ISLANDS OF THE VALE.*

Miss HAYDEN'S delightful talent as an observer of village life —already well known to readers of the Spectator—gains an added charm from the depth and wide range of her interests, social, artistic, antiquarian, historical. When she takes a piece of English ground and paints it for us from the life, with all its natural beauty and all the characteristics of its people, she is never satisfied with a surface view of present- day facts,.but with happy touches shows us how they grew. The old churches, with their tombs and brasses half effaced and decayed; the grand old manor-houses turned into farms, but telling sad stories of the past with their traces of a life no longer lived there; even the remains of an ancient avenue, the clipped yew and box where was once a garden, the piers of a ruined bridge, the queer village names and customs that carry a forgotten tale with them,—by means of all these indications, full of suggestion, our minds are taken back to that old England out of which, after all, the British Empire was born. What do they know of England who only —to paraphrase Mr. Kipling—know it by railway journeys and the dusty high-roads' along which motors fly !

Few well-known place-names are giien by Miss Hayden to • /stands of-the Vats. Ey Eleanor G. Hayden. With Illustrations by J. M. Macintosh, E.B.A. London; Smith, Elder, and Co. Ch. 6d. net4

help towards the exact localising of her " islands of the Vale." For readers who are not familiar with her Wessex country this adds something of vague fascination ; the

villages she describes seem to lie in a land "east o the sun and west o' the moon," just beyond ordinary human ken. Yet this is not so ; for as to the humanity of the villages, it is as rich and strong now as it was in the days when Dame Alice Perrers possessed the manor of Hean's Island. And the thin

veil of mystery is easily torn away, even by readers ignorant of the lie of the land. It is not everybody, certainly, who can turn for help to that ancient traveller who named the shires of England by their " propertees," and if Miss Hayden gave no clearer hints than this, a good many of us would fail to find the villages she so lovingly lingers among. Perhaps, after all, she would not be very sorry. Half the charm of these " islands of the Vale " lies in their remoteness, the air they seem still to breathe of an older England, with its memories and superstitions that science has not yet swept away. However, Miss Hayden gives some guidance :-

" For the benefit of those persons who desire more exact information as to the position of the Vale, I will reveal thus much ; it is enclosed east and west by its own county, the

• propertee of which is `Fyn the Wayne,' indicating rich soil and heavy crops. To the truth of this the huge barns everywhere bear witness. Westward, the Vale touches a land with the motto of which I did not concern myself ; while all along its northern border lies a shire where Mr. Ward bids us ` Gyrde the mare,' presumably because the roads were 'soft—they are so at least to- day—streams abundant and bridges few On one of his tours the itinerant, who enjoyed the distinction of being the

King's antiquary had occasion to cross the eastern portion of the Vale. Starting from a city renowned for the beauty of its buildings, for its learning, and for that which, we are told, is bound up in the heart of youth, he rode out along the great highway that runs southward towards the downs. For the first few miles,' he says, ` it leads over hilly grenade, well wooddid and fruteful of Come '—he was in ` Fyll the Wayne' shire= and other three miles by low level Grenade, in sum partes marschy? "

It appears that the traveller rode right through the Vale, renowned for its woods and cornfields, no great distance to the south of Oxford. Then he got entangled among the

brooks and fords and bridges, " the narrow crooked lanes that lead from the main highway to the buried villages." Mach of the land is University property; the country is full of legends of the Civil War, which seemed like yesterday, not so long ago, to old inhabitants. One old man, for instance, "remem- bered sitting as a boy in the chimney-corner and bearing the bullets from the battle of Newbury whistle past the cottage."

Such is the strength of tradition, the curious echo of past storms which makes phantom armies sweep over the field of Edgehill, not so many miles away.

So much for the position of the Vale. Originally this wide, shallow, open ground with its boundary of hills was no doubt under water, and long ages passed before its marshes were dried. Hence the quaint names of the villages, —Hean's Island, Cerdic's Island, Goose Island, and so on. But all through English history this stretch of country has been highly valued and inhabited by true lovers of its soil; to this day, according to Miss Hayden's delightful account, the peasants of the Vale have a distinct character of their own, while the stories she has collected of their forbears a century or two ago are not to be beaten for quaintness, often for tragic poetry, in any part of England.

In a book whose charm is so varied it is not easy to point out the most attractive pages. But one turns again to the description of the oldest part of the ancient manor-house at Cerdic's Island, the "solar " with its tall windows now thickly veiled with ivy, its fine old fireplace, priest's chamber and oratory. This house is only one of the many which attract antiquary and archaeologist, if not historian, among the "islands of the Vale." Another most suggestive and charming description is that of the ruined church at the Ford of the Heath, otherwise Hatford, full of traditions of Alfred and the Danes, as well as of later history. The manor-house here was, they say, the residence of Thomas Chaucer, son of the poet, and there is a certain tomb in the ruined chancel close by which local tradition declares to be that of Geoffrey Chaucer himself.

Westminster claims him, it is true; but Miss Hayden was so struck with the probabilities on the other side, and with the curious likeness of the effigy on this old tomb to the Occleve portrait of Chaucer, that she induced the rector of the parish to have the shit) raised in *Search of further evidence. She

found a skeleton in a white stone coffin, but nothing of any kind to prove to whom those poor bones belonged, so that she was left with her conviction, still strong, that Chaucer's son bad laid him in that quiet corner close to his own home. The truth will never be known, probably ; but this book may bring pilgrims to the ruined church at Hatford.

The illustrations are as charming as the letterpress, and that'. is saying a good deal. We heartily recommend the book to all our readers.