GARDENS STONELEIGH f 



OLD-&NEW ABBEY - 



A NOTABLE house and .1 beautiful garden art- those at 

 Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. The river Avon, in 

 its course south-westward through the county, 

 glorifies many a great aN>de. and tr.u 

 that are famous in our history. It sweeps j n broad 

 lakelike stretches through the sylvan park at Stoneleigh, it 

 lingers, as if reluctant to leave, beneath the shadow of 

 romantic Guy's Cliff, it passes by ancient Warwick, win-re 

 Cesar's Tower keeps watch upon its waters, it -u 

 onward in growing volume to glorious Charlecte and Stratford, 

 and reflects on its broad bosom the scenes that Shakespeare 

 loved, and that are haunted by the splendour of his genius 

 still. It is a region in which the delights of many gardens are 

 found. Here, as he says, we are in the Forest of Arden, that 

 country of the greenwood, where the swineherd tended hi- 

 grunting troops, crunching the mast "f oak .md beech. There 

 was feeding, says Dugdale, for 2,000 hogs in the Kind's woods 



at Stoneleigh ; land, too, \vhere tin- .rn ripened for the sickle, 

 and where the sokemen of the royal demesne, when the da\ 

 of the lord's " hrederepe" came, rode thmuyh the licKIs from 

 dawn to sunset, with the white wand ot briel authontv in their 

 hands, to make sure that none were defaulting or " 

 idly " in their harvesting f.ir the King. It was ordered that 

 the reapers should eat by themselves, "everyone a little 

 wheaten bread, four eggs and pottage, namely, gruel, without 

 flesh boiled in it. except the lord would afford them other, with 

 cheese and beer sufficient; and alter dinner one sitting down 

 with bread and beer; but the sokemen themselves i,, be 

 d with better diet, according to their degrees." Tins is 

 a dead-and-gone world, some will s.iv ; but reflect how like it 

 is to ours the reapers stretched at length beneath some 

 shadowy hedge or spreading tree. .H-n^ their bread and 

 cheese, and quaffing foaming ale in the heat of the summer 

 day. 







THE WEST FRONT. 



