I went down the rabbit hole again. This time, I met someone new:
Celia Fiennes.
Amazing. Celia was born in 1662, in Salisbury, a 15-minute modern-day drive from Stonehenge. However, Celia’s family were devoted Parliamentarians, meaning they opposed the Crown and supported Parliament & Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War. Celia’s father, Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes, was the second son of the 8th Baron and first Viscount Saye and Sele, a staunch Puritan and one of the first-generation leaders of the opposition. In fact, both he and all Celia’s uncles had fought against the King.
Celia and Mary of Modena were born only 4 years apart, but as an anti-royalist, I doubt Celia crossed Mary’s path! I’ll bet the brave woman traveler came up in royal conversation though, because, remarkably, Celia rode side-saddle through every county in England, accompanied only by two servants, and including two long journeys through northern England and Scotland and including a close drowning and a highwayman’s attack. Celia kept a journal, later published: Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary. London: Field & Tuer, The Leaderhall Press, 1888.
Unusual for this time period, Celia did not marry. This and her family’s wealth provided the freedom and opportunity she had for such adventurous travel. At the time, travel for pleasure was still very unusual and as a female traveler, Celia was exceptional. Her explorations started for health reasons in the south of England, then continued well beyond.
Wrote Celia:
“If all persons, both Ladies, much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to Inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, would be a souveraign remedy to cure or preserve ffrom these Epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness? -it would also fform such an Idea of England, add much to its Glory and Esteem in our minds.”
Most consider the fine lady in the well-loved children’s nursery rhyme, “Ride A Cock Horse To Banbury Cross” to be Celia:
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.
The phrase ‘cock horse’ originates from the 15th century. It can mean a high-spirited horse or an uncastrated horse. A cockhorse may also refer to the additional horse to assist in pulling a cart or carriage up a hill. From the mid-sixteenth century, it came to mean a hobby horse or an adult’s knee.
The rhyme first turned up in print in the early 18th century, around the time that Fiennes was gaining a reputation for her travels. What’s more, Celia’s brother was a viscount who lived at Broughton Castle in Banbury, so she certainly fits the bill when it comes to matching the woman in the nursery rhyme to the place it specifically mentions. For ‘fine lady’ should we read ‘Fiennes lady’? Celia lived to be 78 years old, dying in London, in 1741. She is remembered with a memorial near Whitchurch, 45 miles south of Liverpool, to commemorate the 300th anniversary
