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Odiham. One of the most delightful of Hampshire's small towns, it has houses older than the Reformation, set in a countryside made fair by Nature and made notable by history.
The Tudor vicarage, a charming gabled place with tall chimneys, has an interesting neighbour on each side. One is the farm called Palace Gate, which has in its barns and cellars and the fine avenue of limes behind it all that is left of an old palace visited by Queen Elizabeth I; the other is a beautiful house of which parts go back to the 15th century.
A mile out along the Winchfield road is an old tree called French- man's Oak because it showed prisoners in the Napoleon wars that they had reached the limit of the walk permitted them. Then there is the great chalk pit with its towering white cliffs and hosts of jack- daws, and the cottages where the humbler ranks of prisoners were quartered to be near their work of quarrying. We can take a walk from Odiham which brings us to a scene more thrilling, for it leads to the banks of the old Basingstoke Ganal by the neighbouring hamlet of North Warnborough, where stands all that is left of the castle from which King John set out on a summer's day in 1215 for the meadows of Runneymede, where he threw himself on the ground in his rage and gnashed his teeth and gnawed chips and straw before he sealed Magna Carta.
Those who love the quiet corners which keep alive so many of the charities of our countryside will linger by the friendly bit of l7th century England behind Odiham church, a group of almshouses forming three sides of a garden. Close by them is a tiny cottage with a chimney almost as big as itself. It is still called the Pest House, as it was in the days when the sick were tended here.
On these small homes of the old folk falls the shadow of the red church tower, built of brick in the Civil War and looking with its red and white pinnacles rather like the tower of a Tudor house. There is a grim head over the clock, and stone corbels are everywhere. On a south buttress are scratched two mass clocks, unusual in having the hours numbered on them.
The church rises in the square known as the Bury, and we come to it through a short avenue of limes. It is the biggest church in North Hampshire, refashioned in the 14th century. One of its stately arcades has three piers of slender clustered i5th century columns, the other is 14th century, with arches springing so airily as to need only two columns to carry them from end to end of the nave. The galleries, lavishly carved and reached by their original steps, were built in Charles I's day; the 17th century pulpit, carved with scrolls and vases of flowers, is one of the handsomest in the county. The chancel has delicate 15th century screens, Jacobean altar rails, and low arcades of the 13th century. The pillar piscina is 700 years old. The font, made about 1200, is remarkable for being hewn from chalk; it has a lily carved on it and an inscription from the Vulgate (Psalm. 121:2) carved round the bowl. An odd bracket at the edge of the bowl probably served for the attachment of the hinge of the cover. A chest in the tower has the date 1662 set in nails, and one in the vestry has four keys marked with the initials of the vicar and three churchwardens. There is a beautiful silver chalice of 1618 and a sanctus bell of 1558.
The church is rich in brasses of men and women of the 15th and 16th centuries, confused in some cases by wrong inscriptions. There is a civilian with his wife dressed in the quiet clothes fashionable about 1480, a gaily-clad lady of the 16th century kneeling with her nine daughters, and another lady with six daughters; a handsome young man in armour, and a civilian in square-toed shoes; a 15th century priest named William Goode, and a fine heraldic brass of the i7th century to Edward Seagar. Most charming of all the brasses is the little one of Margaret Pye on the vestry floor. It is the portrait of a baby in swaddling clothes as worn 300 years ago, with a long pleated bib and pretty headcloth. Outside the church door is the old tomb of Robert May:
Stop, gentle reader, hither turn thine eye To learn whose mortal part beneath doth lie,
We are told that Robert founded the grammar school for Odi- ham's poor boys, and are urged to copy his virtues:
Thus taught, good reader, to thy home retreat, With rival ardour let thy bosom beat,
In the shadow of the north wall lie the graves of two French prisoners. It is a noble tradition in Odiham that their stones are scrupulously kept, and we found them, like the thatched cottage in the poem, wondrous neat and clean. One of them has these touching words: "He was a prisoner of war; Death hath set him free." Protected by a timber roof against the churchyard wall are the old stocks and whipping-post. The post has still its iron grips for the wrists, made in three sizes so that they would fit whoever came. An odd thing we heard here was the tale of a calendar found in the smoke loft of a chimney in Hillside Farm, another old house about a mile from Odiham. It was being repaired a few years ago when a calendar for 1666 fell out from a niche in the chimney, black with smoke but unburned. It marked off the days of the Great Fire of London, but had itself escaped the little fire burning below it for 250 years.
There was born at Odiham in 1468 a man who is still unforgotten for his great learning. He was William Lily, who while still at Oxford obeyed some mysterious call to the East. Like a true Cru- sader he went to Jerusalem; then returned to Italy and settled down for five years in Rhodes. Here he was in the midst of hapless companies of scholars who had fled in terror when the conquering Turk captured Constantinople in 1453.
For centuries Constantinople had been the last sanctuary of class- ical learning. Here scholar recluses had hoarded manuscripts which had come down from ancient days. Here in a quiet backwater when all was storm, fire, and barbarism in the outer world, the world of the scholars had quietly brooded over its treasures, rich only in possessions of the intellect.
Like a thunderbolt the Turks broke into this great academy of culture, and the scholars fled in all directions; but they carried with them seeds to fertilise all Europe. Under their cloaks and in hastily gathered packages they brought away their precious manuscripts, so that wherever two or three refugees from Constantinople were gathered together there was learning in the midst of them; and each gathering was as a river sending off streams of inspiration and teaching in every direction.
It was one such company of exiled scholars with whom this son of Odiham took up his residence at Rhodes. For five years Lily laboured with delighted ardour at Greek language and literature; then he came home with volumes of learning in his head and stacks of manuscripts under his arm. The profoundest scholar in his native land, he established a small school and was the first man to teach Greek in London. The value of his work was quickly perceived. When Dean Colet in 1512 founded St Paul's School he made Lily its first master, and there for 11 years this great scholar moulded and enriched the minds of Young England. The illustrious Leiand was one of his pupils; Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were among his friends and contributed to his work on Greek grammar, the preface to which, it is believed, was written by Cardinal Wolsey.
