What a prodigal and immoral consumption of that already poor, overworked letter "e," already, as every compositor working at case knows, the greatest in demand of all the twenty-six letters of the alphabet!