348 THE UPTONS.

for the re-building of Upton Church. The tower is good, and was surmounted by a spire; but, about the end of the last century, a builder was given £7 and the materials to take it down; and subsequently the present incongruous wooden cupola was erected at the cost of £275. Baptists and Roman Catholics have chapels in the town. The Baptists commenced here in 1670. Wesley preached here in 1770, in a new room, just finished; and Benjamin Baxter, a Nonconformist minister, of Upton, was the author of "A Posing Question put by the Wise Men," &c.

A town hall (cost £2,000, with market-house in the basement and public rooms above), post office, workhouse, good shops and inns, Messrs. Lechmere and Co.'s branch of the Tewkesbury and Worcester Old Banks, excellent gasworks, a reading room in connection with the Mechanics' Institute; a Rifle Corps, numbering eighty men, under the command of Captain Kent; a savings bank, and schools (endowed and otherwise) of all kinds; a cemetery, recently constructed, with separate chapels for Churchmen and Dissenters; a burial board, a mothers' society; a provident society, for assisting poor families to obtain coal and clothing; markets and fairs, clubs, &c., form a respectable bulk of institutions; yet, for all this, Upton would have been less known than it is but for its old bridge and the "Lion Inn," immortalized by Fielding in his "Tom Jones." The old stone bridge over the Severn was partly broken down by Cromwell's forces in the civil wars, but being repaired, it remained till our own day, to prove a constant nuisance to the county in lawsuits and expenses. It appears that a Mr. E. Hall (A. D. 1575) left property in the hands of feoffees (for whom Mr. G. Jukes is the present receiver), the proceeds of which were to be applied to the repairs of the church and bridge, and for the necessary uses of the parish ; and the disagreement between the feoffees and the county magistrates as to the proportion to be laid out on the bridge led to disputes and delays, till at length the bridge fell down in the flood of 1862, and in the same year the