By William Morris
GOSSIP ABOUT AN OLD HOUSE ON THE UPPER THAMES.
BY WILLIAM MORRIS.
Published in THE QUEST: Number IV. November, 1895.
Originally printed at the press of
the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, and published by
Messrs. Cornish Brothers, New Street, Birmingham, England.
 HE Village of
Kelmscott lies close to the Thames on the Oxfordshire side of it, some five
miles (by water) from the present end of the navigation at Inglesham, where the
Colne, coming down from Fairford, Bibury and Chedworth, joins the main stream of
the Thames.
Kelmscott lies on the plain of the Thames Valley, but the ground rises up
from it gradually, with little interruption of the rise, till the crest of the
ridge is gained which lies between Oxfordshire and Worcestershire, culminating
in the Broadway Beacon some thirty miles from Kelmscott. To the N.E. of the
village lies the nearly treeless piece of ground formerly Grafton Common, and
beyond it is a string of pretty inland villages, or rather two strings, the
westward comprising little Faringdon, Broughton Poggs and Filkins; the eastward,
Langford, Broadwell, and Kencott. Of these Langford with its church partly 13th
century, partly preconquest, Broadwell with its lovely 13th century tower and
spire, and the curious little church of Broughton Poggs are specially
interesting.
Turning south from Kelmscott one comes on the Thames, with the weir of Eaton
Hastings on the foot-path from the village, but on the Berkshire side a range of
heights low, but well designed, rise up from the flat meadows here, and running
eastward well into a higher range on which Faringdon lies. Three miles down the
river is a very pretty 15th century bridge of three arches which carries the
road from Bampton to Faringdon over the Thames at Radcot. On the Eyott and the
fields about here was fought a battle between the Earl of Oxford, Richard II
supporter, and Bolingbroke, as the latter marched toward his thrown; and
Cromwell also fought a skirmish there on his advance to the attack of Faringdon
House, which was one of the stubbornest of the scattered Royalist strongholds.
To get back to Kelmscott again. The church, at the N.W. end of the village,
is small but interesting; the mass of it, a nave with a tiny aisle transept and
chancel, being Early English of date, though the arches of the aisle are
round-headed; a feature which is imitated from Faringdon Church, and repeated at
Little Faringdon, and Langford. There are remains of painting all over the
church, the N. transept having been painted with figure subjects of the life of
Christ in trefoil head panels. The E. window has a painted glass image of St.
George (in whose honour the church is dedicated) of the time of Edward IVth.
Most of the windows (which are insertions of the early 14th century) have their
inner arches elegantly cusped, a characteristic feature of these Oxfordshire
churches. A very beautiful pell-cot formed by two trefoil arches crowns the
eastern gable of the nave, and composes pleasantly with the low pitched roofs
over a clerestory, which in the 15th century took the place of the once
high-pitched ones. The church is plastered almost all over the walls, as no
doubt it was in the earliest days: it is fortunate in having escaped the process
of stripping and pointing which so many of our village churches have undergone
at the hands of the restoring wise-acres.
 HEN you turn
down from the church toward the Thames you come at a corner of the road on the
base of the village cross probably of the 15th century), and then, turning to
the left and bearing round to the right, all of which transaction takes place in
about two hundred yards, you come face to face with a mass of grey walls and
pearly grey roofs which makes the House, called by courtesy the Manor House,
though it seems to have no manorial rights attached to it, which is the ultimate
subject of this paper, and which I have held for twenty-three years. It lies at
the very end of the village on a road which, brought up shortly by a back-water
of the Thames, becomes a mere cart track leading into the meadows along the
river.
You enter through a door in a high impointed stone wall, having passed by
first a pretty, characteristic cottage with its baking oven much en evidence,
and next a shed with high-pitched-roof. Entering the door in the wall you go up
a flagged path through the front garden to the porch, which is a modern but
harmless addition in wood. The house from this side is a lowish three storied
one with mullioned windows, (in the 3rd these are in the gables) and at right
angles to this another block whose bigger lower windows and pedimented gable
lights indicate a later date. The house is built of well-laid rubble stone of
the district, the wall of the latter part being buttered over, so to say, with
thin plaster which has now weathered to the same colour as the stone of the
walls; the roofs are covered with the beautiful stone slates of the district,
the most lovely covering which a roof can have, especially when, as here and in
all the traditional old houses of the countryside, they are `sized down'; the
smaller ones to the top and the bigger toward the eaves, which gives one of the
same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fishers' scales or a birds'
feathers.
Turning round the house by the bigger block, one sees where the gable of the
older and simpler part of the house once came out, and notes with pleasure the
simple expression of the difference of levels in the 1st floor and 3rd floor, as
by the diversity of windows and roofs: the back of the house shows nothing but
the work of the earlier builders, and is in plan of the shape of an E with the
tongue cut out, [ of the older part of the house, is copied in the later
addition, and the two with their elegantly shaped gables, handsomely moulded,
add much to the general beauty of the house.
Standing a little aloof from the N.E. angle of the building one can get the
best idea of a fact which it is essential to note, and which is found in all
these old homes here-abouts, to wit, all the walls `batter,' i.e. lean a little
back. this is so invariable that it is hardly possible to suppose that it is an
example of traditional design from which the builders could not escape. To my
mind it is a beauty, taking from the building a rigidity which would otherwise
mar it; giving it (I can think of no other word) a flexibility which is never
found in our modern imitations of the houses of this age.
From this square place also one gets a good view of the farm buildings which
stand to the South of the house; a very handsome barn of quite beautiful
proportions, and several other sheds, including a good dove cot, all built in
the same way as the house, and grouping delightfully with it.
HE garden,
divided by old clipped yew hedges, is quite unaffected and very pleasant, and
looks in fact as if it were a part of the house, yet at least the clothes of it:
which I think ought to be the aim of the layer out of a garden. Many a good
house both old and new is marred by the vulgarity and stupidity of its garden,
so that one is tormented by having to abstract in one's mind the good building
from the nightmare of `horticulture' which surrounds it.
Going under an arched opening in the yew hedge which makes a little garth
about a low door in the middle of the north wall, one comes into a curious
passage or lobby, a part of which is screened into a kind of pantry by wooden
mullions which have once been glazed, and offer somewhat of a problem to the
architect. The said lobby leads into what was once a great parlour (the house is
not great at all remember) and is now panelled with pleasing George Ist
panelling painted white: the chimney piece is no doubt of the date of the
building, and is of rude but rather amusing country work; the windows in this
room are large and transomed, and it as pleasant as possible; and I have many a
memory of hot summer mornings passed in its coolness amidst the green
reflections of the garden. Turning back, and following a little passage leading
from the lobby aforesaid to the earlier part of the house, one passes by a room
in the long arm of the [ almost level with the garden, with a stone
chimney-piece rude enough as to its carving but well designed: and then at the
end of the little passage is a delightful little room quite low ceilinged, in
the place where the house is `thin in the wind,' so that there is a window east
and a window west, and the whole room has a good deal the look of a particularly
pleasant cabin at sea, were it not for the elms and the rooks on the west, and
the green garden shrugs and the blackbirds on the east. This room is really the
heart of the Kelmscott house, having been the parlor of the old house before
`Mr. Thomas Turner built the house in the closes and on the tofts where once
stood two ancient houses,' as an old deed has it; one of the `ancient houses,'
as I am clear, being the old part of the present house, and Mr. Thomas Turner
only built the grander and high block or wing.
Outside this little parlour is the entrance passage from the flagged path
aforesaid, made by two stout studded partitions the carpentry of which is very
agreable to anyone who does not want cabinet work to supplant carpentry. The
very pleasant kitchen is on the further side of this entrance. Going back to the
little passage which leads to the lobby one comes to the staircaise, of a common
Elizabethan pattern with spherical knops on the standards, and so on to the
first floor which has the peculiarity of being without passages, so that you
have to go from one room into another, to the confusion of some of our casual
visitors, to whom a bed in the close neighbourhood of a sitting room is a dire
impropriety. Braving this terror, we must pass through the only north room in
the house, which is in the junction of the older and the newer house and up
three steps into the Tapestry, which is over the big panelled parlour. The walls
of it are hung with tapestry of about 1600, representing the story of Samson;
they were never great works of art, and now when all the bright colours are
faded out, and nothing is left but the indigo blues, the greys and the warm
yellowy browns, they look better, I think, than they were meant to look: at any
rate they make the walls a very pleasant background for the living people who
haunt the room; (it is our best sitting room now, though it was once the best
bed-room) and, in spite of the designer, they give an air of romance to the room
which nothing else would quite do.
 NOTHER charm
this room has, that through its south window you not only catch a glimpse of the
Thames clover meadows and the pretty little elm-crowned hill over in Berkshire,
but if you sit in the proper place, you can see not only the barn aforesaid with
its beautiful sharp gable, the grey stone sheds, and the dove cot, but also the
flank of the earlier house and its little gables and grey-scaled roofs, and this
is a beautiful outlook indeed. Mr. New will, I am sure, give you a good idea of
this - at least as much of it as the limits of his drawing will admit. The
chimney-piece of this room is of stone, and of the date of the later work; again
it is good after its rough country fashion; and in the middle of it, surrounded
by a mantling by no means in-elegant, is the coat-armour of the Turners, argent,
a cross ermine, four mill-rhinds sable. A mill-rhind by the way is that thing in
which the spindle turns: hence the charge, which makes a piece of
`canting heraldry,' as `tis called in French, armes parlantes.
Out of this best room let us pass through our present best bed room over the
little parlour, and leaving a very pleasant room on the right, called the
cheese-room when I first came to the house, and on the left a little room
partitioned in modern times from a lobby, and which has the distinction of
having its glazing almost wholly of old quarries - leaving all this we come to a
newel stair-case, which comes up from the kitchen, and leads us up in the
attics, i.e. the open roof under the slates, a very sturdy collar beam roof of
elm often unsquared; it is most curiously divided under most of the smaller
gables into little chambers where no doubt people, perhaps the hired field
labourers, slept in old time: the bigger space is open, and is a fine place for
children to play in, and has charming views east, west and north: but much of it
is too curious for description. On one of the mullions of the older house is
scored T W K 1577 Oct. 16. I believe this to be genuine, and not a relation to
`Bill Stumps his mark.' K is like enough to be Kinch, a name still common
hereabout. Again on a gable of the latter part is scored T B 1640 and
representation in the manner of youth of either T.B., or his father, or
schoolmaster; I am inclined to think the latter. T.B. I take to be one of the
Bradshaws, several generations of whom are buried in Kelmscott church. These
dates certainly square with probabilities, as the older part of the house looks
about 1573, and the later (in this country side) looks 1630 to 1640. One
thing I should have said before as to the position of the House: we are on the
very confines of Oxfordshire; a slow brook or ditch saunters off to the Thames
somewhat less than a furlong west from us, which is called the Town Ditch, or
the County Ditch, and on the other side thereof is Gloucestershire.
 ERE then are a
few words about a house that I love; with a reasonable love I think: for though
my words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure you
that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and
the lives of those that lived on it; needing no grand office-architect, with no
great longing for anything else than correctness, and to be like Julius Caesar;
but some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of the
meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much let us hope)
of common sense, a liking for making materials serve ones turn, and perhaps at
bottom some little grain of sentiment. This I think was what went to the making
of the old house; might we not manage to find some sympathy for all that from
henceforward; or must we but shrink before the Philistine with one, Alas that it
must perish!
William Morris.
Kelmscott, October 25, 1895.
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