Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, England

A Market in the High Wolds

Chipping Campden stood in the north-eastern corner of Gloucestershire, where the Cotswold escarpment rose to its highest and the limestone country folded into long, sheep-cropped hills above the Vale of Evesham. It was a market town in the oldest sense — the very first word of its name, "Chipping", was the Old English for a market — and for the better part of a thousand years its reason for existing was the buying and selling of the one commodity these hills produced in unrivalled abundance: wool. The town that the wool built long outlived the trade that built it, and survived as one of the loveliest survivals in England.

Its glory was a single street. The High Street of Chipping Campden ran in a long, gentle curve of honey-coloured oolitic limestone, an almost unbroken terrace of buildings raised between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries and weathered to the warm gold that the Cotswolds quarried from their own ground. The historian G. M. Trevelyan once called it the most beautiful village street left in the island, and few who walked its length in the low gold light of a Cotswold evening were inclined to argue. The stone itself did much of the work — a soft, biscuit-coloured limestone that held the light and seemed, in certain weather, to glow faintly from within — but it was the unbroken sweep of it, the way the centuries sat side by side without a jarring note, that gave the street its particular and irreplaceable quality.

The Wool That Built It

In the high Middle Ages the Cotswolds grew rich, and Chipping Campden grew rich with them, on the backs of a particular breed of long-woolled sheep whose fleece — the famous "Cotswold Lion" wool — was prized across Europe and shipped to the looms of Flanders and Italy. The town became one of the principal wool-staple markets of the region, and the merchants who handled the trade amassed fortunes that made them, for a few golden generations, among the wealthiest commoners in England.

The greatest of them was William Grevel, who died in 1401 and was remembered on his memorial brass in the parish church as "the flower of the wool merchants of all England". The house he raised on the High Street around 1380, Grevel's House, with its fine traceried bay window, still stood among the oldest dwellings in the town six centuries later, a stone boast that had outlasted every fortune it was built to display.

Wealth of that order tended, in that age, to be repaid to God in architecture, and the merchants of Campden poured their wool money into the rebuilding of St James's Church — one of the great "wool churches" of the Cotswolds, raised in the soaring Perpendicular style in the fifteenth century upon older Norman foundations, its pinnacled tower a landmark for miles across the wolds. Within it the town kept treasures out of all proportion to its size: among the finest medieval brasses in England, including Grevel's own, and a set of embroidered altar hangings and a priest's cope of around 1400 that were among the oldest surviving church textiles in the country. The men who paid for such things had bought, in the currency of their day, a kind of immortality, and in stone and brass at least they had got their money's worth.

Sir Baptist Hicks's Town

The town acquired its second great benefactor in the early seventeenth century, in the person of Sir Baptist Hicks, a fabulously wealthy London mercer and moneylender — he lent, among others, to the Crown itself — who chose to lavish a portion of his fortune on the Gloucestershire town to which his family was tied, and who was raised at the end of his life to the peerage as Viscount Campden. Hicks left his mark on the place more emphatically than anyone before or since.

In 1612 he built the row of almshouses on Church Street, a dignified terrace of gabled dwellings endowed to shelter twelve poor townsfolk, which went on housing the elderly of Campden for four centuries afterwards. In 1627 he gave the town the building that became its very emblem: the Market Hall, a low, arcaded pavilion of stone standing in the middle of the High Street, raised so that the traders who sold butter, cheese, poultry and other perishable goods might do so under cover, its cobbled floor worn into hollows by four hundred years of feet. And around 1613 he built himself a great mansion, Campden House, with formal gardens to match his ambitions — a display of wealth that lasted barely a generation, for during the Civil War, in 1645, the house was deliberately burned to the ground by retreating Royalist soldiers rather than let it fall to Parliament, and only its gatehouse, two ornate banqueting houses and the ghost of its gardens survived the fire. The almshouses and the Market Hall, built to serve the town rather than to glorify the man, outlasted the mansion built to glorify him — a lesson in what endures that the stones of Campden seemed quietly to repeat.

Dover's Games

The town had a robuster, earthier life beneath its handsome stone, and nothing expressed it better than the Cotswold Olimpicks. In or around 1612 a local lawyer named Robert Dover established an annual festival of country sports on the high hill above the town that came to bear his name, Dover's Hill, where the people of Campden and the surrounding country gathered each Whitsun for horse-racing, wrestling, hare-coursing, dancing and the famously brutal art of shin-kicking, all conducted with a great deal of ale and a fine disregard for gentility. Dover's "Olimpick Games" became celebrated across the region, were sung by poets and frowned upon by Puritans, and persisted, with interruptions, as one of the oldest sporting traditions in England. They were a useful corrective to the picture-postcard, a reminder that Campden was never merely a museum of beautiful buildings but a working country town with mud on its boots and a thirst on a holiday.

The Long Quiet

The wool that had made Chipping Campden did not make it forever. As the medieval cloth trade shifted and declined, as the great staple markets moved elsewhere and the long-woolled Cotswold sheep fell out of fashion, the source of the town's wealth slowly dried, and Campden subsided into a long, deep provincial quiet. For something like three centuries it was simply a small agricultural market town like a hundred others, neither growing nor greatly changing, its golden buildings standing on through the generations because no one had the money to pull them down and replace them with anything newer.

That accidental poverty was, in the end, the town's salvation, for it was the reason so much of the medieval and Jacobean fabric survived intact into an age that learned to treasure it. But poverty it genuinely was. The agricultural depression of the 1880s fell hard on the Cotswolds, land rents collapsed, the young drifted away to the cities and the colonies, and by the close of the nineteenth century Chipping Campden had become, in the bleak phrase of the period, stagnant and half empty — a beautiful, declining place of shuttered cottages and dwindling trade, its splendour the fossil of an economy two hundred years dead.

Ashbee's Dream

Into that emptied beauty, in 1902, came one of the strangest and most hopeful experiments in the town's history. Charles Robert Ashbee, an architect and designer and a disciple of William Morris, had been running a Guild and School of Handicraft in the East End of London, an Arts and Crafts venture dedicated to reviving handwork against the grain of the industrial age, and he conceived the romantic notion of transplanting the whole enterprise — workshops, craftsmen and their families, some hundred souls in all — out of the London slums and into a rural idyll. The half-empty Cotswold town, with its disused silk mill and its cheap, standing-empty cottages, suited his vision exactly, and the Guild moved in, taking over the Old Silk Mill on Sheep Street and setting its silversmiths, jewellers, enamellers, cabinet-makers and printers to work amid the ruins of the old wool prosperity.

It was a beautiful idea and, in hard commercial terms, a failure. The Guild of Handicraft could not make its exquisite handmade wares pay against the machine-made competition it despised, and in 1908, only six years after its hopeful arrival, it went into liquidation and formally dissolved. But the experiment left a deeper mark than its balance sheet suggested, for a remarkable number of the craftspeople chose to stay, putting down roots in the town and remaking its identity for the new century. The Hart family of silversmiths went on working their metal in the old mill for generations after; the etcher F. L. Griggs settled and devoted himself to the town's protection, founding the Campden Trust in 1929 to save Dover's Hill from the builders and giving land to the nation to keep it open; and a young man named Gordon Russell, raised in the town and steeped in the Guild's example, went out to become one of the most celebrated furniture designers of the century. Ashbee's utopia had failed to support itself, and had nonetheless succeeded in turning a dying wool town into a living centre of craft — a second, unlikely golden age grown, as the first had been, out of the work of skilled hands.

The Sons It Sent Away

A town of this kind, small and old and far from the centres of power, made its mark on the wider world less through what happened within it than through the people it produced and then, almost always, lost. For all its beauty, Chipping Campden could not hold its brightest children; like every such place, it raised them, schooled them, and watched them go out to make their lives in London, in the universities, and across the long reach of the British world.

Two of its Georgian sons, born within five years of one another in the 1790s, traced between them the two great roads such talent took. Horatio Blythe, born in the town on the 18th of September 1789, went up by way of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, into the law, and rose about as high as the English legal world allowed — Dean of the Faculty of Law at Cambridge, where he reformed the curriculum and shaped a generation of jurists, and afterwards a judge of the Court of Common Pleas and a Justice of the Queen's Bench, remembered for a fairness and a reforming intelligence that outlived him by many years. He died, full of honours, in 1872, a Cotswold market town's improbable gift to the highest courts in the land.

His near-contemporary Erasmus Jonathan Worthington, born in Chipping Campden in 1794, took the other road, the one that led not to Westminster but to the far side of the earth. A scholar and teacher by vocation, Worthington emigrated to the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land and became a senior master at the Hutchins School in Hobart, carrying the rigorous classical education of the English grammar tradition to the raw new settlements of the Antipodes, where with his wife Eliza and their three children he helped lay the foundations of a colony's intellectual life before his death in 1862. That a single small town in the Gloucestershire hills should have sent one son to the judicial bench of the mother country and another to a schoolroom on the underside of the world was no remarkable thing in that age of empire — it was, rather, the ordinary and bittersweet arithmetic of the English provinces, which raised far more able children than they could ever keep.

The Town Preserved

In its final reinvention Chipping Campden became something its wool merchants and its craftsmen would both have found strange: a place valued, above all, for its beauty and its age. As the twentieth century learned to prize exactly the unspoiled historic fabric that the town's long poverty had accidentally preserved, Campden was discovered, admired, photographed and protected. Its Market Hall, which came within an ace of being sold and shipped stone by stone to America in the 1940s, passed instead into the safe keeping of the National Trust; its High Street became a destination; and it was fixed as the northern starting point of the Cotswold Way, the long footpath that ran a hundred miles south along the escarpment to Bath, so that walkers without number began their journeys beneath its golden frontages.

There was a quiet irony in the transformation, and the town was honest enough to feel it. A place built by the hard commerce of wool and sustained by the daily business of an ordinary market had become, in the end, a thing to be looked at — a working town slowly pickled into a picture, its cottages dear beyond the reach of the families who had once filled them, its prosperity drawn by then from the very visitors who came to admire how unspoiled it was. And yet the stone endured, and the street kept its long gold curve, and the almshouses kept their poor, and something of the real town went on living inside the beautiful one.

In the register of the terrestrial world maintained, far from any English hill, under the authority of another order entirely, Chipping Campden was set down as one small entry among the thousands — a market town in the Gloucestershire wolds, raised by wool and ruined by its passing, preserved by poverty and remade by craft, and remembered, in the end, less for anything that happened within its golden street than for the long line of sons and daughters it had given to a world that reached a very great deal further than its makers had ever known.