“In the event of refusal, they were to be given up to the civil authorities to be burnt.”

[Illustration:  The Manor-House, Coln St. Aldwyns. 214.png]

CHAPTER X.

A STROLL THROUGH THE COTSWOLDS.

                              “In Gloucestershire
     These high, wild hills and rough, uneven ways
     Draw out our miles, and make them wearisome.”

King Richard II.

It cannot be said that there are many pleasant walks and drives in the Cotswold country, because, as a rule, the roads run over the bleak tableland for miles and miles, and the landscape generally consists of ploughed fields divided by grey stone walls; the downs I have referred to at different times are only to be met with in certain districts.  Once upon a time the whole of Cotswold was one vast sheep walk from beginning to end.  It was about a hundred and fifty years ago that the idea of enclosing the land was started by the first Lord Bathurst.  Early in the eighteenth century he converted a large tract of downland round Cirencester into arable fields; his example was soon followed by others, so that by the middle of last century the transformation of three hundred square miles of downs into wheat-growing ploughed fields had been accomplished.  It is chiefly owing to the depression in agricultural produce that there are any downs now, for they merely exist because the tenants have found during the last twenty years that it does not pay to cultivate their farms, hence they let a large proportion go back to grass.

But there is one very pleasant walk in that part of the Cotswolds we know best, and this takes you up the valley of the Coln to the Roman villa at Chedworth.

The distance by road from Fairford to the Chedworth woods is about twelve miles; and at any time of the year, but more especially in the spring and autumn, it is a truly delightful pilgrimage.

And here it is worth our while to consider for a moment how tremendously the abolition of the stage coach has affected places like Fairford, Burford, and other Cotswold towns and villages.  It was through these old-world places, past these very walls and gables, that the mail coaches rattled day after day when they “went down with victory” conveying the news of Waterloo and Trafalgar into the heart of merry England.  In his immortal essay on “The English Mail Coach,” De Quincey has told us how between the years 1805 and 1815 it was worth paying down five years of life for an outside place on a coach “going down with victory.”  “On any night the spectacle was beautiful.  The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their beautiful simplicity—­but more than all, the royal magnificence of the horses—­were what might first have fixed the attention.  But the night before us is a night of victory:  and