Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

There were so many pleasing places within easy reach of Bath that it was / hard to choose among them, and Bath itself was so constantly pleasing / that it was a serious loss to leave it for a day, for an hour. I do not / know, now, why we should have gone first, when we gathered force to / break the charm, to Bradford-on-Avon. If we did not go first to Wells it / was perhaps because we balanced the merits of an eighth-century Saxon / Chapel against those of a twelfth-century Cathedral, and felt that the / chapel had prior claim. Possibly, spoiled as we were by the / accessibility of places in England, and relaxed as we were by the air of / Bath, we shrank from spending five or six hours in the run to Wells when / we could get to and from Bradford in little or no time. Wells is one of / the exceptions to the rule that in England everything is within easy / reach from everywhere, or else Bath is an exception among the places / that Wells is within easy reach of. At any rate we were at Bradford / almost before we knew it, or knew anything of its history, which there / is really a good deal of.

The best of this history seems to be that when in the year 652 the Saxon / King of Wessex overcame the Britons in a signal victory, he did not / exterminate the survivors, but allowed them to become the / fellow-subjects of their Saxon conquerors under his rule. Just how / great a blessing this was it would not be easy to say at the actual / distance of time, but it seems to have been thought a good deal of a / blessing for a King of Wessex to bestow. To crown it, some fifty years / later, a monastery was founded in Bradford, by St. Aldhelm, a nephew of / the King. A chapel was built on the site of the uncle's battle with the / Britons, and such as it was then such we now saw it, the vicar of the / parish having not long ago rescued it from its irreligious uses as a / cottage dwelling and a free school, and restored it spiritually and / materially to its original function. It is precious for being the only / old church in England which is wholly unchanged in form, and though very / small and very rude it is pathetically interesting. It seemed somehow / much older than many monuments of my acquaintance which greatly / antedated it; much older, say, than the Roman remains at Bath, for it is / a relic of the remote beginning of an order of things, and not the / remnant of a fading civilization. No doubt the Saxons who built it on / the low hill slope where it stands, in a rude semblance of the Roman / churches which were the only models of Christian architecture they could / have seen, thought it an edifice of the dignity since imparted to it by / the lapse of centuries.

Without, the grass grew close to its / foundations, in the narrow plot of ground about it, and the sturdy / little fabric showed its Romanesque forms in the gray stone pierced by / mere slits of windows, which gave so faint a light within that, after / entering, one must wait a moment before attempting to move about in the / cramped, dungeon-like space. With the simple altar, and the chairs set / before it for worshippers, it gave an awful sense of that English / continuity on which political and religious changes vainly / break: the parts knit themselves together again, and transmit the / original consciousness from age to age. The type of beauty in the child / who sold us permits to see the chapel and followed us into it was in / like manner that of the Saxon maids whose hulking fathers had beaten in / battle the fierce, dark little Britons on that spot twelve hundred years / before: the same blazing red cheeks, the same blue, blue eyes, the same / sunny hair which has always had to make up for the want of other / sunniness in that dim clime, falling round the fair neck. No doubt the / snuffles with which the pretty creature suffered were also of the same / date and had descended from mother to daughter in the thirty generations / dwelling in just such stone-cold stone cottages as that where we found / her. It was one of a row of cottages near the chapel, of a red-tiled, / many-gabled, leaden-sashed, diamond-paned picturesqueness that I have / never seen surpassed out of the theatre, or a Kate Greenaway picture, / and was damp with the immemorial dampness that inundated us from the / open door when we approached. What perpetuity of colds in the head must / be the lot of youths in such abodes; how rheumatism must run riot among / the joints of age in the very beds and chimney-corners! Better, it / sometimes seemed, the greatest ugliness ever devised by a Yankee / carpenter in dry and comfortable wood than the deadly poetry of such / dwellings.

But there were actually some wooden houses in Bradford, or partially / wooden, which the driver of our fly took us to see when we had otherwise / exhausted the place. They had the timbered gables of the Tudor times / when the English seemed to build with an instinct for domestic comfort / earlier unknown and later lost; but otherwise Bradford was of stone, / stony. It studded the slopes of its broken uplands with warts and knots / of little dwellings, and had a certain foreignness, possibly imparted by / the long abode of the Flemish cloth-workers whom an enterprising / manufacturer invited to the place centuries before, and whose skill / established its ancient industry in a finer product and a greater / prosperity. Now, one reads, the competition of the same art in Yorkshire / has reduced the weavers of Bradford to a fifth of their number fifty / years ago. But the presence of the Flemings was so influential in the / seventeenth century that they had a quarter of their own, and altogether / there were intimations in Bradford so Continental, the raw rainy day of / our visit, that I thought if it could have had a little sun on it there / were moments when it might have looked Italian.