Court Room, Stoniton

Court Room, Stoniton,Scene of Hetty Sorrel's trial. "The place fitted up that day as a court of justice was a grand old hall, now destroyed by fire. The mid-day light that fell on the close pavement of human heads, was shed through a line of hight pointed windows, variegated with the mellow tints of old painted glass. Grim dusty armour hung in high relief in front of the darkoaken gallery at the farther end; and under the broad arch of the great mullioned window opposite was spread a curtain of old tapestry, covered with dim melancholy figures, like a doxing indistinct dream of the past. It was a place that through the rest of the year was haunted with the shadowy memories of old kings and queens, unhappy, discrowned, imprisoned." The scene of Hetty's trial was Derby ("Stoniton"), but the original described in the Court Room was St. Mary's Hall, Coventry, which, at the time of George Eliot's residence in Coventry, was used for trials. A description of St. Mary's Hall, given in Poole's Coventry, agrees in many details with the description in Adam Bede. The detail of destruction by fire was taken from another original, the town hall of Derby, which was destroyed by fire in 1841. (See "Coventry in relation to George Eliot's fiction", by F.W. Humberstone, in the Coventry Herald, 14th-15th November, 1919; Poole, Coventry, pp. 117-128; Mottram, True Story of George Eliot, p. 39.)

<em>Adam Bede</em>

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