Ill 



THE VALE OF EVESHAM 



THE western edge of the Cotswolds yields one of the 

 noblest views England has to show : the road after a 

 long gentle rise suddenly rolls over into space, and 

 all the glories of the world are spread before one 

 the rich wooded valley of the Avon and of the farther 

 Severn, beyond which rises the shapely line of the 

 Malvern Hills, with the Clees more remote, and in the 

 vaporous distance fold after fold of the foothills of 

 the Welsh marches. The face of the escarpment falls 

 400 feet in a single wave to the fertile Evesham Vale, 

 but the road zigzags down into a little coombe where 

 lies Broadway, most admired of the Cotswold villages, 

 with their comely houses of brown stone. Not far 

 away in a similar gap lies Winchcomb, with its great 

 orchards, memorable too in the past for the bloodshed 

 which attended the suppression of tobacco-growing in 

 these parts. In Charles II.'s time Winchcomb seems 

 to have been the centre of a flourishing tobacco 

 industry, but rather than collect an Excise duty the 

 authorities preferred to abolish the English growth, 

 prompted also by certain courtiers who were interested 

 in the Virginia plantations and wanted a monopoly. 

 At any rate, as may be read in Pepys, it was necessary 

 to send down troops to destroy the tobacco fields, and, 

 as in Ireland at a later date, an industry was deliber- 



