The Hardy Country: Literary landmarks of the Wessex Novels
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Title: The Hardy Country: Literary landmarks of the Wessex Novels
Author: Charles G. Harper
Release date: September 7, 2014 [eBook #46801]
Most recently updated: October 7, 2014
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HARDY COUNTRY: LITERARY LANDMARKS OF THE WESSEX NOVELS ***
This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
[Picture: Weymouth: St. Mary Street and statue of George III.]
THE
HARDY COUNTRY
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF
THE WESSEX NOVELS
* * * * *
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
AUTHOR OF “THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY,” ETC.
“Here shepherds pipe their rustic song,
Their flocks and rural nymphs among.”
[Picture: Medallion]
_ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR_
* * * * *
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1904
_PREFACE_
_Dorsetshire_, _the centre of the_ “_Hardy Country_,” _the home of the
Wessex Novels_, _is a land literally flowing with milk and honey_: _a
land of great dairies_, _of flowers and bees_, _of rural industries_,
_where rustic ways and speech and habits of thought live long_, _and the
kindlier virtues are not forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in
towns_: _a land desirable for its own sweet self_, _where you may see the
beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey of which I
have spoken_, _and where that flow of milk is no figure of speech_. _You
may indeed hear the swish of it in the milking pails at almost every turn
of every lane_.
_Thatch survives in every village_, _as nowhere else_, _and here quaint
towns maintain their quaintness at all odds_, _while elsewhere foolish
folk seek to be—as they phrase it_—“_up to date_.” _It is good_, _you
think_, _who explore these parts_, _to be out of date and reckless of all
the tiresome worries of modernity_.
_Spring is good in Dorset_, _summer better_, _autumn—when the kindly
fruits of the earth are ingathered and __the smell of pomace is sweet in
the mellow air—best_. _Winter_? _Well_, _frankly_, _I don’t know_.
_To all these natural advantages has been added in our generation the
romantic interest of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels of rural life and
character_, _in which real places are introduced with a lavish hand_.
_The identity of those places is easily resolved_; _and_, _that feat
performed_, _there is that compelling force in his genius which
inevitably_, _sooner or later_, _magnetically draws those who have read_,
_to see for themselves what manner of places and what folk they must be
in real life_, _from whose characteristics such poignant tragedy_, _such
suave and admirable comedy_, _have been evolved_. _I have many a time
explored Egdon_, _and observed the justness of the novelist’s description
of that sullen waste_: _have traversed Blackmoor Vale_, _where_ “_the
fields are never brown and the springs never dry_,” _but where the
roads—it is a cyclist’s criticism—are always shockingly bad_: _in fine_,
_have visited every literary landmark of the Wessex Novels_. _If I have
not found the rustics so sprack-witted as they are in_ THE RETURN OF THE
NATIVE _and other stories—why_, _I never expected so to find them_, _for
I did not imagine the novelist to be a reporter_. _But—this is in
testimony to the essential likeness to life of his women—I know_
“_Bathsheba_”; _only she is not a farmer_, _nor in_ “_Do’set_,” _and I
have met_ “_Viviette_” _and_ “_Fancy_.” _They were called by other
names_, _’tis true_; _but they were_, _and are_, _those distracting
characters come to life_.
_A word in conclusion_. _No attempt has here been made to solemnly_
“_expound_” _the novelist_. _He_, _I take it_, _expounds himself_. _Nor
has it been thought necessary to exclude places simply for the reason
that they by some chance do not find mention in the novels_. _These
pages are_, _in short_, _just an attempt to record impressions received
of a peculiarly beautiful and stimulating literary country_, _and seek
merely to reflect some of the joy of the explorer and the enthusiasm of
an ardent admirer of the novelist_, _who here has given tongues to trees
and a voice to every wind_.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
PETERSHAM, SURREY,
_July_ 1904.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; 1
FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD
II. WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX 9
III. WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL 16
IV. STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE 26
V. THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD 35
VI. THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER 47
VII. DORCHESTER 62
VIII. DORCHESTER (_continued_) 74
IX. SWANAGE 84
X. SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE 92
XI. CORFE CASTLE 105
XII. WAREHAM 114
XIII. WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS 122
XIV. BERE REGIS 133
XV. THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY 148
XVI. DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND 168
YEOVIL
XVII. SHERBORNE 178
XVIII. SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH 191
XIX. SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH 205
(_continued_)
XX. WEYMOUTH 214
XXI. THE ISLE OF PORTLAND 222
XXII. WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER 232
XXIII. WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE 246
XXIV. BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE 257
XXV. WIMBORNE MINSTER 270
XXVI. WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY 277
XXVII. WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY (_continued_) 288
XXVIII. WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH 297
XXIX. OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW 302
INDEX 313
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Weymouth: St. Mary Street and Statue of George III. _Frontispiece_
Fawley Magna 3
High Street, Oxford, _Facing_ 4
High Street, Winchester 11
Winchester Cathedral, _Facing_ 14
Weyhill Fair 24
Salisbury Cathedral 30
Stonehenge 32
Pentridge 36
Eastbury 41
Blandford Forum 45
The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew 49
Weatherbury Castle 50
The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle 51
Piddletown 55
A Quaint Corner in Piddletown 57
Lower Walterstone Farm; Original of “Bathsheba’s 59
Farm” in _Far from the Madding Crowd_
Ten Hatches, Dorchester 69
Dorchester Gaol 75
The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester 77
Colyton House, Dorchester 79
The Old Church, Swanage 89
Encombe 95
Corfe Castle 99
Corfe Castle, _Facing_ 106
Approach to Wareham: The Walls of Wareham 116
Wareham 119
The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon Abbey 123
Woolbridge House 125
Woolbridge House: Entrance Front 127
Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath, _Facing_ 128
Chamberlain’s Bridge 130
Rye Hill, Bere Regis 131
Bere Regis 135
Bere Regis 137
Bere Regis: Interior of Church 141
“Toothache,” Bere Regis 143
“Headache,” Bere Regis 143
Bere Regis: The Turberville Window 145
Stinsford Church; the “Mellstock” of _Under the 149
Greenwood Tree_
Birthplace of Thomas Hardy 158
Birthplace of Thomas Hardy 159
The Duck Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn in 161
_The Return of the Native_
Tincleton 163
An Egdon Farmstead 165
A Farm on Egdon 166
Cross-in-Hand, _Facing_ 170
Batcombe 171
Tomb of “Conjuring Minterne” 173
Melbury House, _Facing_ 174
Sherborne Abbey Church, _Facing_ 184
Long Burton 192
Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum 194
Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore 195
Cerne Abbas 201
The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey, _Facing_ 202
The Cerne Giant 203
Cerne Abbas 206
Wolveton House 207
Weymouth and Portland from the Ridgeway 209
The Wishing Well, Upwey 211
Weymouth Harbour 219
Sandsfoot Castle 223
Bow and Arrow Castle 229
Portisham 233
The Road out of Abbotsbury 235
Sheep-Shearing in Wessex, _Facing_ 236
West Bay, Bridport 239
High Street and Town Hall, Bridport 243
Sutton Poyntz: the “Overcombe” of _The Trumpet 247
Major_
Bincombe 249
Poxwell Manor 251
Owermoigne: the Smugglers’ Haunt in _The Distracted 253
Preacher_
Lulworth Cove 254
Lulworth Cove 255
Lytchett Heath: The Equestrian Effigy of George 256
III.: Entrance to Charborough Park, _Facing_
Bournemouth: The Invalids’ Walk 258
Poole Quay 267
Sturminster Marshall: Anthony Etricke’s Tomb, 270
Wimborne Minster, _Facing_
The Wimborne Clock Jack 273
Wimborne Minster: the Minster and the Grammar 274
School, _Facing_
The Tower, Charborough Park 281
Weather-vane at Shapwick: the “Shapwick Monster” 283
The Maypole, Shillingstone 285
Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn 286
Marnhull 289
Gold Hill, Shaftesbury 295
The Observatory, Horton, _Facing_ 298
Horton Inn: the “Lorton Inn” of _Barbara of the 299
House of Grebe_
Monmouth Ash 300
Bingham’s Melcombe 303
Milton Abbas, _Facing_ 306
Milton Abbas, an Early “Model” Village 307
Abbot Milton’s Rebus, Milton Abbey 309
Milton Abbey 310
Turnworth House 311
CHAPTER I
PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD
IN the literary partition of England, wherein the pilgrim may discover
tracts definitely and indissolubly dedicated to Dickens, to Tennyson, to
Ingoldsby, and many another, no province has been so thoroughly annexed
or so effectively occupied as that associated with the Wessex novels
written by Mr. Thomas Hardy. He holds Wessex in fee-simple, to the
exclusion of all others; and so richly topographical are all those
romances, that long ere sketch-maps showing his literary occupancy of it
were prepared and published in the uniform edition of his works, there
were those to whom the identity of most of his scenes offered no manner
of doubt. By the circumstances of birth and of lifelong residence, the
“Wessex” of the novels has come to denote chiefly his native county of
Dorset, and in especial the neighbourhood of Dorchester, the county town;
but Mr. Hardy was early an expansionist, and his outposts were long ago
thrown forward, to at last make his Wessex in the domain of letters
almost coterminous with that ancient kingdom of Saxon times, which
included all England south of the Thames and west of Sussex, with the
exception of Cornwall. The very excellent sketch-map prepared for the
definitive edition of Mr. Hardy’s works very clearly shows the
comparative density of the literary settlements he has made. Glancing at
it, you at once perceive that what he chooses to term “South
Wessex”—named in merely matter-of-fact gazetteers Dorsetshire—is thickly
studded with names of his own mintage, unknown to guidebook or ordnance
map, and presently observe that the surrounding divisions of Upper,
North, Mid, Outer, and Lower Wessex—as who should say Hampshire,
Berkshire, Wilts, Somerset, and Devon—are, to follow the simile already
adopted, barely colonised.
His nearest frontier-post towards London is Castle Royal, to be
identified with none other than Windsor; while near by are Gaymead
(Theale), Aldbrickham (Reading), and Kennetbridge (Newbury). In the
midst of that same division of North Wessex, or Berkshire, are marked
Alfredston and Marygreen, respectively the little town of Wantage,
birthplace of Alfred the Great, and the small village of Fawley Magna,
placed on the draughty skyline of the bare and shivery Berkshire downs.
Then, near the eastern border of Upper Wessex is Quartershot, or
Aldershot, and farther within its confines Stoke-Barehills, by which name
Basingstoke and the unclothed uplands partly surrounding it are
indicated. Its “gaunt, unattractive, ancient church” is accurately
imaged in a phrase, and it is just as true that the most familiar object
of the place is “its cemetery, standing among some picturesque mediæval
ruins beside the railway”; for indeed Basingstoke cemetery and the fine
ruins of the chapel once belonging to the religious who, piously by
intent, but rather blasphemously to shocked ears, styled themselves the
“Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost,” stand immediately without the railway
station. At Stoke-Barehills, Jude and Sue, visiting the Agricultural
Show, were observed by Arabella, Jude’s sometime wife, with some
jealousy.
[Picture: Fawley Magna]
Finally, northernmost of all these transfigured outer landmarks, is
Christminster, the university town and city of Oxford, whose literary
name in these pages derives from the cathedral of Christ there. This
remote corner of his kingdom is especially and solely devoted to the
grievous story of _Jude the Obscure_, a pitiful tale of frustrated
ambition, originally published serially in _Harper’s Magazine_, under the
much more captivating, if less descriptive, title of _Hearts Insurgent_.
The story opens at Fawley Magna, to whose identity a clue is found in the
name of Fawley given the unhappy Jude. The village, we are told, was “as
old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an upland
adjoining the undulating North Wessex downs. Old as it was, however, the
well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained
absolutely unchanged. . . . Above all, the original church, hump-backed,
wood-turreted and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either
cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilised as pigsty
walls, garden-seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the
flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of
German-Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a
new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had
run down from London and back in a day.” Who was that obliterator thus
held up to satire? Inquiries prove the church to have been rebuilt in
1866, and its architect to have been none other than G. E. Street, R.A.,
than whom the middle Victorian period had no more accomplished architect.
Truly enough, its design is something alien, but candour compels the
admission that, however detached from local traditions, it is really a
very fine building, and its designer quite undeserving of so slighting a
notice.
[Picture: High Street, Oxford]
From Fawley the scene of Jude’s tragedy changes to Christminster, the
Oxford of everyday commerce. Oft had he, as a boy, seen from this
vantage-point the faint radiance of its lights reflected from the sky at
night, twenty miles away. His anticipations and disillusionments, his
strong resolves and stumblings by the way, over stumbling-blocks of his
own and of extraneous making, picture a strong character brought low,
like Samson by Delilah—cheated of scholarly ambition by the guardians of
learning, who open its gates only to wealth or scholarships acquired by
early opportunity. Take _Jude the Obscure_ as you will, it forms a
somewhat serious indictment of university procedure: “They raise pa’sons
there, like radishes in a bed. ’Tis all learning there—nothing but
learning, except religion.” Jude sought learning there, and Holy Orders,
but never rose beyond his trade of stonemason, and, after many fitful
wanderings through Wessex, ends tragically at Oxford.
Since _Jude the Obscure_ was written Oxford has gained another historic
personality, none the less real than the great figures of actual life who
have trodden the pavements of its High Street. You may follow all the
innermost thoughts of that mere character in a novel, and see fully
exposed the springs that produce his actions; and thus he is made seem
more human than all your Wolseys and great dignitaries, whose doings,
smothered in dust, and whose motives, buried deep beneath their own
subterfuges and the dark imaginings of historians with little but ancient
verbiage to rely upon, seem only the spasmodic, involuntary capers of so
many irresponsible jumping-jacks. Nowadays, when I think of Oxford, it
is to recall poor Jude Fawley’s fascination by it, like the desire of the
moth for the star, or for the candle that eventually scorches its wings
and leaves it maimed and dying. “It is a city of light,” he exclaimed,
not knowing (as how should he have known?) that the light it emits is but
the phosphorescent glow of decay. And when I walk the High Street, “the
main street—that ha’n’t another like it in the world,” it is not of
Newman or his fellow Tractarians I think, but of Jude the stonemason,
feeling with appreciative technical fingers the mouldings and crumbling
stones of its architecture.
In one novel, _A Pair of Blue Eyes_, Mr. Hardy has made an expedition far
beyond the confines of his Wessex. Away beyond “Lower Wessex,” or
Devonshire—itself scarce more than incidentally referred to in the whole
course of his writings—he takes the reader to the north coast of
Cornwall, the “furthest westward of all those convenient corners wherein
I have ventured to erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of
country life and passions; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond,
the vague border of the Wessex kingdom, on that side which, like the
westering verge of modern American settlements, was progressive and
uncertain.”
“Castle Boterel” he styles the stage of his tragical story of _A Pair of
Blue Eyes_; a place to be found on maps under the style and title of
Boscastle. That tiny port and harbour on the wildest part of a wild
coast obtains its name, in a manner familiar to all students of Cornish
topography, by a series of phonetic corruptions. Originally the site of
a castle owned by the Norman family of De Bottreaux, its name has in the
course of centuries descended from that knightly designation to that it
now bears. Leland, four hundred years ago, described the place as “a
very filthy Toun and il kept,” and probably had still in mind and in
nostrils when he wrote the scent of the fish-cellars and the fish-offal
which to this day go largely towards making up the bouquet of most of the
smaller Cornish fishing-ports.
Still, as in Leland’s time, goes the little brook, running down from the
tremendously hilly background “into the Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles,” and
still the harbour remains, from the mariner’s point of view, “a pore
Havenet, of no certaine Salvegarde,” winding, as it does, in the shape of
a double S, between gigantic rocky headlands, and most difficult of
approach or exit. It will thus be guessed, and guessed rightly, that,
although poor as a harbour, Boscastle is a place of commanding
picturesqueness. Its Cornish atmosphere, too, confers upon it another
distinction. In the romantic mind of the novelist the district is
“pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery.
The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal
soliloquy of the waters, the bloom, of dark purple cast, that seems to
exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an
atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.”
But it is not always like that at Boscastle. There are days of bright
sunshine, when the sea is in colour something between a sapphire and an
opal, when the cliffs reveal unexpected hues and the sands of
Trebarrow—the “Trebarwith Strand” of the novel—shine golden, in contrast
with the dark slaty headland of Willapark Point—the “cliff without a
name” where Elfride, the owner of that pair of blue eyes, saves the prig,
Henry Knight, by the singular expedient none other than the author of the
Wessex novels would have conceived. The average reader may perhaps be
allowed his opinion that it had been better for Elfride had she saved her
underclothing and allowed Knight to drop from his precarious hand-hold on
the cliff’s edge into the sea below waiting for him.
The town of “St. Launce’s” mentioned in the book is of course Launceston,
and “Endelstow” is the village of St. Juliot’s.
CHAPTER II
WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX
BUT, to have done with these preliminary triflings in the marches of the
Hardy Country, let us consider in what way the Londoner may best come to
a thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land. On all counts—by force
of easy access, and by its ancient circumstance—Winchester is indicated.
“The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore-time capital of
Wessex,” stands at the gate of this literary country and hard by the
confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and history it is
closely akin. At one in feeling with that hoary hunting preserve, it is
itself modern in but little measure, and loves to linger upon memories of
the past. Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical
counters with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty
game of history was played; but do, by the presence of their works, make
the least impressionable feel that they were creatures of blood and
fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake nations; groping darkly in
superstition, without doubt, but perceiving the light, distant and dim,
and striving with all the strength of their strong natures to win toward
it. They fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had done for
paganism, and were not—it really seems necessary to insist upon
it—creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals are sealed; but
lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and hated, and despaired
and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with perhaps even greater keenness,
than any Edwardian liege of this twentieth century. Still runs the
Itchen, bright and clear as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed,
to be in their turn ousted in governance by the Norman-French; and still,
although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of Norman
domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed, stolid, and
long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and Wessex, and in him that
ancient kingdom, although unknown to modern political geographies,
survives.
Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and for your
intrinsic worth, alike. Changing, although ever so slowly, with the
years, your developments make, not as elsewhere, for black bitterness of
heart and vain regrets for the things of sweet savour and good report,
swept away into the dustheaps and potsherds of “progress,” but for
content and happy assent. In these later years, for example, it has
occurred to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior
and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England, ruling
at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in A.D. 901, and buried here in a spot
still shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey. That is a noble,
heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to commemorate the
millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough keeping with
Winchester’s ancient dignity.
[Picture: High Street, Winchester]
Near by, where its imposing bulk is reared up against the giant
background of St. Giles’s Hill, you may still see and hear the Itchen
rushing furiously under the old City Mill by Soke Bridge, where dusty
millers have ground corn for a thousand years. Released from the
mill-leat, the stream regains its placid temper and wanders suavely along
daisy-dappled meads to St. Cross, and so at last to lose itself in
Southampton Water; still fishful all the way, as in the days of old Izaak
Walton himself, who lies in the south transept of the cathedral yonder,
and has a sanctified place in these liberal-minded times in a tabernacle
of the restored reredos, in the glorious company of the apostles, the
saints, kings and bishops, who form a very mixed concourse in that
remarkable structure. I fear that if they were all brought to life and
introduced to one another, they would not form the happiest of families.
But that’s as may be. From this vantage-point by King Alfred’s statue—or
“Ælfred,” as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the
unscholarly—you may see, as described in Tess, “the sloping High Street,
from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the mediæval cross
to the bridge”; but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low
Norman tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being beckoned
afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane, and, diligently
inquiring, at last find it. Best it is to come to the cathedral by way
of that aforesaid mediæval cross in the High Street, hard by the
curiously overhanging penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry,
which, to the astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a
backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike space of
trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old residences of cathedral
dignitaries with nothing to do and exceedingly good salaries for doing
it. It has been remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some
sixty per cent. of the famous men whose careers are included in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ were the sons of clergymen. No wonder
at all, I take it, in this, for it is merely nature’s compensating swing
of the pendulum. The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing
up energy for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest
empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest scoundrels too,
have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of the Church.
That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a history to its
squatness—a history bound up with the tragical death of Rufus. The grave
of the Red King in the cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story
whose inner history has never been, and never will be, fully explained;
but by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless king’s death
at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced by the glanced arrow said to
have been aimed at the wild red deer by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem
that the clergy were more intimately connected with that “accident” than
was seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of that
time. It must not be forgotten that the king had despoiled the Church
and the Church’s high dignitaries with a thorough and comprehensive
spoliation, nor can it be blinked that certain of them had denounced him
and prophesied disaster with an exactness of imagery possible only to
those who had prepared the fulfilment of their boding prophecies. “Even
now,” said one, “the arrow of retribution is fixed, the bow is
stretched.” This was not metaphor, merely: they prophesied who had with
certainty prepared fulfilment. And when the thing was consummated and
the body of the Red King was buried in the choir beneath the original
central tower, the ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was
not, according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the
insufficient support given to its great crushing weight by the inadequate
pillars, but to the fact that one was buried beneath who had not received
the last rites of the Church. If indeed that be so, the mills of God
certainly do grind slowly.
For the rest, the cathedral is the longest in England. Longer than Ely,
longer than St. Albans, it measures from east to west no less than 556
feet. As we read in the story of _Lady Mottisfont_, Wintoncester, among
all the romantic towns in Wessex, is for this reason “probably the most
convenient for meditative people to live in; since there you have a
cathedral with nave so long that it affords space in which to walk and
summon your remoter moods without continually turning on your heel, or
seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll under cover from the
rain or sun. In an uninterrupted course of nearly three hundred steps
eastward, and again nearly three hundred steps westward amid those
magnificent tombs, you can, for instance, compare in the most leisurely
way the dry dustiness which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and
bishops with the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of
commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest out-of-doors.
Then, if you are in love, you can, by sauntering in the chapels and
behind the episcopal chantries with the bright-eyed one, so steep and
mellow your ecstasy in the solemnities around that it will assume a rarer
and fairer tincture.”
[Picture: Winchester Cathedral]
In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old Guildhall every
evening at eight o’clock, the sentimental survival of an old-time very
real and earnest ordinance; the West Gate remains in the wall, hard by
the fragments of the royal castle; down in the lower extremity of the
city the bishop’s palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered,
ivy-covered walls: much in fine remains of Winchester’s ancient state.
But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for Salisbury.
CHAPTER III
WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL
FROM Wintoncester to Melchester—that is to say, from Winchester to
Salisbury—is twenty-three miles if you go by way of Stockbridge and
Winterslow; if by the windings of the valley roads by King’s Somborne and
Mottisfont, anything you like, from thirty upwards, for it is a devious
route and a puzzling. We will therefore take the highway and for the
present leave the byways severely alone.
The high road goes in an ascent, a white and dusty streak, from
Winchester to Stockbridge, the monotonous undulations of the chalky downs
relieved here and there on the skyline by distant woods, and the wayside
varied at infrequent intervals by murmurous coppices of pines, in whose
sullen depths the riotous winds lose themselves in hollow undertones or
absolute silences. But before the traveller comes thus out into the
country, he must, emerging from the West Gate, win to the open through
the recent suburb of Fulflood; for “Winton” as its natives lovingly name
it, and as the old milestones on this very road agree to style it, has
after many years of slumber waked to life again, and is growing. It is
not a large nor a bustling suburb, this recent fringe upon Winchester’s
ancient kirtle, and you are soon out of it and breasting the slope of
Roebuck Hill. Here, looking back, the tragic outlines of the prison,
with grey-slated roof and ugly octagonal red-brick tower, cut the
horizon: an unlovely palimpsest set above the mediæval graciousness of
the ancient capital of all England, but one that has become, in some
sort, a literary landmark in these later years, for it figures in the
last scene of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_. In the last chapter of that
strenuous romance you shall read how from the western gate of the city
two persons walked on a certain morning with bowed heads and gait of
grief. They were Angel Clare, the husband, and ’Liza-Lu, the sister of
poor Tess, come to witness the hoisting of the black flag upon the tower
of that inimical building. They witnessed this proof that “‘Justice’ was
done, and the President of the Immortals (in Æschylean phrase) had ended
his sport with Tess,” not from this Stockbridge road, but from the first
milestone on the road to Romsey, whence the city may be seen “as in an
isometric drawing” set down in its vale of Itchen, “the broad cathedral
tower with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the
spires of St. Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the college, and, more to
the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day
the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept
the rotund upland of St. Catherine’s Hill; further off, landscape beyond
landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging
above it.”
Turning away from the contemplation of these things, and overpassing the
crest of Roebuck Hill and its sponsorial inn, the road dips down suddenly
into the tiny village of Weeke, whose name is sometimes, with romantic
mediævalism, spelled “Wyke.” For myself, did I reside there, I would
certainly have my notepaper stamped “Wyke next Winchester,” and find much
satisfaction therein. Wyke consists, when fully summed up, of a
characteristic rural Hampshire church, with little wooden belfry and
walls of flint and red brick, of some scattered farms and of a roadside
pond, a great prim red-bricked house of Georgian date, and a row of
pollard limes on a grassy bank overlooking the road.
And then? Then the road goes on, past more uplands, divided into fields
whose smooth convexity gives the appearance of even greater size than
they possess: every circumstance of their featureless rotundity disclosed
from the highway across the sparse hedges, reduced by free use of the
billhook to the smallest semblance of a hedge, consistent with the
preservation of a boundary. Wayside trees are to seek, and the wayfarer
pants in summer for lack of shade, and in winter is chilled to the bone,
as the winds roam free across Worthy downs.
Such is the way up Harestock Hill; not so grim as perhaps this
description may convey, but really very beautiful in its sort, with a few
cottages topping the rise where a signpost points a road to Littleton and
Crawley, and where the white-topped equatorial of an observatory serves
to emphasise a wholly unobstructed view over miles of sky. It is only
from vast skyfields such as this that one hears the song of the skylark
on those still summer days when the sky is of the intensest azure blue
and the bees are busy wherever the farmer has left nooks for the
wild-flowers to grow. On such days the dark woods of Lainston, crowning
the distant ridge, lend a welcome shade. Fortunately they are easy of
access, for the road runs by them and an inconspicuous stile leads
directly into one of the rook-haunted alleys of those romantic avenues
with which the place is criss-crossed. A slightly marked footpath
through undergrowth thickly spread with the desiccated leaves of autumns
past, where the hedgehog hides and squirrels and wild life of every kind
abound, leads by a crackling track of dried twigs and the empty husks of
last year’s beech-nuts to another stile and across a byroad into another
of the five grand avenues leading to Lainston House, a romantically
gloomy, but architecturally very fine, late seventeenth-century mansion
embowered amid foliage, with a ruined manorial chapel close at hand in a
darkling corner amid the close-set mossy boles of the trees. The spot
would form an ideal setting for one of the Wessex tales, and indeed has a
part in a sufficiently queer story in actual life. That tale is now
historic—how Walpole’s “Ælia Lælia Chudleigh” was in 1745 privately
married, in this now roofless chapel, to Captain Hervey, a naval officer
who afterwards succeeded to the title of third Earl of Bristol. “Miss
Chudleigh,” however, she still continued to be at Court. Twenty-five
years later she was the heroine of a bigamy case, having married, while
her first husband was living, Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston. This was
that lively lady who, Walpole tells us, “went to Ranelagh as Iphigenia,
but as naked as Andromeda.”
The ruined chapel has long been in that condition. Its font lies, broken
and green with damp, on the grass, and the old ledger-stones that cover
the remains of Chudleighs and Dawleys, successive owners of the manor,
are cracked and defaced. The “living” of Lainston is worth £60 per
annum, and goes with that of the neighbouring village of Sparsholt, the
vicar holding it by virtue of preaching here once a year. Stress of
weather occasionally obliges him to perform this duty under the shelter
of an umbrella, when his congregation, like that of the saint who
preached to the birds, is composed chiefly of rooks and jackdaws. But
their responses are not always well timed, and the notes of the jackdaw
sound uncommonly like the scoffings of the ribald.
One emerges from Lainston woods only to perceive this to be a district of
many woodlands. Across the road is Northwood, where, close by Eastman’s
great school, are thick coppices of hazels and undergrowths that the
primroses and bluebells love. In another direction lies Sparsholt. None
may tell what the “Spar” in the place-name of this or the other Sparsholt
in Berkshire means, but “holt” signifies a wood; and thus we may perceive
that the surroundings must still wear very much the aspect they owned
when the name was conferred. Sparsholt has no guidebook
attractions—nothing but its old thatched cottages and quiet surroundings
to recommend it. But the fragrant scent of the wood-smoke from cottage
hearths is over all. You may see its blue filmy wreaths curling upwards
on still days, against the dark background of foliage. It is a rustic
fragrance never forgotten, an aroma which, go whithersoever you will,
brings back the sweet memory of days that were, and the sound of a voice
in more actual fashion than possible to the notes of a well-remembered
song, or the scent of a rose.
They are not woods of forest trees that beset this district, but hillside
tangles of scrub oaks, of hazels and alders, where the wild-flowers make
a continual glory in early spring. There are the labyrinths of No Man’s
Land, the intricacies of Privet and Crab Wood, through whose bosquets run
the long-deserted Roman road from Winchester to Old Sarum, and the
nameless spinneys dotted everywhere about. Away on the horizon you may
perceive a monument, capping a hill. It is no memorial of gallantries in
war, but is the obelisk erected on Farley Mount to the horse of a certain
“Paulet St. John,” which jumped with him into a chalk-pit twenty-five
feet deep, emerging, with his rider, unhurt. That was in 1733. An
inscription tells how that wonderful animal was afterwards entered for
the Hunters’ Plate, under the name of “Beware Chalk Pit,” at the races on
Worthy downs, and won it.
Continuing on to Stockbridge, whose race-meeting has recently been
abolished, the way grows grim indeed, with that Roman grimness
characteristic of all the Wessex chalky down country. The road is long,
and at times, when the sun is setting and the landscape fades away in
purple twilight, the explorer becomes obsessed, against all reason, with
the weird notion that the many centuries of civilisation are but a dream
and the distant ages come back again. To this bareness the pleasant
little town of Stockbridge, situated delightfully in the valley of the
Anton, is a gracious interlude. In its old churchyard the curious may
still see the whimsical epitaph to John Bucket, landlord of the “King’s
Head” inn, who died, aged 67, in 1802:
And is, alas! poor Bucket gone?
Farewell, convivial honest John.
Oft at the well, by fatal stroke
Buckets like pitchers must be broke.
In this same motley shifting scene,
How various have thy fortunes been.
Now lifting high, now sinking low,
To-day the brim would overflow.
Thy bounty then would all supply
To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry.
To-morrow sunk as in a well,
Content unseen with Truth to dwell.
But high or low, or wet or dry,
No rotten stave could malice spy.
Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise
And claim thy station in the skies;
Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine,
Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign.
In 1715, when the poet Gay rode horseback to Exeter and wrote a rhymed
account of his journey for the Earl of Burlington, he described
Stockbridge in doleful dumps. Why? Because for seven years there had
been no election:
Sad melancholy ev’ry visage wears;
What! no election come in seven long years!
Of all our race of Mayors, shall Snow alone
Be by Sir Richard’s dedication known?
Our streets no more with tides of ale shall float!
Nor cobblers feast three years upon one vote.
Some of this seems cryptic, but it is explained by the fact of Sir
Richard Steele having published, September 22nd, 1713, a quarto pamphlet
entitled _The Importance of Dunkirk considered_ . . . _in a letter to the
Bailiff of Stockbridge_, whose name was John Snow. The number of voters
at Stockbridge was then about seventy, and its population chiefly
cobblers. To say it was a corrupt borough is merely to state what might
be said of almost every one at that time; but it seems to have been
especially notable, even above its corrupt fellows, for a contemporary
chronicler is found writing: “It is a very wet town and the voters are
wet too.” He then continues, as one deploring the depreciation of
securities, “The ordinary price of a vote is £60, but better times may
come.” But when elections only came septennially, the wet voters who
subsisted three years upon one vote must have gone dry, poor fellows, an
unconscionable while.
Some ten miles north of Stockbridge, on the road past Andover, and
overlooking the valley of the Anton, is Weyhill, a Hardy landmark of
especial importance, for it is the point whence starts that fine tale,
_The Mayor of Casterbridge_, described in its sub-title as “The Life and
Death of a Man of Character.” It is a pleasant country of soft riverain
features by which you who seek to make pilgrimage to this spot shall
fare, coming into the quiet, cheerful little market-town of Andover, and
thenceforward near by the villages which owe their curiously feminine
names to their baptismal river, the Anton. There you shall find Abbot’s
Ann and Little Ann, and I daresay, if you seek long enough, Mary Ann
also. Weyhill, a hamlet in the parish of Penton Mewsey, is a
place—although to look at it, you might not suspect so—of hoary
antiquity, and its Fair—still famous, and still the largest in
England—old enough to be the subject of comment in _Piers Plowman’s
Vision_, in the line:
At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair.
Alas that such things should be! this old-time six-days’ annual market is
now reduced to four. It is held between October 10th and 13th, and
divided into the Sheep, Horse, Hops, Cheese, Statute or Hiring, and
Pleasure Fairs. On each of these days the three miles’ stretch of road
from Andover is thronged with innumerable wayfarers and made unutterably
dusty by the cabs and flys and the dense flocks of sheep and cattle on
their way to the Fair ground.
There are quaint survivals at Weyhill Fair. An umbrella-seller may
still, with every recurrent year, be seen selling the most bulgeous and
antique umbrellas, some of them almost archaic enough to belong to the
days of Jonas Hanway, who introduced the use of such things in the
eighteenth century; and unheard-of village industries display their
produce to the astonished gaze. Here, for example, you see an exhibit of
modern malt-shovels, together with the maker of them, the “W. Choules
from Penton” whose name is painted up over his unassuming corner; and
although the Londoner has probably never heard of, and certainly never
seen, malt-shovels, the making of them is obviously still a living
industry.
Greatly to the stranger’s surprise, Weyhill, although in fact situated
above the valley of the Anton, does not appear to be situated on a hill
at all. The road to “Weydon Priors,” by which name it figures in _The
Mayor of Casterbridge_, is indeed, as the novelist sufficiently hints, of
no very marked features. It is “a road neither straight nor crooked,
neither level nor hilly,” and at times other than Fair-time is as quiet a
country road—for a high road—as you shall meet; and, except for that one
week in the year, Weyhill is as a derelict village. There, on a grassy
tableland, stand, deserted for fifty-one weeks out of every fifty-two,
the whitewashed booths and rows of sheds that annually for a brief space
do so strenuous a trade, and scarce a human being comes into view. Even
now, just as in the beginning of the story, Weyhill does not grow:
“Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon.”
[Picture: Weyhill Fair]
It is on the last day of the old six-days’ Fair, in 1829, that the story
opens, with a man and woman—the woman carrying a child—walking along this
dusty road. That they were man and wife was, according to the novelist’s
sardonic humour, plain to see, for they carried along with them a “stale
familiarity, like a nimbus.” The man was the hay-trusser, Michael
Henchard, whose after rise to be Mayor of Casterbridge and whose final
fall are chronicled in the story. This opening scene is merely in the
nature of a prologue, disclosing the itinerant hay-trusser seeking work,
coming to the Fair and there selling his wife for five guineas to the
only bidder, a sailor—the second chapter resuming the march of events
eighteen years later.
CHAPTER IV
STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE
RETURNING to Stockbridge, _en route_ for Salisbury, eight miles more of
roads of the same unchanging characteristics, but growing more
plentifully carpeted with crushed flints as we advance, bring us to
Wiltshire and to a junction with the Exeter Road from Andover at Lobcombe
Corner. In the neighbourhood are “the Wallops,” as local parlance refers
to a group of three villages, Over and Nether Wallop, with the wayside
settlement of Little (or Middle) Wallop in between. It is this
last-named to which Mr. Hardy refers when he tells how the ruined and
broken-hearted Mayor of Casterbridge, fleeing from the scene of his
vanished greatness and resuming his early occupation of hay-trusser,
became employed at a “pastoral farm near the old western highway. . . .
He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that,
situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually
nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless
spot only half as remote.” Dorchester, otherwise Casterbridge, is in
fact just forty-nine and a half miles distant, down this old Exeter Road.
In less than another mile on our westward way the sight of a solitary
house in all this apparently uninhabited wilderness arouses speculations
in the pilgrim’s mind—speculations resolved on approach, when the sight
of the recently restored picture-sign of the “Pheasant,” reared up on its
posts on the short grass of the open down, opposite its door, proclaims
this to be the old coaching inn once famed as “Winterslow Hut.” None
ever spoke of the inn in those days as the “Pheasant,” although that was
the sign of it, plainly to be seen; as “Winterslow Hut” it was always
known, and a more lonely, forbidding place of seclusion from the haunts
of man it would be difficult to find. It was once, appropriately enough,
the retreat of a lonely, forbidding person—the self-selected place of
exile from society of Hazlitt, the essayist, who, parting from his wife
at the village of West Winterslow (whence the inn takes its name of
“Winterslow Hut”) two miles away, lived here from 1819 to 1828. Here he
wrote the essays on “Persons one would wish to have seen,” and the much
less sociable essay, “On Living to One’s Self”—an art he practised here
to his own satisfaction and the cheerful resignation of the many persons
with whom he quarrelled. And here he saw the Exeter Mail and the
stage-coaches go by, and must have found the place even lonelier, in the
intervals after their passing, than it seems now that the Road, as an
institution, is dead and the Rail conveys the traffic to and from
Salisbury and the west, some two miles distant, across country hidden
from view from this point beneath the swelling shoulders of the
unchanging downs.
Salisbury spire is soon seen, when the long drop into the valley of the
Wiltshire Avon, down Three Mile Hill, begins; its slender spire, the
tallest in England, thrusting its long needle-point 404 feet into the
blue, and oddly peering out from the swooping sides of the downs, long
before any suspicion of Sarum itself—as the milestones style it—has
occupied the mind of the literary pilgrim.
Salisbury, like some bland and contented elderly spinster, does not look
its age. When you are told how Old Sarum was abandoned, New Sarum
founded, and everything recreated _ad hoc_ at the command of Bishop
Poore, impelled thereto by a vision, in the then customary way, you are
so impressed with what we are used to regard as such thoroughly
“American” proceedings that you forget, in the apparent modernity of such
a method, how very long ago all this was done. This great change of site
took place about 1220, and sixty years later the great cathedral,
remarkable and indeed unique among all our cathedrals for being designed
and built, from the laying of the foundation stone to the roofing-in of
the building, in one—the Early English—style, was completed. It was
actually a century later that the spire itself was finished.
Much of this seeming youthfulness of Salisbury is due to the regularity
of plan upon which the city is laid out, and to the comparative breadth
of its streets. To that phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch,
whose like certainly could never have been met with outside the pages of
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, Salisbury seemed “a very desperate sort of place; an
exceedingly wild and dissipated city.” Here we smile superior, although
it is true that in his short story, _On the Western Circuit_, Mr. Hardy
presents Melchester, as he names this fair city, as given over to blazing
orgies in the progress of Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting
merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than
they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he
should have been. Granting the truth of this picture of Melchester Fair,
it is to be observed that this is but an interlude in a twelvemonth’s
programme of polished, decorous, and well-ordered urbanity. Its
character is more truly portrayed in _Jude the Obscure_, where Sue
Bridehead having gone to the city, to enter the Training College in the
Close, her cousin Jude follows her. He found it “a quiet and soothing
place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly
learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment.” It was here
he obtained work at his trade of stonemason, labouring on the restoration
of the cathedral; here that Sue shocked his ecclesiastical and mediæval
bent, meeting his suggestion that they should sit for a talk in the
cathedral by the proposal that she would rather wait in the railway
station: “That’s the centre of town life now—the cathedral has had its
day!” To his shocked interjection, “How modern you are!” she replied
defensively, “I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than
mediævalism, if you only knew”; meaning thereby that she was enamoured of
classicism and the old pagans.
To Sue the cathedral was not unsympathetic merely by force of that
clear-cut regularity which impresses most beholders with a sense of a
splendid, but cold, perfection. There are those who compare this great
fane with Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
Dead perfection, no more;
but while those critics are critics only of design and carved stones, who
would welcome something in its regular features paralleled by a
tip-tilted nose in a human face, Sue was obviously preoccupied by the
sense that it, not alone among cathedrals, has outlived the devotional
needs that produced it, and is little more than a magnificent museum of
architectural antiquities. That magnificence would be even more complete
and pronounced had not the egregious James Wyatt been let loose upon the
“restoration” of it, towards the close of the eighteenth century, when he
cast out and destroyed most of its internal adornments, and pulled down
and utterly obliterated the beautiful detached bell tower, coeval with
the cathedral itself, which stood, away from it, on the north side.
It is perhaps worthy of remark that there may be noticed in the cathedral
the tomb, with somewhat bombastic inscription, of Dr. D’Albigny
Turberville, the seventeenth-century oculist, who died, aged 85, in 1696.
The flagrant Latin, which tells us that his fame shall perish no sooner
than this marble, does not allow for human forgetfulness, nor for the
advances of science.
The Normal School in the Close, whence Sue escaped, after being confined
to her room as a punishment for her night’s escapade with Jude, is a
prominent building, described as “an ancient edifice of the fifteenth
century, once a palace . . . with mullioned and transomed windows, and a
courtyard in front shut in from the road by a wall.”
[Picture: Salisbury Cathedral]
From the ever-impending tragedy of Jude’s ambitions it is a relief to
turn to the pure comedy of Betty Dornell, the first Countess of Wessex,
in that collection of diverting short stories, _A Group of Noble Dames_.
Looking upon those two old inns, the “Red Lion” in the High Street and
the “White Hart,” we are reminded that it was to the first-named that
Betty resorted with that husband with whom, although married at an early
age, she had not lived.
“‘Twice we met by accident,’ pleaded Betty to her mother. ‘Once at
Abbot’s Cernel and another time at the “Red Lion,” Melchester.’
“‘O, thou deceitful girl!’ cried Mrs. Dornell. ‘An accident took you to
the “Red Lion” whilst I was staying at the “White Hart”! I remember—you
came in at twelve o’clock at night and said you’d been to see the
cathedral by the light o’ the moon!’
“‘My ever-honoured mamma, so I had! I only went to the “Red Lion” with
him afterwards.’”
Nine miles to the north of Melchester stands Stonehenge, reached after
their flight through the deserted midnight streets of the city by Tess
and Angel Clare, vainly endeavouring to elude justice after the murder of
the sham D’Urberville at Sandbourne. The night was “as dark as a cave,”
and a stiff breeze blew as they came out upon the black solitudes of
Salisbury Plain. For some miles they had proceeded thus, when “on a
sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front,
rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against
it.
“‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel.
“‘It hums,’ said she. ‘Hearken!’
“The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the
note of some gigantic one-stringed harp.” It was indeed Stonehenge, “a
very Temple of the Winds.”
And here, as the night wore away, and Tess lay sleeping on the Altar
Stone, and the great trilithons began to show up blackly against the
coming dawn, the figure of a man advancing towards them appeared rising
out of the hollows of the great plain. At the same time Clare heard the
brush of feet behind him: they were surrounded. Thoughts of resistance
came to him; but “‘It’s no use, sir,’ said the foremost plain-clothes
man: ‘There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is
reared.’” And so they stood watching while Tess finished her sleep.
Stonehenge sadly requires such romantic passages as this to renew its
interest, for, truth to tell, the first glimpse of this mysterious
monument of prehistoric ages is wofully disappointing. No use to strive
against that disappointment as you come up the long rises from Amesbury
under the midday sun and see its every time-worn cranny displayed
mercilessly in the impudent eye of day: the interval between anticipation
and realisation is too wide, and the apparent smallness and
insignificance of the great stone circles must, although unwillingly, be
allowed. This comparative insignificance is, however, largely the effect
of their almost boundless environment of vast downs, tumid with the
attendant circles of prehistoric tumuli, each tumulus or barrow crowned
with its clump of trees, like the tufted plumes of a hearse.
[Picture: Stonehenge]
Mystery continues to shroud the origin of Stonehenge, which was probably
standing when the Romans first overran Britain, and seems by the most
reasoned theories to have really been a Temple of the Sun. Its name is
only the comparatively modern one of “Stanenges,” or “the hanging
stones,” given by the Saxons, who discovered it with as much astonishment
as exhibited by any one of a later age, and so named it, not from any
reference to the capital punishment of _sus. per coll._, but from the
great lintel-stones that are laid flat upon the tall rude columns, and
may fancifully be said to hang in mid-air, at a height of twenty-five
feet.
Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a “monument to all time,” speak
not according to knowledge, for the poor old relic is becoming sadly
weatherworn and decrepit, and has aged rapidly of late years. No good
has been wrought it by the fussy interferences and impertinences of
“scientific” men, who, taking advantage of an alleged necessity for
shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the soil and strove to wrest
its secret by the method of sifting the spadesful of earth and stone
chippings. Then a last indignity befell it. Sir Edward Antrobus, of
Amesbury, lord of the manor, claimed Stonehenge as his manorial property,
and, erecting a barbed-wire fence around it, levied a fee of a shilling a
head for admission through the turnstiles that click you through, for all
the world as though you were entering some Earl’s Court Exhibition. The
impudence that has found it possible to do these things, in defiance of
undoubted public rights of way, bulks majestically—much larger than
Stonehenge itself, whose grey pile it indeed belittles and vulgarises.
CHAPTER V
THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD
IT is thirty-eight and a half miles from Salisbury to Dorchester, the
“Casterbridge” of the novels, along the old coach-road to Exeter.
Speaking as an exploratory cyclist, I would ten times rather go the
reverse way, from west to east, for the gradients are all against the
westward traveller, and westerly winds are the prevailing airs during
summer and autumn. It is, indeed, a terribly difficult road, exposed,
and very trying in its long rises. One charming interlude there is,
three miles from Salisbury, at the beautifully situated little village of
Coombe Bissett, set down in the deep valley of an affluent of the
Wiltshire Avon; but it is heartbreaking work climbing out of it again, up
the inclines of Crowden Down. At eight miles’ distance from Salisbury
the old Woodyates Inn, long since re-christened the “Shaftesbury Arms,”
stands in a lonely situation beside the road, looking regretful for
bygone coaching days. Its old name, deriving from “wood-gates,”
indicated its position on the south-western marches of the wooded
district of Cranborne Chase. When railways disestablished coaches and
the road resumed its solitude, the old inn became for a time the home of
William Day’s training establishment for racehorses. He tells, in his
recollections, of the drinking habits of the old Wiltshire farmers in
general, and of two in particular, who used to call at Woodyates when on
their way to or from Salisbury. They would talk, over the fire and their
glasses of grog, somewhat in this fashion of their drunken exploits when
riding home horseback: “Well, John, I fell off ten times.” “Yes, Thomas,
and I fell off a dozen times: you see, I rode the old black horse, and he
always jerks me about so.” It was said that there was scarcely a yard of
ground over the eight miles that these worthies had not fallen on to from
their horses.
[Picture: Pentridge]
At the distance of a mile from the coach-road at this point, where, by
the way, we leave Wilts and enter Dorset, is the Hardy landmark of
“Trantridge,” to be identified with the little village of Pentridge set
down on the map. It was to Trantridge that Tess came early in her
career, from her home at Marnhull in the Vale of Blackmore, to take
service with Mrs. Stoke-D’Urberville of The Slopes, relict of Mr. Simon
Stoke, merchant or money-lender, who had unwarrantably assumed the name,
the crest, and arms of the knightly D’Urbervilles—dead and gone and
powerless to resent the affront. It would be useless to seek The Slopes,
rising in all the glory of its new crimson brick “like a geranium bloom
against the subdued colours around”; but plain to see, not far away, is
the “soft azure landscape of the Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest
land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England, of undoubted
primæval date.” It was in the Chase that the ruin of Tess was wrought by
Alec D’Urberville.
The exceedingly rustic village of Pentridge nestles under the lee of a
long, partly wooded hill, probably the “ridge” referred to in the
place-name. In the little highly restored or rebuilt church with the
stone spirelet is now to be seen, since August, 1902, when it was
erected, the plain white marble tablet:
TO THE MEMORY OF
ROBERT BROWNING,
of Woodyates, in this parish, who died Nov. 25th, 1746,
and is the first known forefather of
Robert Browning, the poet.
He was formerly footman and butler in the
Bankes family.
“All service ranks the same with God.”
BROWNING.
_This Tablet_
was erected by some of the poet’s friends and admirers
1902.
Much reflected glory doubtless accrues to “the Bankes family” from this
tablet, which owes its being to the exertions of Dr. F. J. Furnivall. It
seems that the poet’s ancestor, after severing his connection with the
Bankes, became landlord of the Woodyates Inn, and churchwarden here.
This entrance to Dorsetshire is not so favourable an one as that, for
example, from Somerset, by Templecombe and Stalbridge or Sherborne, where
Dorset is indeed like unto the Land of Promise, a land flowing with milk
and honey, where herds of cattle low musically in mead or byre, and the
earth is alluvial—rich, deep, and sticky.
Here is the more arid, elevated country of open down; chalky, and
producing only coarse grass, pine-trees, bracken, and furze—a
sheep-grazing, as opposed to a cattle-rearing, district. Dorset is
indeed a greatly varied county in the character of its soils. The
sheep-grazing districts may be said to be this of the north-east border,
and those other stretches of lofty, almost waterless chalk downs, running
due east and west, parallel with the coast, with a similarly lengthy, but
broader, stretch in a like direction, from where the downs rise from the
Stour at Sturminster Marshall, past Milton Abbas and Cerne Abbas, on to
Beaminster. In between these are the valleys of the River Frome—the
“Vale of Great Dairies” of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, and the “Vale of
Little Dairies” in the same story, otherwise Blackmore Vale. A glance at
the map will show the River Frome flowing in its “green trough of
sappiness and humidity” from the neighbourhood of Beaminster, past
Chilfroom, Frome Vanchurch, and Frampton, which most obviously take their
name from the stream, to Dorchester, Moreton, Wool, and Wareham, whence
it pours its enriching waters into Poole Harbour; and another glance will
discover the Vale of Little Dairies, or Blackmore, bounded by Blandford
and Minterne Magna, and the heights of High Stoy on the south, and by
Shaftesbury, Wincanton, and Sherborne on the north; including within its
compass Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton, together with a host of small
villages. The natural outlet of this last district—which, despite the
name of “Little Dairies,” given to it in the pages of the novels, is a
larger area than that of the Frome valley, and of course produces in the
aggregation more—is the railway junction of Templecombe, which, beyond
being a mere junction, is also an exceedingly busy and bustling place for
the receipt of all this dairy produce of Blackmore.
Such are, roughly, the main agricultural divisions of Dorset, which is,
to the hard-working farmer who is his own bailiff, with his family to aid
in the dairy-work, still a county where ends may be made to meet, with a
considerable selvedge or overlapping to sweeten his industry. Despite a
very general belief current in towns, there are still considerable
numbers of these families. The farmer and his wife have largely grown
out of the rustic speech, and their sons and daughters—the daughters
especially, the adaptive dears!—have got culture for leisure moments, but
they are none the less practical for that. A generation ago, perhaps,
things were not so pleasing, for the then would-be up-to-date attempted
the absurdity of aping the leisured classes, while seeking to carry on
farming and obtain a living by it. Such as those came to grief, and were
rightly the butts of outside observers, as well as of moralists of their
own class. A thorough-going farmer of that period, who saw the daughters
of his neighbour going on the way to their music-lesson, reported his
feelings and sayings as follows:
“While I and an’ my wife were out a-milken, they maidens went by, an’ I
zaid to her, ‘Where be they maidens a-gwoin’?’ an’ she zaid, ‘Oh! they be
a-gwoin’ to their music.’ An’ I zaid, ‘Oh! a-gwoin’ to their music at
milken-time! That ’ull come to zom’ehat, that wull.’” And it doubtless
did come to a pretty considerable deal, if—as a doctor might say—the
course of the disease was normal.
Resuming the main road, which for the distance of a mile beyond Woodyates
is identical with the old Roman road, the Via Iceniana, that ancient
relic of a past civilisation may presently be seen parting company from
the modern highway, and going off by itself, to the left, across the
downs, making for the great fortified hill of Badbury Rings. It is known
locally as the Achling Dyke, and is somewhat conspicuously elevated above
the bracken, the gorse, and heather of these wilds.
Now, passing a few scattered cottages, we come—in fifteen miles from
Coombe Bissett—to a village, the first on this lonely main road. Tarrant
Hinton, this welcome village, stands on a sparkling little stream,
without doubt the “tarrant,” or torrent, whence it and a small sisterhood
of neighbouring settlements obtain a generic name. There are Tarrant
Gunville, Tarrant Monkton, Tarrant Rawston, Tarrant Rushton, Tarrant
Keynston, and Tarrant Crawford; and then, as below the last-named place
the little stream falls into the Stour, there are no more Tarrants.
[Picture: Eastbury]
To Tarrant Gunville belongs Eastbury Park, a place of Hardyesque and
romantic aspect; but, so far, not made the vehicle of any of his stories.
It has, to be sure, a story of its own—a tale of vaulting ambition which
fell on t’other side. Eastbury was built, like many another ponderous
and overgrown mansion of the eighteenth century, by Vanbrugh, to the
commission of George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who,
growing enormously rich by long-continued peculation, blossomed out as a
patron of the arts and a friend of literature. But before his huge house
could be completed he was gathered to his fathers and to judgment upon
his illegitimate pickings, leaving all his wealth to his grandnephew,
George Bubb Dodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, who lavished £140,000 on
the completion of the works. Here he too became a patron, and
entertained the literary men of his time until 1762, when, dying, the
property went to Earl Temple, who, unable to afford the expense of
maintaining the immense place, actually offered—and offered in vain—an
income of £200 a year to any one who would reside at Eastbury and keep it
in repair. As this bait failed, the great house was dismantled and
demolished, piecemeal, in 1795, only one wing remaining to attest its
former grandeur.
But traces of that grandeur are not wanting, from the iron railings,
stone piers, and decorative kerbs, carved boldly with an acanthus-leaved
design, that conduct into the demesne, to the magnificent clumps of
beeches and other forest trees studding the sward of what was the park;
and that remaining wing itself, still disclosing in its arcade, or
loggia, something of Vanbrugh’s design.
Eastbury, of course, is haunted—so much is to be expected of such a
place; but those who have seen the headless coachman and his ghostly
four-in-hand issuing from the park gates, or returning, are growing
scarce, and times are become so sceptical that even they cannot obtain
credence. So, with a sigh for the decay of belief, we will e’en on
through Pimperne down to Blandford, which good town, of fine dignified
classic architectural presence, the coach-road enters in a timid
back-doors manner, down a narrow byway.
Blandford is further dignified by that curious pedantic Latinity very
marked in many Dorsetshire place-names. In this manner it is made to
figure as “Blandford Forum,” a rendering of “Blandford Market.” In Mr.
Thomas Hardy’s pages it is “Shottsford Forum,” and so appears in his
story of _Barbara of the House of Grebe_, in _Far from the Madding
Crowd_, and again in _The Woodlanders_, wherein it is stated, from the
mouth of a rustic character, that “Shottsford is Shottsford still: you
can’t victual your carcass there unless you’ve got money, and you can’t
buy a cup of genuine there, whether or no”; this last a sad drawback from
the amenities of a delightful town. But there is a very excellent pump,
and an historic, in the broad High Street, whereon, cast in enduring
iron, it may be read how a certain John Bastard, a “considerable sharer”
in the great calamity by which Blandford was burnt in 1731, “humbly
erected this monument, in grateful Acknowledgement of the Divine Mercy,
That has since raised this Town, Like the Phoenix from its Ashes, to its
present flourishing and beautiful State.” That, it will be allowed, is
rather a fine, curly, and romantic way of putting it. A rider to this
inscription goes on to say that in 1899 the Corporation of Blandford
converted the pump into a drinking-fountain, and that the Blandford
Waterworks Company, not halting in good deeds, gratuitously supplies the
water.
The pilgrim who, arriving in Blandford hot, dusty and thirsty, and
perhaps mindful of that alleged impossibility of buying a cup of genuine,
essays to drink from the fountain, is at first surprised at the keen
interest taken in his proceedings by a quickly collecting group of
urchins. Their curiosity appears to be in the nature of surprise at the
sight of a grown man drinking water, but light is shed upon it when,
pressing hard the obstinate knob that releases the fount, the thing
suddenly gives way and squirts half a pint or so up his sleeve. This is
a never-failing form of entertainment to the youth of Blandford, and a
cheap one.
Not once, but several times has Blandford been destroyed by fire. It
owed these disasters to the old Dorsetshire fashion of thatched roofs,
and only in time, by dint of repeated happenings in this sort, learned
wisdom. This light dawned at the time when the classic revival in
architecture was flourishing, and thus, as already hinted, Blandford’s
High Street is wholly of that character. Classicism does not often make
for beauty in English towns, but here the general effect is admirable,
and although the stone of the fine church-tower—designed in the same
taste—is of a jaundiced greenish-yellow hue, it is a noble feature.
Blandford’s natives have sometimes won to a great deal more than local
fame; witness Alfred Stevens, the designer of the Wellington monument in
St. Paul’s Cathedral, who was born in 1817, in Salisbury Street, that
back-doors coach-road entrance into the town already mentioned.
Willowes, the unhappy husband of Barbara, of the House of Grebe, was a
descendant of one of the old families of glass-painters of Shottsford
mentioned in that story, and more particularly referred to by Aubrey, the
antiquary, who says: “Before the Reformation, I believe there was no
country or great town in England but had glasse painters. Old Harding of
Blandford in Dorsetshire, where I went to schoole, was the only country
glasse painter that ever I knew. Upon play daies I was wont to visit his
shop and furnaces. He dyed about 1643, aged about 83 or more.” That
craft has long since died out from the town.
[Picture: Blandford Forum]
A beautiful backward view of the town is obtained on leaving it, over the
Town Bridge that spans the sluggish, lily-grown Stour, at the entrance to
Lord Portman’s noble park of Bryanstone. Here a dense overarching canopy
of trees gives a grateful shade on summer days and frames the distant
prospect whence the classic tower of the church grandly rises. The
entrance-gates to the domain of Bryanstone are jealously kept locked and
guarded, but there be ways of circumventing this churlish exclusiveness
and of seeing the astonishingly beautiful scenery of the park, as the
present writer has by chance discovered for himself. You, at the cost of
some effort in hill-climbing, take the defences in the rear, and entering
away back by the farmstead and workshops of the estate, come down by the
finest of the scenery to those selfsame locked gates at these outskirts
of Blandford, to observe and hear with some secret satisfaction the
expressed horror of the lodge-keeper, only too anxious to let you out and
be rid of you.
But, for the unenterprising, there is a sufficiently beautiful distant
view of the park and of the new mansion from the Town Bridge. A former
Lord Portman in 1780 employed James Wyatt to build him a classic mansion
which remained until the rule of the present owner of the title, who
demolished and replaced it with the fine mansion designed by Norman Shaw,
R.A., and built in red brick and Portland stone.
CHAPTER VI
THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER
FROM this point the old coach-road becomes astonishingly hilly, so that
mere words cannot accurately portray it, and recourse must be had to the
eloquent armoury of the printer’s case to set it forth in any truly
convincing manner. The series of semicircular dumpling hills is not
adequately to be shadowed forth by the aid of mere brackets—we must
picture them thus:
[Picture: Representation of Hills in Type]
and, to give some notion of the quality of the surface during the heats
of summer, let a glaring white surface five inches deep in dust and
powdered flint be imagined, the whole stirred up into a stifling halo of
floating particles by the frequent passage of a flock of sheep. Such is
the Exeter Road between Blandford and Dorchester in the merry months of
summer.
Five miles of this bring us to the village of Winterborne Whitchurch,
anciently referred to as “Album Monasterium” or “Blaunch Minster,”
situated in the stony bottom where the little stream called the
Winterborne does not in summer flow across the road. John Wesley,
grandfather of the more famous John, the founder of Methodism, was vicar
of this parish in 1658, and on the Restoration was dispossessed, when he
took to a life of itinerant preaching amid the hills and dales of
Dorsetshire, not altogether dissimilar from that of his celebrated
grandson. Here, about 1540, was born George Turberville, the poet. To
this succeeds, in less than another three miles, Milborne St. Andrew, on
the less dried up Mill Bourne. This, the “Millpond St. Jude’s” alluded
to in _Far from the Madding Crowd_, is a pretty place, of an old-world
coaching interest, reflected from its partly thatched “Royal Oak” inn and
the post office, once the “White Hart,” with the imposing effigy of a
white hart still prominent on its cornice, in company with those of two
foxes and a row of miniature cannon. Up along a byroad, past the
feathery poplars that lend so feminine an air of beauty to the village,
is the church, and then the Manor House Farm, once the residence of the
Mansell Pleydells, who since the building of Whatcombe House, near by
Winterborne Whitchurch, in 1758, have left this residence to farming.
The red-brick pillars of the entrance-gates remain—partly ruined and
standing foolishly, without a trace of the old carriage drive that once
went between them—on the grass, surmounted still with sculptured displays
of military trophies surrounding a cartouche bearing the lichened arms of
the Pleydells, including an inescutcheon of pretence showing that before
they allied themselves with a Mansell they married money with a Morton.
It is a fine house, full of character, with unusually—and somewhat
foreign-looking—high-pitched roof. Grand old trees lead up to it, and in
the distance one perceives a manorial pigeon-house, against the skyline.
The old drive led round to the other side of the mansion, where it is
divided from the meadows by a moatlike cut in the Mill Bourne, now,
however, richer in mud than in water, and crossed by a brick bridge. We
can picture Lady Constantine, the susceptible young and wealthy widow of
the defunct Sir Blount, stealing at night over this bridge, to visit
Swithin St. Cleeve, stargazing in his lonely tower on the hilltop. In
the garden, with its sundial, are pretty old-world box-edged flower-beds
and shady arbours. Foundations of many demolished buildings are
traceable in the meadows.
[Picture: The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew]
The scene of _Two on a Tower_ is a selection from various places. “The
tower,” Mr. Hardy writes to me, “had two or three originals—Horton,
Charborough, etc.” Those other places are duly described in these pages,
but the “etc.” covers the curious brick obelisk built on the summit of
the earthwork-encircled hill near by this old manor-house of Milborne St.
Andrew, and called Weatherbury Castle. Standing on this “fir-shrouded
hilltop,” one may see, for many miles around, summer conflagrations among
the furze on Bere Heath, the tall tower in Charborough Park, which, much
more than this obelisk, resembles Swithin’s observatory, and, near at
hand, below, this old manor-house, the “Welland House” of the story.
From this eyrie, too, you perceive the old Exeter Road swooping whitely
downhill, and hear the hum of threshing-machines, coming up, like the
drowsy buzz of insects, from the vale.
[Picture: Weatherbury Castle]
It is not difficult to detect sarcasm in the description of this hill.
It “was (according to some antiquaries) an old Roman camp—if it were not
(as others insisted) an old British castle, or (as the rest swore) an old
Saxon field of Witanagemote—with remains of an outer and an inner vallum,
a winding path leading up between their overlapping ends by an easy
ascent.”
[Picture: The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle]
Not so easy, really—indeed, demanding a rather strenuous climb. And when
you are on the crest of that ancient glacis (impregnable it might well
have been when men fought hand to hand) it is with some difficulty you
penetrate the dense woodland growing within this _ceinture_. Little can
in these times be seen of the obelisk from without: only from one
particular view-point can you observe its ultimate inches and the metal
ball that caps it, rising mysteriously from amid the topmost branches of
the fir-trees. Its situation is exactly described in the story: “The
gloom and solitude which prevailed round the base were remarkable. The
sob of the environing trees” (how like, by the way, to that passage in
Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s _Ruddigore_, “the sob of the breeze is heard in the
trees”) “was here expressively manifest, and, moved by the light breeze,
their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted pendulums,
while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar’s sides, or occasionally
clicked in catching each other. Below the level of their summits the
masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never pierced that
moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation. Pads of moss grew in the joints
of the stonework, and here and there shade-loving insects had engraved on
the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning, but curious and
suggestive.”
[Picture: E.M.P. inscription on obelisk] The why or purpose of this
slight brick structure are lost. The only clue, afforded by the
inscription on a stone tablet set in the lichened bricks, points to it
being the handiwork of a Pleydell. It was, in fact, built by Edmund
Morton Pleydell, but his purpose, if indeed he had one beyond a singular
notion of ornament, has passed, with himself, beyond these voices; and
the neglected condition of the monument—if indeed it be a monument—fully
bears out the moral reflection in _Two on a Tower_. “Here stood this
aspiring piece of masonry, erected as the most conspicuous and
ineffaceable reminder of a man that could be thought of; and yet the
whole aspect of the memorial betokened forgetfulness. Probably not a
dozen people within the district knew the name of the person
commemorated, while perhaps not a soul remembered whether the column were
hollow or solid, whether with or without a tablet explaining its date and
purpose.”
Regaining the high road and passing uphill by where the Dewlish toll-gate
once stood, and by an up-and-down course infinitely varied as to
gradient, we come at length down to the valley of the Piddle, and to
Piddletown, the “Weatherbury” of _Far from the Madding Crowd_, where
Gabriel Oak, come down in the world by the agency of Fate and his foolish
young sheep-dog, took service with his distractingly elusive dear,
Bathsheba Everdene, the lady-farmer. Weatherbury, as Mr. Hardy
regretfully tells us, is not the Weatherbury he once knew. It has indeed
been very largely rebuilt, and the rather stern and prim limestone
cottages that stand prominently in one of its several streets do not
altogether prepossess one in favour of this village that is not quite a
townlet and yet may quite possibly resent the more rustic definition.
The “several” streets are, after all, rather roads, with rows of houses
and cottages less integrally than incidentally there, and the several are
perhaps reducible to a term less connotive of number; but they run in
unexpected directions and uncovenanted angles, and so make an imposing
show, comparable with the effect produced by six supers who, by judicious
stage-management in passing and repassing, can be made to represent an
army. But the Piddle, running sparkling and clear through Piddletown,
redeems the conjoined effect of those streets and gives the place a final
and definitive _cachet_ of rurality, by no means belied by the very
large, though very rustic, church—happily still unrestored, and, with its
tall pews and fine Jacobean carved oak choir-gallery, a perfect picture
of an ancient Wessex place of worship. Hardean village choirs and
Gabriel Oak’s bass voice take, if it be possible, an even greater air of
actuality to the pilgrim who enters here.
The interest of Piddletown church is added to by the fine and curious
bowl font, diapered in an unusual pattern, and by the tombs of the
Martins of Athelhampton, who lie mediævally recumbent in effigy in their
own chapel, quite unconcerned, although scored over with the initials of
the undistinguished, and although their old manor-house of Athelhampton,
near by, on the road to Bere Regis, has since the time they became
extinct passed through several alien hands. Poor old fellows! Their
somewhat threatening motto, under their old monkey crest, of “He who
looks at Martin’s ape Martin’s ape shall look at him!” has lost any point
it ever had.
[Picture: Piddletown]
A touching epitaph desires your prayers for two of the family:
Here lyeth the body of Xpofer Martyn Esquyer,
Sone and heyre unto Syr Willym Martyn, knyght,
Pray for there Soules with harty desyre
That bothe may be sure of Eternall lyght;
Calling to Remembraunce that ev’ry wyhgt
Most nedys dye, and therefor lett us pray
As other for us may do Another day.
This church of Piddletown, or “Weatherbury,” is the scene of Sergeant
Troy’s belated remorse and of the acute misery of that incident where,
coming by the light of a lantern and planting flowers on Fanny Robin’s
grave, he sleeps in the porch while the rain-storm breaks and the
storm-water from the gurgoyles of the tower spouts furiously over the
spot.
“The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle’s jaws directed all its
vengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion,
and boiled like chocolate. The water accumulated and washed deeper down,
and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into the night. . . . The
flowers so carefully planted by Fanny’s repentant lover began to move and
writhe in their bed. The winter-violets turned slowly upside down, and
became a mere mat of mud. Soon the snowdrops and other bulbs danced in
the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron. Plants of the tufted
species were loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.”
The street beside the church retains a good deal of its quaint features
of thatch and plaster, with deep eaves where the house-martins build. A
pretty corner including an old thatched house with architectonic windows
closely resembling those of a Queen Anne bureau, and supported on pillars
having a cousinship with classic art, is especially noticeable.
[Picture: A quaint corner in Piddletown]
If we wish to see the old mansion that served as model for Bathsheba’s
farm, we shall not find it in Piddletown, but must turn aside and proceed
up the valley of the Piddle, in the direction of Piddlehinton and
Piddletrenthide—usually termed “Longpiddle.” Before reaching these, at
the distance of rather over a mile, we come to Lower Walterstone, where,
behind noble groups of beeches, horse-chestnuts, and sycamores growing on
raised grassy banks, it will be found, in the shape of a Jacobean mansion
eloquently portrayed by the novelist:
“By daylight, the bower of Oak’s new-found mistress, Bathsheba Everdene,
presented itself as a hoary building, of the Jacobean stage of Classic
Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion which told
at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the
manorial hall upon a small estate around it, now altogether effaced as a
distinct property, and merged in the vast tract of a non-resident
landlord which comprised several such modest demesnes. Fluted pilasters,
worked from the solid stone, decorated its front, and above the roof
pairs of chimneys were here and there linked by an arch, some gables and
other unmanageable features still retaining traces of their Gothic
extraction. Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions
upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or sengreen sprouted
from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings. A gravel walk leading
from the door to the road in front was incrusted at the sides with more
moss—here it was a silver-green variety, the nut-brown of the gravel
being visible to the width of only a foot or two in the centre. This
circumstance, and the generally sleepy air of the whole prospect here,
together with the animated and contrasting state of the reverse façade,
suggested to the imagination that, on the adaptation of the building for
farming purposes, the vital principle of the house had turned round
inside its body, to face the other way.”
The way from Piddletown to Dorchester, passing the hamlet singularly and
interestingly named “Troy Town,” which, although itself intrinsically
without visible interest, invites speculation, presently passes over
Yellowham Hill, clothed in luxuriant woods. This spot, the “Yalbury
Hill” of Troy’s excruciatingly pitiful meeting with Fanny Robin, figures,
together with the woodlands—the “Yalbury Great Wood” of _Under the
Greenwood Tree_—in several others among the Wessex stories. Coming to it
in old times, the coaches changed horses at the “Buck’s Head” inn, now
quite disestablished and forgot, save for the humorous description of it
to be found in the pages of _Far from the Madding Crowd_. Unswervingly
the highway passes over its crest and down on the other side, the
wayfarer along it watched by bright-eyed squirrels and the other lesser
fauna of this dense covert, while he thinks himself unobserved. It is a
lovely road, but you should see it and its encompassing woods in autumn,
when the October sunshine, with that characteristic golden sheen peculiar
to the time of year, falls between the rich red trunks of the firs on to
the golden-brown of the dried bracken; when the acorns are ripe on the
dwarf oaks and fall with startling little crashes into the sere leaves of
the undergrowth; when the nuts are ripe on the hazels and the
squirrels—too busy now to follow the wayfarer’s movements—are
industriously all day long gathering store of them over against winter.
Then Yellowham Woods are at their finest.
[Picture: Lower Walterstone Farm: Original of Bathsheba’s farm]
Where the descent from this eminence reaches an intermediate level,
preparatory to diving again downwards, the road takes a curve through the
park-lands of Kingston House, a stately but cold-looking mansion of
stone, figuring in that first novel, _Desperate Remedies_, as “Knapwater
House.” The bias of the architect, as he then was, is prominently
displayed in Mr. Hardy’s description of it: “The house was regularly and
substantially built of clean grey freestone throughout, in that plainer
fashion of Greek classicism which prevailed at the latter end of the last
century, when the copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic
variations in the Roman orders. The main block approximated to a square
on the ground plan, having a projection in the centre of each side,
surmounted by a pediment. From each angle of the north side ran a line
of buildings lower than the rest, turning inwards again at their farthest
end, and forming within them a spacious open court, within which
resounded an echo of astounding clearness. These erections were in their
turn backed by ivy-covered ice-houses, laundries, and stables, the whole
mass of subsidiary buildings being half buried beneath close-set shrubs
and trees.”
Leaving aside, for the present, an exploration of Stinsford, down the
next turning, to come later to a particular and intimate discussion of
it, we proceed to Dorchester, whose houses, and those of its allied
suburb of Fordington, are now seen, crowning the ridge on which the old
county town stands.
CHAPTER VII
DORCHESTER
DORCHESTER, the “Casterbridge” of the novels, stands upon or, more
correctly, above, the River Frome, and from that circumstance derived its
ancient Roman name of Durnovaria, whose Latinity Mr. Hardy has exploited
in the name of “Durnover” he confers upon Fordington. The Romans
themselves did by no means invent their name for the station they founded
here, but just adapted the title given by the native tribe of Durotriges
to their settlement. Those natives, who were of Welsh stock, styled
their habitation by the sufficiently Welsh name of Dwrinwyr, which, like
all Cymric place-names, was descriptive and alluded to its watery
situation.
The approach to Dorchester has suffered in late years, in the pictorial
point of view, from the decay and destruction of many of those
magnificent old elms that once formed a noble introduction along this,
the “London Road”; but it is not wholly to be bankrupted of beauty, for,
although Dorchester may continue to grow, it is not in this direction
that its suburbs will be thrown out. The flat water-meadows of the Frome
forbid building operations here, and in effect say, at the bridge
immediately below where Fordington on its ridge stands on the thitherward
bank of the stream—“thus far and no farther!” From this approach,
looking to where Fordington’s houses die away on the left hand, and to
where the chalky downs begin to rise, you may obtain a distant view of
the novelist’s residence, a house he himself designed, standing beside
the Wareham Road near where an old turnpike-gate stood, and called from
it “Max Gate.” Looking, however, straight ahead, the road into
Dorchester is seen becoming a street and going with inflexible Roman
directness through the town, with the ancient church tower of Fordington
slightly to the left, and the equally ancient church of St. Peter’s
immediately in front, in the centre of the town, where the two main
streets cross. Attendant modern churches and chapels, and the Town Hall,
with spires, act as satellites. To the right hand, rising bulky from the
huddled mass of houses, is a grey building which but a little experience
of touring in England identifies without need of inquiry as the gaol.
Dorchester, figuring as the “Casterbridge” of that mayor whose surprising
history is set forth in that powerful story, bulks large in the whole
series of Wessex novels—as how could it fail of doing, seeing that the
novelist himself was born at Upper Bockhampton, only three miles away?
In masterly fashion he has described its salient points, as they were
before modernity had come to obliterate them, or at least to take off the
sharp edge of their singularity. He has expended much thought upon Roman
Dorchester, and speculated upon what manner of place it was fifteen
hundred years ago. “Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street,
alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed
dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep
about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier
or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest
for a space of fifteen hundred years.” Nay, even within the precincts of
his own garden, on the edge of the rotund upland that looks so wanly down
upon the railway, relics of the legionaries have been discovered. Three
of those stout warriors were there found. “Each body was fitted with,
one may almost say, perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the
head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other, the
tight-fitting situation being strongly suggestive of the chicken in the
egg-shell.”
More attuned to modern times is that description of Dorchester as it
appeared when Susan, Henchard’s wife, with Elizabeth-Jane, entered it
from the London Road that evening. Wonderfully observed and true is that
passage where the light of the street lamps, glimmering through those
engirdling trees that were then, even more than now, the great feature of
the town, is made a snug and comforting contrast with the outside
country, seeming “strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering
its nearness to life.” Then the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of
the people, as reflected in the character of the goods displayed in shop
windows, is neatly shown, in a list of those objects: the hay-rakes, the
seed-lips, butter-firkins, hoes and spades and mattocks; the
horse-embrocations, scythes, reaping-hooks, and hedger’s and ditcher’s
gloves, articles all of everyday requirement.
The “grizzled church” to which they came was St. Peter’s, whose tower
showed “how completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had
been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in the crevices
thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass, almost as far up as the
very battlements.” Yes, and so one vividly remembers it; but restoration
has recently made away with all these evidences of age, and cleaned the
stonework and renewed and pointed it, greatly to the aid of the tower’s
structural stability, ’tis true, but the very death of picturesque
effect. There is a pleasing thing here, at the foot of this tower, where
High East Street and High West Street join. It is the bronze life-sized
statue, in his habit as he lived, of “Pa’son Barnes,” otherwise the
Reverend William Barnes, the Dorset poet, described by Thomas Hardy as he
is represented here—“an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak,
knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his
shoulders and a stout staff in his hand.” This quaint figure, whose life
and thoughts and writings were racy of the soil whence he sprang—he was
born in the Vale of Blackmore—was for many years a quite inadequately
rewarded schoolmaster, and only late in life was given, first the living
of Whitcomb, and then that of Winterborne Came, near Dorchester. His
poems in the Dorsetshire vernacular, long known and admired, were not
pecuniarily successful. “What a mockery is life!” said he. “They praise
me, and take away my bread! They may be putting up a statue to me some
day, when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live. I asked for
bread, and they gave me a stone!”
Prophetic indeed! for here is the statue, with beneath it the
inscription:
WILLIAM BARNES
1801–1886
and the quotation from one of his own folk-poems:
Zoo now I hope his kindly fëace
Is gone to vind a better plëace,
But still wi’ vo’k a’ left behind
He’ll always be a kept in mind.
The mural monument of a sixteenth-century Thomas Hardy, within the
church, attracts attention. The inscription states him to have been
“esquire” and of Melcombe Regis, and goes on to describe his benefactions
to the town and the gratitude of the “Baylives and Burgisses” therefor.
To “commend to posterity an example soe worthy of imitation,” they
erected this tablet. He is said to be the common ancestor of Admiral Sir
Thomas Hardy, the friend and comrade of Nelson, and of Thomas Hardy, the
novelist.
Still from this tower of St. Peter’s sounds the curfew chime, with the
stroke of eight o’clock every evening, as described in the story; its
“peremptory clang” the signal for shop-shutting throughout the town.
“Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol,
another from the gable of an alms-house, with a preparative creak of
machinery more audible than the note of the bell.”
In High East Street stands, just as described, the principal inn—I
suppose in these times one should, for fear of disrespect say “hotel”—of
Dorchester, the “King’s Arms,” white-faced, with the selfsame “spacious
bow-window projected into the street over the main portico,” the whole
not too imposing for comfort, and not too homely for dignity. It was a
coaching house in days gone by. From a step above the pavement on the
opposite side of the street Susan and Elizabeth-Jane, amid the crowd,
witnessed the dinner given to the mayor, and through the archway Boldwood
carried Bathsheba, fainting at the news of her husband’s death.
Equally white-faced, but a good deal more picturesque, is the “White
Hart,” down at the end, or the beginning if you will, of the sloping
street, as you enter the town. By it runs the Frome, and in its
courtyard on market-days may be seen such a concourse of carriers’ carts
as rarely witnessed nowadays. Dorchester is a busy carrying centre, by
no means spoiled in that respect by railways, which yet fail to reach
many of its surrounding villages.
The brick bridge that here spans the Frome, and the stone bridge some
distance farther away, spanning a branch of the same stream out away in
the meads, have their parts in the _Mayor of Casterbridge_. “These
bridges had speaking countenances. Every projection in each was worn
down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from generations
of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year made restless
movements against these parapets, as they had stood there, meditating on
the aspect of affairs. In the case of the more pliable bricks and
stones, even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the same mixed
mechanism. The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint;
since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the
coping off and throw it down into the river, in reckless defiance of the
magistrates. For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of
the town—those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in
crime. Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their
meditations in preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so
clear.” He goes on to tell how there was a marked difference in quality
between the frequenters of the near bridge of brick and the far one of
stone. The more thoroughgoing failures and those with the most
threadbare characters, or with no characters at all, save bad ones,
preferred the near bridge: to reach it entailed less trouble, and it was
not for such as them to mind the glare of publicity.
“The _misérables_ who would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer
stamp. They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is
called ‘out of a situation’ from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient
of the professional class—shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get
rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more
weary time between dinner and dark.” These unfortunates gazed steadily
into the river, never turning to notice passers-by, and indeed shrinking
from observation. And so day by day they looked and looked in the
stream, until at last their bodies were sometimes found in it.
[Picture: Ten Hatches, Dorchester]
When Henchard’s ruin was complete, he too began to frequent the stone
bridge, and would have ended in the same way, not at the bridge itself,
but over in the meadows where the many branches of the Frome are
regulated and controlled by a number of sluices known as Ten Hatches.
“To the east of Casterbridge lay moors and meadows, through which much
water flowed. The wanderer in this direction, who should stand still for
a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these
waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones,
from near and far parts of the moor. At a hole in a rotten weir they
executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone
breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic
cymballing; and at Durnover Weir they hissed. The spot at which their
instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence
during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds.”
The ruined mayor, to whom, and not the cold, successful Donald Farfrae,
the reader’s sympathies go out, would have ended all his troubles here
with a plunge in the waters, had it not been for the ghastly floating
Skimmington effigy of himself he saw floating down the current as he was
about to drop in.
“Gray’s Bridge,” as the stone structure on the London Road is known, is
that toward which Bob Loveday, in the _Trumpet Major_, gazed anxiously,
awaiting the coach bearing his Matilda, and across it, of course, on
their way to Longpiddle, went those “Crusted Characters,” telling stories
in the carrier’s cart jogging along with them so comfortably from the
“White Hart.”
The fateful, almost sentient, character many natural objects are made to
assume in the march of Mr. Hardy’s tragic stories is expressly shown in
his description of the Roman amphitheatre of Maumbury, at the farther or
western extremity of Dorchester, beside the road to Weymouth. He styles
it “the Ring, on the Budmouth Road,” and explains how “it was to
Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly
of the same magnitude.” It is not, as might be gathered from this
passage, a building, like the Coliseum, but a vast amphitheatre formed by
earthworks. Used by the Romans as the scene of their gladiatorial
displays, it has doubtless witnessed many an act of savage cruelty, but
is now a solitude. A sinister place it has been always, for, when
executions were public affairs, the gallows stood within the old arena;
and until well into the eighteenth century the populace came to it in
thousands to witness the execution of felons where, before the dawn of
the Christian era, fighting men had struggled to the death: where
perhaps, in early Christian times, in the days of the Diocletian
persecution, Christians had been sacrificed. It was here, in 1705, that
Mary Channing was executed, under the most fearful circumstances of
barbarity belonging to the penalties prescribed for _petit treason_. The
crimes known by that name included several forms of rebellion against
authority, among them the murder of a husband by a wife. A husband being
then, much more than now, in the eyes of the law in a position of
authority over his wife, to murder him was not merely murder—it was
_petit treason_ as well, and therefore deserving of exceptional
punishment. Mary Brookes, married by the wish of her parents, against
her own inclination, to one Richard Channing of Dorchester, a grocer,
almost ruined him by her extravagance, and then poisoned him by giving
him white mercury, first in rice-milk, and twice afterwards in a glass of
wine. At the Summer Assizes, 1704, she was found guilty and condemned to
death. On March 21st, 1705, accordingly, she was strangled here, in this
arena, and then burned, the horrible spectacle being witnessed by ten
thousand persons. She was but nineteen years of age. This Golgotha was
disestablished in 1767, when the gallows was removed to the decent
solitudes of Bradford Down, a mile and a half along the Exeter Road, on
the way to Bridport. It was to this spot that a mayor of Dorchester
desired to escort a distinguished traveller leaving the town, after being
presented with the customary address. “May I be allowed to accompany
your Highness as far as the gallows?” he asked, greatly to the dismay of
that departing Serenity, to whom the allusion seemed more ill-omened than
really it was. It is a tale told of many places and many mayors, and he
would be a clever commentator who should distinguish the real original.
The lone amphitheatre of Maumbury has thus, it will be seen, real
tragical associations fitting it for the novelist’s more sombre humours.
He tells how intrigues were there carried forward, how furtive and
sinister meetings happened within the rim of these ancient earthworks,
and how, although the patching up of long-standing feuds might be
attempted on this spot, seldom had it been the place of meeting of happy
lovers. In this ring, then, the reconciliation of Susan and Henchard
took place, after eighteen years, and was but the prelude to miseries and
disasters.
CHAPTER VIII
DORCHESTER (_continued_)
HENCHARD’S house—“one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old
brick,” there are many such here—was in the neighbourhood of North
Street, and not far from that Corn Exchange where Bathsheba was wont, on
market days, to mingle with the burly farmers and corn-factors, like a
yacht among ironclads, displaying for inspection the sample wheat in her
outstretched palm.
Down here, too, is the gaol, whose mass is seen from the meads on
approaching the town. It has been much altered, but the heavy stone
gateway, together with the flanking walls of red brick, is very much as
of old. Happily, such things as are noticed in that gruesome short
story, _The Withered Arm_, are things only of dreadful memory. At that
time the populace of Dorchester were accustomed to wait below in the
meadows, eager to witness the executioner, the criminals—murderers,
burglars, rick-firers, sheep and horse-stealers, even down to those
convicted of petty larceny—being capitally condemned and hanged as high
as, possibly indeed higher than, Haman, whose place of suspension is
notoriously and traditionally lofty. Gertrude Lodge, coming here for the
cure of her withered arm by the agency of the dead man’s touch, observed,
as all could then not help observing, those “three rectangular lines
against the sky,” which indicated the coming execution and the morrow’s
exhibition, to be followed by the merry-makings of Hang Fair. When she
enquired the hour of execution, she was told: “The same as usual—twelve
o’clock, or as soon after as the London mail-coach gets in. We always
wait for that, in case of a reprieve.”
[Picture: Dorchester Gaol]
In Dorchester Gaol—we have no space here for those merely actual persons
of flesh and blood who have been incarcerated, or who have suffered in
it—those more real characters of fiction, Boldwood and Marston were
confined; and hence the Shottsford watchmaker of _The Three Strangers_,
lying under sentence of death, escaped along the downs to Higher
Crowstairs, where, while sheltering in the ingle-nook of the cottage, two
other strangers, one of them the hangman deputed to execute the demands
of the law upon him on the morrow, take shelter from the weather.
To follow this gloomy train a little longer, the veritable Hangman’s
Cottage, home of this erstwhile busy functionary, at a time when
Dorchester demanded the whole time and energies of a Jack Ketch, and not
a very occasional visit from one common to the whole kingdom, may be
seen, at the foot of Glydepath Lane, in a fine damp situation near the
river. It is one of a tiny group of heavily thatched old rustic cottages
built of grouted flint and chalk, faced and patched with red brick, and
held together with iron ties, so that in their old age they shall not,
some night, altogether collapse and deposit their inhabitants among the
potatoes, the peas, and cabbages of their fertile gardens. Dorchester
paid its hangman a regular salary, and in the intervals between his more
important business, he was under engagement to perform those minor
punishments of whipping and scourging, of putting in the stocks, and of
pillorying, by whose plentiful administration Old England was made the
“Merry England” of our forefathers. Let not the reader, however, seek a
covert satire here. It is not to be gainsaid that it was a “Merry
England,” for the times were so brutal that, in all such degrading and
pitiful spectacles as these, the populace took the keenest delight.
Sufficient for the day—! and those who made merry did not stop to
consider that they who were now spectators might soon very likely afford
in their own persons the same spectacle.
Miserable times! Proof of them, do you need seek it, is to be found in
the Dorchester Museum, where the leaden weights, boldly inscribed
“MERCY,” are pointed out as the contribution, years ago, of an
exceptionally tender-hearted governor of the gaol to a more pitiful
method of ending the condemned man who was to die for his crime of arson.
[Picture: The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester]
The man was of unusually light weight, and, as those were the times when
men really were slowly and painfully hanged and choked by degrees, before
criminals were given a drop and their necks broken, it was thought a
kindly thing on the part of this governor that he should have provided
these heavy weights, to attach to this particular victim’s feet and so
help to shorten his misery.
This museum it was that Lucetta, keen to get the girl out of the way,
suggested for Elizabeth Jane’s entertainment; with affected enthusiasm
and a good deal of veiled womanly sarcasm at the expense of antiquities,
describing how it contained “crowds of interesting things—skeletons,
teeth, old pots and pans, ancient boots and shoes, birds’ eggs—all
charmingly instructive.”
But enough of such things, let us to other quarters.
Looking on to the cheerful and prosperous South Street from the corner of
Durngate Street is the substantial “grey façade” of Lucetta’s house,
where lived Henchard’s lady-love, whose affections were so readily
transferable. The lower portion of this, the “High Place Hall” of the
story, has suffered a transformation into business premises, but the
resounding alleyways of Durngate Street and neighbouring lanes are as
gloomy as those spots are described. “At night the forms of passengers
were patterned by the lamps in black shadows upon the pale walls,” and so
they are still.
But the description of Lucetta’s house in those pages is a composite
picture; a good deal of it deriving from an old mansion in another part
of the town. This will be found by taking a narrow thoroughfare leading
out of the north side of High West Street, and called, in different parts
of its course, Glydepath Lane and Glydepath Street. In this quiet byway
is the early eighteenth-century mansion known as Colyton House, sometime
a town residence of the Churchill family, and so named from the little
Devonshire town of Colyton, near which is situated Ash, that old
dwelling, now a farmhouse, whence the historic Churchills sprang.
Readily to be seen, in a blank wall, is the long-filled-in archway, with
the dreadful keystone mask, alluded to in the pages of _The Mayor of
Casterbridge_.
[Picture: Colyton House, Dorchester]
“Originally the mask had exhibited a comic leer, as could still be
discerned; but generations of Casterbridge boys had thrown stones at the
mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the blows thereof had chipped off the
lips and jaws as if they had been eaten away by disease.” Its appearance
is indeed of a ghastly leprous nature, infinitely shuddery.
At this end of the town, out upon the Charminster road is the great Roman
encampment of Poundbury, or, locally, “Pummery,” where Henchard spread
that feast, deserted by those for whom it was intended, in favour of the
rival entertainment in the West Walks, prepared by the hateful Farfrae,
that paragon of all the business and higher virtues, whom the reader
perversely, but not unnaturally, detests. “Roman” it has been in this
last passage declared, but, in truth, its origin has been as widely
disputed as that of Weatherbury Castle, where the varying theories arouse
Mr. Hardy’s sarcasm so markedly. It lies without the site of the Roman
walls of Durnovaria, and probably formed some advanced outpost or great
camp in the long years of the Roman occupation of Britain, before the
establishment of security and the growth of their towns. Those Roman
walls are now for the most part gone and their sites were long ago
planted with avenues, now growing aged and past their prime, and ceased
to be that clean-cut barrier between _urbs_ and _rure_ they formed of
old, when Dorchester of pre-railway days had not grown too big for that
girdle the Romans had set about her: a girdle not too constrictive for
the needs of the Middle Age, nor even in the eighteenth century with any
suspicion of tight-lacing, but all too compressive soon after the coaches
had given way to trains, and steel rails and steam along them had sent up
the birthrate. A notable passage in _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ tells
how there were not, quite a little while ago, any suburbs here, in the
modern sense, nor any gradual fusion of town and country. “The farmer’s
boy could sit under his barleymow, and pitch a stone into the window of
the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances
standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a
sheep stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa,’ that floated in
at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”
But those bounds have in several places been leaped, and, in especial
where the South Walk runs, modern villas have redly replaced the golden
grain or the green pastures. Changed manners and customs have brought
about this alteration, quite as much as increased population. The four
old traditional streets of the town, together with their more immediate
offshoots, have been resigned more exclusively to business than of yore,
and made less a residence. The butchers, the bakers, the
candlestick-makers, who would once have scorned to live anywhere else
than over “the shop,” will now not very often condescend to make their
homes in the upper stages of their “stores” or “establishments,” or by
what other pretty names modern finesse elects to describe shops and
counters and tills and such like things by which tradespeople become
rich.
And, by that same token, the business premises thus deserted for snug
suburban villas, are themselves changing. One could never, in modern
times, have strictly called Dorchester generally picturesque, in the
prominent circumstances of those four main streets: repeated
conflagrations that destroyed most of the really old and interesting
houses forbade that, and replaced thatch and barge-boarded gables with
plain brick fronts, severe in unornamental rectangular windows, and
ending on the skyline with unimaginative straight copings. But the
latest manifestations of these times, when they say business is a
struggle and all trades alike carried on less for the profit of the
purveyor, than for the good of the purchaser, are expensive carved stone
and brick frontages, with good artistic features. As art in this country
only spells much expenditure of good money and as building operations are
always costly, it is a little difficult to square all these developments
with the talk of “hard times.” South Street, in especial, is being
grandly transformed, and “Napper’s Mite,” the crouching row of
almshouses, built from the benefaction of the good Sir Robert Napper, in
1615, made to look additionally humble by newly risen tall buildings.
But the town authorities have not yet removed the old rusticated stone
obelisk that stands in Cornhill, in the centre of the town, where High
East and High West Streets, and North and South Streets meet. It serves
the multum-in-parvo purposes of a pump, a lamp-standard, and a
leaning-stock for Dorchester’s weary or born-tired, and is moreover a
landmark. But the two dumpy little houses at the corner, which were
properly dumpy and humble and—so to speak—knew their place, and abased
themselves in the presence of their betters—that is to say, in the
contiguity of St. Peter’s across the road—have been rebuilt, with the
result that their tall upstanding pretentiousness detracts not a little
from the height of that “grizzled tower.”
And so, turning to the left at this corner, we leave Dorchester for
Bridport, along High West Street, the quietest of all these
thoroughfares, and looking rather “out of it,” and somewhat glad of that
fact, in a dignified, exclusive way, typified by its aristocratic old
houses, and its old County Hall. It is true there are a few shops in
High Street, but they are by no means pushful shops. They never make
“alarming sacrifices,” nor sell off. Indeed, were I not fearful of
offending susceptibility, I might declare a belief that they never sell
anything at all, and are kept by “grown-ups,” not grown tired of playing
at shops when they did so arrive at years supposed to be those of
discretion. Here is a quiet shop—where they will doubtless sell you
something, if you really enter and firmly insist upon it—occupying one of
the few really old and picturesque houses in the main thoroughfare; it is
the house “by tradition” occupied by the infamous Judge Jeffreys, when
visiting Dorchester on the business of that special occasion, the Bloody
Assize, holden to try the unhappy wretches arraigned for their part in
Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685. The old house bears an inscription to this
effect. Over three hundred prisoners faced the judge at that awful time,
and two hundred and ninety received sentence of death. Of these the
number actually executed was seventy-four, and, as the old gossip at the
“Three Mariners” tells, portions of their bodies were gibbeted in various
parts of the county, “different j’ints sent about the country like
butcher’s meat.”
And so we leave Dorchester and its, on the whole, grim memories, along an
avenue, fellow to that by which the town was entered.
CHAPTER IX
SWANAGE
THE name of Swanage shares with that of Swansea, the honour of being,
perhaps, the most poetic that any seaside resort ever owned. It is a
corruption of the Danish name of “Swanic,” or “Swanwich,” and there seems
to be no reason to doubt—although there exists a school of antiquarians
sceptical enough to doubt it—that the place was then, as its name
indicates, a place of swans. Your modern antiquary, disgusted at the
childish legends once everywhere accepted as sober historical facts,
rushes to the other extreme, and, although a thing be obvious, will not
allow its obviousness, unless supported by documentary or other tangible
evidence. He must needs disregard the self-evident, and delve deeply and
unavailingly in attempts to prove that “things are not what they seem.”
Conjectures that there was at that time a royal swannery here are based
upon the known fondness of royal personages for preserving that bird,
once thought a table delicacy, and upon the existence from ancient times
of the famous Abbotsbury swannery, along this same coast. But it is
needless here to labour the point; and although the little stream, more
and more pollutedly with every year of the extension of modern Swanage,
still flows down into the sea under the name of the Swan Brook, the
argument supported by it in favour of the obvious origin of the
place-name shall be no further pursued.
But the surrounding quarries have for many centuries past given a very
different character to Swanage than that of a village with a marshy creek
inhabited by swans. Few places ever proclaimed the industries by which
they lived more prominently than did this little port, until well within
recent recollection. A colliery town no more insistently obtrudes the
circumstances by which it earns its livelihood than Swanage displayed
evidences of its cleanly trade and craft of stone-working and
stone-exporting.
The varieties of stone from the quarries to the rear of Swanage are among
the most famous building and decorative stones in the world; for here we
are at the gates of Isle of Purbeck, where, not only the oolitic
limestone of the same nature as “Portland stone” is quarried, but that
(to antiquaries at least) far more generally known material, “Purbeck
marble,” as well. No ancient church or cathedral of any considerable
size or elaboration was considered complete without shafts and font and
other decorative features of Purbeck marble, sometimes polished, at other
times left in its native state; and thus, from very early times until the
beginning of the sixteenth century, when more strikingly coloured and
patterned foreign marbles began to find their way into England, Swanage
in particular, and Purbeck in general, enjoyed an amazing prosperity.
Swanage in Mr. Hardy’s pages is “Knollsea,” and is described in _The Hand
of Ethelberta_ as a village:—“Knollsea,” we learn, “was a seaside village
lying snug within two headlands, as between a finger and thumb.” A very
true simile, as a glance on the map, upon the configuration of Swanage
Bay, will satisfy those curious in the exactness or otherwise of literary
images. But time has very rapidly vitiated the justness of what
follows:—“Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a quarrier,
unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and had been a
quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half and had been
to sea.”
“The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same special sort as their
pursuits. The quarrymen in white fustian understood practical geology,
the laws and accidents of dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the
ways of the world and mammon; the seafaring men, in Guernsey frocks, had
a clearer notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies
than of any inland town in their own country. This, for them, consisted
of a busy portion, the Channel, where they lived and laboured, and a dull
portion, the vague unexplored miles of interior at the back of the ports,
which they seldom thought of.”
This charming picture of an out-of-the world place remained, very little
blurred by change, until well on into the ’80’s of the nineteenth
century, when it occurred to exploiting railway folk that the time was
ripe for the construction of a branch railway from Wareham. With the
opening of that line the primitive houses, and the equally primitive
people who lived in them, suffered a change almost as sudden and complete
as though a harlequin had waved his wand over their heads.
There was indeed something exceptionally primitive in the Swanage people.
They were chiefly quarrymen, and like all quarry folk, mining the great
blocks of stone from mother earth, a strangely reserved and isolated
race. A man who, felling timber, might conceivably remain all his life
mentally detached from his occupation, following it only mechanically,
could not long in these quarries, rich in the embalmed stoniness of
myriads of humble creatures living in the palæozoic age, remain
unaffected by his surroundings. An imaginative man might, not inaptly,
conceive himself as a phenomenally gigantic giant working in some vast
petrified graveyard among the petrifactions of a world infinitely little;
and, as the dyer’s hand is subdued to the dye he works in, and—a less
classic allusion—as the photographer acquires a permanent stain from his
collodion, he could scarce escape the almost inevitable mental twist
resulting from the surroundings.
And as they were, and in some measure still are, individually peculiar,
so collectively they retain their exclusiveness. Still, with every
recurrent Shrove Tuesday, their guild meets at Corfe, under the
presidency of warden and steward; and even in these days it is not open
for an outsider to become a Purbeck quarryman. It is an industry only to
be followed by patrimony and by due admission into its membership in the
prescribed manner, which is that of appearing at the annual court with a
penny loaf in one hand, a pot of beer in the other, and a sum of six
shillings and eightpence in the pocket, ready to be duly paid down.
With all the changes that have overtaken Swanage, who knows nowadays,
save very old folk, that Swanage people are, or were, locally “Swanage
Turks”? When—outside Swanage, of course—you asked why so named, you were
apt to be told “Tarks, we al’us carls ’em, ’cos they don’t know nawthen
about anything.” The informant in this particular instance was a Poole
man. None could possibly have brought this charge of comprehensive and
thorough-going ignorance against the natives of Poole, for that ancient
port was a sink of iniquity, and inhabited, if we are to believe the
history books—which there is no reason we should not do—by ruffians who
were by no means unspotted of the world, but had plumbed the depths of
every wickedness. Since Swanage has become the terminus of a branch
railway and become a seaside resort, its “Turks” have acquired a very
considerable amount of worldly wisdom, and can argue and chop logic with
you, as well as the best.
To those who knew and loved old Swanage, the change that has come with
its tardy accessibility by rail is woeful, but to those who have not so
known and loved, I daresay it seems, by contrast with Bournemouth, a
place strangely undeveloped. The trouble with the first-named is that
development has been all too rapid, and has utterly robbed Swanage of its
immemorial character as the port whence the famous Purbeck stone was
shipped. Alas! pretentious houses of a tall and terrible ugliness now
stand in the middle of the bay, on the shore immediately in front of what
used merely by courtesy to be called “the town,” but is now actually
grown to that status. The “bankers”—rows upon rows of stacked slabs of
Purbeck stone that used to form so striking a feature of the shore, and
were wont, to a stranger seeing them first on a moonlit night, to look so
grisly, as though this were some close-packed seashore cemetery—the
circumstance of facetious irony—the grown prosperity of Swanage has built
banks, where the Swanage tradesfolk doubtless deposit heavily from the
profits of their summer trading.
[Picture: The Old Church, Swanage]
In the distance, along the curving shore of Swanage Bay, there has arisen
with the development of the Durlstone estate, a grand hotel, and in the
town itself—the folly of it!—uninteresting modern commercial buildings
have replaced the quaint old cottages that, built as they were, in a
peculiarly local fashion, with great stone slabs and rude stone tiling,
had their like nowhere else. Now, the rows of newly arisen streets are
such as have their counterparts in every town, and you can dine _à la
carte_ or _table-d’hôte_ at the many hotels and boarding-houses, as their
announcements boldly inform the visitor, quite as elaborately as in great
cities. All, without doubt, very refined and up to date, but perhaps not
to all of us, who keep the simple and robustious appetites of our
beginnings, so pleasing a change from the time (of which Kingsley speaks)
when a simple glass of ale and a crust of bread and cheese at a rustic
inn was all one wished, and certainly all one could have got.
Of those times there are but little “islands,” so to speak, left in the
surging mass of modern brick and stone. One of them is the ancient
church, whose tower is thought to be Saxon—the church where Ethelberta
Petherwin, in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, marries Lord Mountclere.
Another, tucked away behind the Town Hall, and only to be with some
difficulty discovered, is the old village lock-up. No dread Bastille
this, but an affair resembling a stone tool-house, twelve feet by eight,
and lighted only by the holes in the decaying woodwork of its
nail-studded door. It was built in 1803, “erected” as the old
inscription tells us, “for the prevention of Wickedness and Vice by the
Friends of Religion and Good Order.” The inference to be drawn from the
small size of this place of incarceration is that the “Wickedness and
Vice” of Swanage were on a very insignificant scale. Although Swanage
has grown so greatly, and now owns a very fine and large police-station,
it is not to be inferred that the delinquencies have increased in
proportion, but rather that officialism has made a larger growth, and
that Swanage, like poor old England in general, is over-governed.
Among other outstanding features of Swanage, conferred upon it by the
late Mr. Mowlem, of the London contracting firm of Mowlem and Burt, is
the Wellington Clock Tower, the Gothic pinnacled structure now
ornamenting the foreshore, in what were once the private gardens of “the
Grove.” But “the Grove” has now, like many another seashore estate, been
cut up, and new villas now take the place of the older exclusiveness.
The Clock Tower, one of the many memorials to the great Duke of
Wellington, stood, until about 1860, on the south side of London Bridge,
but was removed when the roadway was widened at that point. Once
removed, the good folk of Southwark were at a loss what to do with it,
and so solved their difficulty by presenting its stones to Mr. Mowlem,
the contractor. They thought he had been saddled with a “white
elephant,” and chuckled accordingly; but they little knew their man. He
considered the relic “just the thing” for his native town of Swanage, and
accepting it with the greatest alacrity, despatched it hither, and
presented it to his friend Mr. Docwra, of “the Grove.” This poor old
monument to martial glory has suffered of late, for its pinnacle has been
blown down and replaced by a copper sheathing very like a dish-cover.
CHAPTER X
SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE
THAT pilgrim who, whether on foot or by cycle, shall elect to trace these
landmarks, will find the road out of Swanage to Corfe, by way of Langton
Matravers and Kingston a heart-breaking stretch of stony hills, whose
blinding glare under a summer sun is provocative of ophthalmia, and whose
severities of stone walling, in place of green hedges, recall the scenery
of Ireland. Herston, too, the unlovely outskirt of Swanage, is not
encouraging. But the world—it is a truism—is made up of all sorts, and
here, as elsewhere, rewards come after trials.
Langton Matravers, on the ridge-road, is, just as one might suppose from
the stony nature of Purbeck, a village of stone houses, and very grim and
unornamental ones too. Nine hundred souls live here, and so long as the
“Langton freestone” won from its quarries is in good demand, are happy
enough, although subject to every extremity of weather. The “Matravers”
in the place-name derives from the old manorial lords, the Maltravers
family, who dropped the “l” out of their name some time after one of
their race, deeply implicated in the barbarous murder of Edward II.,
proved himself a very “bad Travers” indeed, and so made his name
peculiarly descriptive.
Passing Gallows Gore Cottages—what a melodramatic address to own!—we come
to Kingston village, along just such a road, with just such a view as
that described in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, although, to be sure, she
went, on that donkey-ride to Corfe, by another and very roundabout route,
through Ulwell Gap, over Nine Barrow Down. Ordinary folk would have gone
by the ordinary road; but then, you see, Ethelberta was a poetess, and
“unconventionality—almost eccentricity—was _de rigueur_” for such an one.
Hence also that unconventional, and uncomfortable, seat on the donkey’s
back.
From this point Corfe Castle is exquisitely seen, down below the ridge,
but situated on the course of the minor, but still mighty, backbone that
bisects the Isle. From hence, too, the country may be seen spread out
like a map, “domains behind domains, parishes by the score, harbours,
fir-woods and little inland seas mixing curiously together.” Dipping
down out of sight of all these distant Lands of Promise, among the richly
wooded lanes of Kingston, the glaring limestone road is exchanged for
shaded ways, where sunlight only filters through in patches of gold,
looking to the imaginative as though some giant had come this way and
dropped the contents of his money-bags. Thatched cottages, tall elms,
and old-fashioned roadside gardens are the features of Kingston; but
above all these, geographically and in every other respect, is the great
and magnificent modern church built for Lord Eldon and completed in 1880,
after seven years’ work and a vast amount of money had been expended upon
it. It was designed by Street—that same “obliterator of historic
records”—who at Fawley Magna earned Mr. Hardy’s satire; but here were no
records to obliterate. Certain reminiscences of the architect’s early
studies of the early Gothic of the Rhine churches may be traced here, in
the exterior design of the apsidal chancel, strongly resembling that of
Fawley, but one would hesitate to apply the opprobrious term of
“German-Gothic” to this, as a whole. Its intention is Early English, but
the general effect is rather of a Norman spirit informed with Early
English details; an effect greatly accentuated by the heaviness and bulk
of the central tower, intended by Lord Eldon to be a prominent landmark,
and fulfilling that intention by the sacrifice of proportion to the rest
of the building. Cruciform plan, size, and general elaboration render
this a church particularly unfitted for so small and so rustic a village.
Had its needs been studied, rather than the ecclesiological tastes of the
third Lord Eldon, the little church built many years ago for the first
earl, the great lawyer-lord, by Repton, would have sufficed; although to
be sure it has all the faults of the first attempts at reviving Gothic.
The Earl of Eldon purchased the manor of Kingston and the residence of
Encombe from William Morton Pitt in 1807. Here, in that little church
built by him, he lies, beside his “Bessie,” that Bessie Surtees with whom
he, then plain and penniless John Scott, eloped from the old house on
Sandhill, Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1772. His house of Encombe, the
“Enkworth Court,” of _The Hand of Ethelberta_, lies deep down in the glen
of Encombe, approached by a long road gradually descending into the
cup-like crater by the only expedient of winding round it. Think of all
the beautiful road scenery you have ever seen or heard of, and you will
not have seen or been told of anything more beautiful in its especial
kind of beauty than this sequestered road down into Lord Eldon’s retreat.
Jagged white cliffs here and there project themselves out of the steep
banks of grass and moss above the way, draped with a profusion of
small-leaved ground-ivy and a wealth of hart’s-tongue ferns, and trees
romantically shade the whole. An obelisk erected by the great statesman,
on a bold bluff, to the memory of his brother, Lord Stowell, adds an
element of romance to the scene, and then, plunging into a final mass of
tangled woodland, the grey stone elevation of the house is seen,
ghostlike, fronting a gravel drive, in its silence and drawn blinds
looking less like the home of some fairy princess than the residence of a
misanthrope, who has retired beyond the reach of the world and drawn his
blinds, with the hope of persuading any who may possibly find their way
here that he is not at home.
[Picture: Encombe]
“Enkworth Court” was, we are told, “a house in which Pugin would have
torn his hair,” and Encombe certainly can possess no charms for amateurs
of Gothic. Nor can it possibly delight students of the ancient Greek and
Roman orders, for its architecture has classic intentions without being
classical, and heaviness without dignity. But its interior, if it
likewise does not appeal to a cultivated taste in matters connected with
the mother of all the arts, is exceptionally comfortable. Here the old
Chancellor, over eighty years of age, spent most of his declining days.
“His sporting days were over; he had but little interest in gardening or
farming; and his only reading, beside the newspaper, was a chapter in the
Bible. His mornings he spent in an elbow-chair by the fireside in his
study—called his shop—which was ornamented by portraits of his deceased
master, George III. and his living companion, Pincher, a poodle dog.”
From Kingston to Corfe Castle, the bourne of innumerable summer visitors,
is two miles. The first glimpse of town and castle is one which clearly
shows how aptly the site of them obtained its original name of
Corvesgate, from the Anglo-Saxon _ceorfan_, to cut. The site was so
named long before castle or town were erected here, and referred to the
passages cut or carved through the bold range of hills by the little
river Corfe and its tributaries. Those clefts are clearly distinguished
from here and from the main road between Corfe and Swanage, and are
notched twice, so deeply into the stony range, that the eminence on which
the castle stands is less like a part of one continuous chain of hills
than an isolated conical hill neighboured by lengthy ridges.
On that islanded hill, shouldered by taller neighbours, the castle was
built, because at this point it so effectually guarded these passes from
the shores of Purbeck to the inland regions. The position in these days
seems a singular one, for from the upper slopes of those neighbours it is
possible to look down into the castle and observe its every detail, but
such things mattered little in days before artillery.
A first impression of Corfe, if it be summer, is an impression of
dazzling whiteness; resolved, on a nearer approach, into the pure white
of the road and of the occasional repairs and restorations of the
stone-built streets, the grey white of buildings past their first
novelty, and the dead greyness of the roofing slabs of stone. There is
little colour in Corfe when June has gone. The golden-green lichens and
houseleeks of spring have been sucked dry by the summer heats and turned
to withered rustiness, and even the grass of the pyramidical hill on
which the castle keep is reared has little more than an exhausted
sage-green hue.
“Corvsgate Castle,” as we find it styled in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, is
frequently the scene, at such a time of year, of meetings like that of
the “Imperial Association” in that story. All that is to be known
respecting these ruins, “the meagre stumps remaining from flourishing
bygone centuries,” is the common property of all interested in historical
antiquities, but there is something, it may be supposed, in revisiting
the oft-visited and in retelling the old tale, which bids defiance to
_ennui_ and precludes satiety, even although the President’s address be a
paraphrase of the last archæological paper, and that the echo of its
predecessor, and so forth, in endless _diminuendo_:
And smaller fleas have lesser fleas,
And so _ad infinitum_.
“Carfe,” as any Wessex man of the soil will name it, just as horses are
‘harses’ and hornets become ‘harnets’ in his ancient and untutored
pronunciation, is, as already hinted, a place of stone buildings, where
brick, although not unknown, is remarkable. Stone from foundation to
roof, and stone slabs of immense size for the roofs themselves. In a
place where building-stone is and has been so readily found it is, of
course, in the nature of things to find the remains of a castle that must
have been exceptionally large and strong, and here they are, peering over
the rooftops of the town from whatever point of view you choose. The
castle is as essential a feature in all views of the town as it is in
history; and rightly too, for had it not been for that fortress there
would have been no town. It is a town by courtesy and ancient estate,
and a village by size; a village that does not grow and has so far
escaped the desecration of modern streets. The market cross, recently
restored to perfection from a shattered stump, and the town hall both
declare it to have been a town, as does, or did, the existence of a
mayor, but such things have long become vanities. The return of two
members to Parliament, a privilege Corfe enjoyed until reform put an end
to it in 1832, proved nothing, for Parliamentary representation was no
more fixed on the principle of comparative electorates than the
representation of Ireland is now in the House of Commons.
[Picture: Corfe Castle]
The temperance interest need by no means be shocked when it is said that
the most interesting feature of Corfe, next to the castle, is its inn.
The church does not count; for the body of it has been uninterestingly
rebuilt, and only the fine tower, of Perpendicular date, remains. The
inns, however, combine picturesqueness with the solid British comforts of
old times and the less substantial amenities of the new. Here, looking
upon the “Bankes Arms,” with its highly elaborate heraldic sign, you can
have no manner of doubt as to what family is still paramount in Corfe,
and I think, perhaps, that to shelter behind so gorgeous an achievement
even reflects a halo upon the guest; while if the “Greyhound” can confer
no such satisfaction, its unusual picturesqueness, with that charming
feature of a porch projecting over the pavement and owning a capacious
room poised above the comings and goings, the commerce and gossipings of
the people, can at least give a visitor the charm of what, although an
ancient feature of the place, is at least a novelty to him.
The three cylindrical stone columns of plethoric figure which support
this porch and its room are more generally useful than the architect who
placed them here, some two hundred and eighty years ago, probably ever
imagined they would be. _He_ devised them for the support of his gazebo
above, but more than twenty generations of Wessex folk have found them
convenient for leaning-stocks, and the comfortable support they give has
further lengthened many a long argument which, had all contributing
parties stood supported only by their own two natural posts that carry
the bodily superstructure, would have been earlier concluded. The
progress of an argument, discussion, narration, or negotiation under such
unequal conditions is to be watched with interest. Time probably will
forbid one being followed from beginning to end; but to be a spectator of
one of these comedies from the middle onwards is sufficient. The length
it has already been played may generally be pretty accurately estimated
by the state of weariness or impatience exhibited by that party to it who
is not supported by the pillar. The “well, as I was saying” of the one
enjoying the leaning-stock, discloses, like the parson’s “secondly, Dear
brethren,” the fact that the discourse is well on the way, but the same
thing may be gathered by those out of earshot, in the manœuvres of the
less fortunate of the two, the one who is supporting his own bulk. He
stands upright, hands behind his back, while swaying his walking stick;
then he leans his weight to one side upon it, first (if he be a stout
man, whom it behoves to exercise caution) carefully selecting a safe
crevice in the jointing of the pavement, as a bearing for the ferule of
his ash-plant; then, growing weary of this attitude, he repeats the
process on the other side, changing after a while to the expedient of a
sideways stress, halfway up the body, by straining the walking stick
horizontally against the wall. Then, having exhausted all possible
movements, he takes a bulky silver watch from his pocket, and affects to
find time unexpectedly ahead of him; and when this resort is reached the
spectacle generally comes to a conclusion.
But it is time to follow Ethelberta into the castle:—
“Ethelberta crossed the bridge over the moat, and rode under the
first archway into the outer ward. As she had expected, not a soul
was here. The arrow-slits, portcullis-grooves, and staircases met
her eye as familiar friends, for in her childhood she had once paid a
visit to the spot. Ascending the green incline and through another
arch into the second ward, she still pressed on, till at last the ass
was unable to clamber an inch further. Here she dismounted, and
tying him to a stone which projected like a fang from a raw edge of
wall, performed the remainder of the journey on foot. Once among the
towers above, she became so interested in the windy corridors,
mildewed dungeons, and the tribe of daws peering invidiously upon her
from overhead, that she forgot the flight of time.”
The ruins that Ethelberta and the “Imperial Association” had come to
inspect owe their heaped and toppling ruination to that last great armed
convulsion in our insular history, the Civil War, whose two greatest
personalities were Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell. Until that time the
proud fortress had stood unharmed, as stalwart as when built in Norman
times.
The history of Corfe before those times is very obscure, and no one has
yet discovered whether the first recorded incident in it took place at a
mere hunting-lodge here or at the gates of a fortress. That incident,
the first and most atrocious of all the atrocious deeds of blood wrought
at Corfe, was the murder of King Edward “the Martyr,” in A.D. 978, by his
stepmother, Queen Elfrida, anxious to secure the throne for her own son.
The boy—he was only in his nineteenth year—had drawn rein here, on his
return alone from hunting, and was drinking at the door from a goblet
handed him by Elfrida herself when she stabbed him to the heart. His
horse, startled at the attack, darted away, dragging the body by the
stirrups, and thus, battered and lifeless, it was found.
Built, or rebuilt, in the time of the Conqueror, Corfe Castle was early
besieged, and in that passage gave a good account of itself and justified
its existence, for King Stephen failed to take it by force or to starve
the garrison out. How long he may have been pleased to sit down before
it we do not know, for the approach of a relieving force caused him to
pack his baggage and be off. Strong, however, as it was even then, it
was continually under enlargement in the reigns of Henry II., Henry III.,
and Edward I., and had a better right to the oft-used boast of being
impregnable than most other fortresses.
CHAPTER XI
CORFE CASTLE
LIKE some cruel ogre of folk-lore the Castle of Corfe has drunk deep of
blood. Its strength kept prisoners safely guarded, as well as foes at
arm’s length, and many a despairing wretch has been hurried through the
now ruined gatehouse, to the muttered “God help him!” of some
compassionate warder. Through the great open Outer Ward and steeply
uphill between the two gloomy circular drum-towers across the second
ward, and thence to the Dungeon Tower at the further left-hand corner of
the stronghold, they were taken and thrust into some vile place of little
ease, to be imprisoned for a lifetime, to be starved to death, or more
mercifully ended by the assassin’s dagger. Twenty-four knights captured
in Brittany, in arms against King John, in aid of his nephew, Arthur,
were imprisoned here, in 1202, and twenty-two of them met death by
starvation in some foul underground hold. Prince Arthur, as every one
knows, was blinded by orders of the ruthless king, and Arthur’s sister,
Eleanor, was thrown into captivity, first here and then at Bristol,
where, after forty years, she died. Thus did monarchs dispose of rivals,
and those who aided them, in the “good old days,” and other monarchs, not
so ferocious, or not so well able to take care of themselves, stood in
danger of tasting the same fare, as in the case of Edward II. imprisoned
here and murdered in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle. Sympathies go out
to the unhappy captives and victims, but a knowledge of these things
tells us that they would have done the same, had opportunity offered and
the positions been reversed.
This stronghold held many a humbler prisoner, among them those who had
offended in one or other of the easy ways of offence in this, the King’s
deer-forest of Purbeck; and many others immured for mere caprice. The
place must have reeked with blood and been strewn with bones like a
hyæna’s lair.
[Picture: Corfe Castle]
So much for the domestic history of Corfe Castle. Its last great
appearance in the history of the nation was during the civil wars of King
and Parliament, when it justified the design of its builders, and proved
the excellence of its defences by successfully withstanding two sieges;
falling in the second solely by treachery. It had by that time passed
through many hands, and had come at last to the Bankes family, by whom it
is still owned. It was only eight years before the first siege in this
war that the property had been acquired by the Lord Chief Justice of the
Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes, who purchased it from the widow of that
celebrated lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, the Coke of “Coke upon Littleton.”
[Picture: Corfe Castle]
When the civil war broke out, Sir John Bankes, called to the King’s side
at York, left his wife and children at their home of Kingston Lacy, near
Wimborne Minster, whence, for security from the covert sneers and petty
annoyances offered them by the once humbly subservient townsfolk, not
slow to note the trend of affairs, they removed in the autumn of 1642 to
Corfe Castle, where they spent the winter unmolested.
Although they thus sought shelter here, they probably had no idea of the
heights to which the tide of rebellion would rise, and could scarce have
anticipated being besieged; but the Parliamentary leaders in the district
had their eyes upon a fortress which, already obsolete and the subject of
antiquarian curiosity, could yet be made a place of strength, as the
sequel was presently to show.
The first attempt to gain possession of the castle was by a subterfuge,
ingenious and plausible enough. The Mayor of Corfe had from time
immemorial held a stag hunt annually, on May Day, and it was thought
that, if on this occasion some additional parties of horse were to
attend, and to seize the stronghold under colour of paying a visit, the
thing would be done with ease. So probably it would, but for the keen
feminine intuition of Lady Bankes, who closed the gates and mounted a
guard upon the entrance-towers, so that when those huntsmen came and
demanded surrender, scarcely in the manner of visitors, they were at once
denied admission, and effectually unmasked. The revolutionary committee
sitting at Poole then considered it advisable to despatch a body of
sailors, who appeared before the castle, early one morning, to demand the
surrender of four small dismounted pieces of cannon with which it was
armed. “But,” says the _Mercurius Rusticus_, a contemporary news-sheet,
“instead of delivering them, though at the time there were but five men
in the Castle, yet these five, assisted by the maid-servants, at their
ladies’ Command, mount these peeces on their carriages againe, and lading
one of them they gave fire, which small Thunder so affrighted the Sea-men
that they all quitted the place and ran away.”
Operations thus opened, Lady Bankes proved herself a ready and
resourceful general. By beat of drum she summoned tenants and friends,
who, responding to the number of fifty, garrisoned the fortress for about
a week, when a scarcity of provisions, together with threatening letters,
and the entreaties of their wives, to whom home and children were more
than King or Parliament, or the Bankes family either, made them shamble
home again. We should perhaps not be too ready to censure them. Lady
Bankes, however, did not despair. A born strategist, she perceived how
vitally necessary it was, above all else, to lay in a stock of
provisions; and to secure them, and time for her preparations she offered
in the meekest way to give up those cannon which, after all, although
they made the maximum of noise effected a minimum of harm.
The enemy, pacified by this offer, removed the guns and left the castle
alone for a while; thinking its defences weak enough. But it was soon
thoroughly provisioned, supplied with ammunition, and garrisoned under
the command of one Captain Lawrence, and when the Roundheads of Poole
next turned their attention to Corfe, behold! it was bristling like a
porcupine with pikes and musquetoons and all those ancient
seventeenth-century engines of war, with which men were quaintly done to
death—when by some exceptional chance the marksmen earned their name and
hit anybody.
The middle of June had gone before the Parliamentary forces from Poole
made their appearance. They numbered between two and three hundred horse
and foot, and brought two cannon, with which they played upon the castle
from the neighbouring hills, with little effect. Then came an interlude,
ended by the appearance, on June 23rd, of Sir Walter Erle with between
five and six hundred men, to reinforce the besiegers. They brought with
them a “Demy-Canon, a Culverin, and two Sacres,” and with these fired a
hail of small shot down into the castle upon those heights on either
hand. The results were poor to insignificance, and it was then
determined to attempt a storming of the castle. This grand advance, made
on June 26th, was begun by intimidating shouts that no quarter would be
granted, but the garrison were so little terrified by this fighting with
the mouth that, tired of waiting the enemy from the walls, they even
sallied out and slaughtered some of the foremost, who were approaching
cautiously under cover of strange engines named the “Sow” and the “Boar.”
The besiegers then mounted a cannon on the top of the church-tower,
“which,” we are told, “they, without fears of prophanation used,” and
breaking the organ, used the pipes of it for shot-cases. The ammunition
included, among other strange missiles, lumps of lead torn off the roof
and rolled up.
All these things proving useless, a band of a hundred and fifty sailors
was sent by the Earl of Warwick, with large supplies of petards and
grenadoes, and a number of scaling ladders, and then all thought the
enterprise in a fair way of being ended. The sailors, nothing loth, were
made drunk, the ladders were placed against the walls, and a sum of
twenty pounds was offered to the first man up. With preparations so
generous as these a riotous scaling-party, carrying pikes and
hand-grenades, strove to mount the ladders, but were met by an avalanche
of hot cinders, stones, and things still more objectionable, hoarded up
by the garrison from those primitive sanitary contrivances called by
antiquaries “garderobes,” against such a contingency as this. One sailor
has his clothes almost burnt off his back, another’s courage is dowsed
with a pail of slops, others are knocked over, bruised and battered, into
the dry moat, by a hundredweight of stone heaved over the battlements,
and long ladders full of escaladers, swarming up, on one another’s heels,
are flung backward with tremendous crashes by prokers from arrow-slits in
the bastioned walls. Soldiers under the machicolated entrance towers
have had their steel morions crushed down upon their heads by heavy
weights dropped upon them, and are left gasping for breath and slowly
suffocating in that meat-tin kind of imprisonment; and a more than
ordinarily active besieger, who has made himself exceptionally prominent,
is suddenly flattened out by a heavy lump of lead. “The knocks are too
hot,” as Shakespeare says, and the assailants are forced to retire, to
bury their dead, to tend one another’s hurts, and those most fortunate to
cleanse themselves. That same night of August 4th, Sir Walter Erle,
hearing a rumour of the King’s forces approaching, hurriedly raised the
siege and retreated upon Poole, and not until February 1646 was Corfe
Castle again molested.
This time it was beset to more purpose. Lady Bankes, now a widow, for
her husband had died in 1644, parted from his family, was at Corfe,
vigilant, keen-eyed, loyal, and more or less strictly blockaded between
Roundhead garrisons. Wareham was in their possession, Poole, as ever, a
hotbed of disaffection, and Swanage watched by land and sea. A gallant
deed performed at the opening of 1646 by one Cromwell, a youthful officer
strangely enough, considering his name, on the Royalist side, was of no
avail. He with his troops burst through the enemy’s lines at Wareham and
on the way encountered the Parliamentary governor of that place, whom he
captured and brought to Corfe. This was undertaken to afford Lady Bankes
an opportunity of escaping, if she wished, but she fortunately refused,
for on the way back the little party were captured.
The castle was then besieged by Colonel Bingham, and endured for
forty-eight days the rigours of a strict investment. In the meanwhile,
Lawrence, the governor, deserted and at the same time released the
imprisoned governor of Wareham. Every one knew the King’s cause here and
in the whole of the kingdom to be in desperate straits, and the knowledge
of fighting for a losing side unnerved all. Seeing the inevitable course
of events, Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman, one of the defenders’ officers,
secretly opened negotiations with the enemy for the surrender, and,
succeeding in persuading the new governor, who had taken the post
deserted by Lawrence, that a reinforcement from Somersetshire was
expected, under that guise at dead of night admitted fifty Parliamentary
troops into the keep. When morning dawned the garrison found themselves
betrayed; but, commanding as they did the lives of some thirty prisoners,
they were able to exact favourable terms of surrender. And then, when
all the defenders marched out, kegs of gunpowder were laid in keep and
curtain-towers, down in dungeons and under roofs, and the match applied.
When the roar and smoke of the explosion had died away, the stern walls
that for five hundred years had frowned down upon the streets of Corfe
had gone up in ruin.
Not altogether destroyed, in the Biblical completeness of the fulfilled
prophecies of “not one stone upon another,” concerning Nineveh, and the
Cities of the Plain; for tall spires of cliff-like masonry still
represent the keep and gateway, and curtain-towers remain in recognisable
shapes, connected by riven jaws of masonry, so hard and so formless that
they are not easily to be distinguished from the rock in which their
foundations are set. Here a tower may be seen, lifted up bodily by the
agency of gunpowder, and set down again at a distance, gently and as
fairly plumb as it was it its original position: there another has been
torn asunder, as one tears a sheet of paper, and a few steps away is
another, leaning at a much more acute angle than the Leaning Tower of
Pisa. Everywhere, light is let into dungeons and battlements abased;
floors abolished and great empty stone fireplaces on what were second,
third and fourth floors turned to mouthpieces for the winds. And yet,
although such havoc has been wrought, and although it is almost
impossible to identify the greater part of its chambers, Corfe Castle is
still a fine and an impressive ruin. It is grand when seen from afar,
and not less grand when viewed near at hand, from the ravine in which
runs the road to Wareham.
CHAPTER XII
WAREHAM
THAT is a straight and easy road which in four miles leads from Corfe to
Wareham, and a breezy and bracing road too, across heaths quite as
unspoilt as those of “Egdon,” but of a more cheerful and hopeful aspect.
_The Return of the Native_, whose scene is laid on the heaths to the
north-west, could not, with the same justness of description, have been
staged upon these, and from another circumstance, quite apart from this
heart-lifting breeziness, these heaths have little in common with their
brooding neighbours. They are enlivened with the signs of a very ancient
and long-continued industry, for where the Romans discovered and dug in
the great deposits of china-clay found here the Dorsetshire labourer
still digs, and runs his truckloads on crazy tramways down to the quays
upon Poole Harbour at Goathorn. Fragments of Roman pottery, made from
this clay, are still occasionally found here, but since that time the
clay has not been turned to extensive use on the spot where it is found,
but is shipped for Staffordshire and abroad. Much of Poole’s prosperity
is due to the china-clay trade, carried on by the vessels of that port,
which receive it from barges crossing the harbour. It was early used for
tobacco-pipes, and probably those of Sir Walter Raleigh’s first
experiments were made from the clay found here. So far back as 1760 the
export of Purbeck china-clay had reached ten thousand tons annually. It
has now risen to about sixty thousand.
This northern portion of the Isle of Purbeck is indeed of altogether
different character from the rugged stony southern half, beyond Corfe.
It is low-lying and heathy, and the roads are a complete change from the
blinding whiteness characterising those of Purbeck _Petræa_, as it may be
named. Here, mended with ironstone, they are of a ruddy colour.
Leaving the clay-cutters and their terraced diggings behind, we come,
past the paltry hamlet of Stoborough, within sight of Wareham, entered
across a long causeway over the Frome marshes and over an ancient Gothic
bridge spanning the Frome itself. Ahead is seen the tower of St. Mary’s,
one of the only two churches remaining of the original eight. Five of
the others have been swept away, and the sixth is converted into a
school. Wareham, it will be guessed, is not a mushroom place of
yesterday, but has a past and has seen many changes.
Wareham, “the oldest arnshuntest place in Do’set, where ye turn up housen
underneath yer ’tater-patch,” as described to the present historian by a
rustic, who might have been the original of Haymoss, in _Two on a Tower_,
is indeed of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that
attractive fact. Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of
the compass, do not perhaps afford the best evidences of that age, for
they are broad and straight and lined with houses which, if not all
Georgian, are so largely in that style that they influence the general
character of the thoroughfares and give them an air of the eighteenth
century. For this there is an excellent reason, found in the almost
complete destruction by fire of Wareham, on July 25th, 1762.
To the ordinary traveller—and certainly to the commercial
traveller—without a bias for history and antiquities, it is the dullest
town in Wessex. Not decayed, like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void
and still, and how it, under this constant solitude and somnolence,
manages to retain its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle.
Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks; but while
Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has shrunk within
them, and one who, climbing those stupendous fortifications, looks down
upon the little town, sees gardens and orchards, pigsties and cowsheds
plentifully intermingled with the streets, on the spot where other and
vanished streets once stood. That “once,” however, was so long ago that
the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and the mind
dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident in such things,
as upon the luxuriance of the gardens themselves and the prettiness of
the picture they produce, intermingled with the houses.
Wareham—“Anglebury” Mr. Hardy calls it—is, or was when the latest census
returns were published, a town of two thousand and three inhabitants.
[Picture: Approach to Wareham]
Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has lost more
than those odd three, thus coming within the fatal definition given
somewhere, by some one, of a village.
[Picture: The Walls of Wareham]
Things are in this way come to a parlous state, for this is the latest of
a good many modern strokes. One, which hurt its pride not a little, was
when, in the redistribution of Parliamentary seats, it lost its
representation and became merged in a county division. Another—but why
enumerate these undeserved whips and scorns? In one respect Wareham
keeps an urban character. It has two inns—the “Black Bear” and the “Red
Lion”—that call themselves hotels, and a score or so of minor houses
where, if you cannot obtain a desirable “cup of genuine,” why, “’tis a
sad thing and an oncivilised?”
It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to style
Wareham “Anglebury,” for that story is greatly concerned with the
settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the Kingdom
of Wessex. Conveniently near the sea, within the innermost recesses of
Poole Harbour, and yet removed from the rage and havoc of the outer
elements, it lies on the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the
two rivers Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from
where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour. In a nook such as this
you might think a town would have been secure, and that was the hope of
those who founded it here. But, to render assurance doubly sure, those
original town-builders—who were probably much earlier than the invading
Saxons and are thought to have been some British tribe—heaped up and dug
out those famous “walls of Wareham,” which surround the town to this day,
and are not walls in the common acceptation of the term, but ditches so
deeply delved, and mounds so steeply piled that they are in some places
little more scalable than a forthright, plumb up and down, wall of brick
or masonry would be, and with an “angle of repose” sufficiently acute to
astonish any modern railway engineer.
Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earthworks, was a place of
strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the bloody
tangle of its long history. Strong defences require determined attacks.
That history only opens with some clearness at the time of the Saxon
occupation, when the piratical Danes were beginning to harry the coast,
but it continues with accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays,
repeated until the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by
only a few dispirited defenders. In A.D. 876 these Northmen captured the
place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them out. Some
Saxon confidence then returned, but the old miseries were repeated when
Canute, not yet the pious Canute of his last years, sailed up the Frome
and not only destroyed this already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the
greater part of Wessex.
Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated place when
the Conqueror came; but it was made to hold up its head once more, and
the two mints it had owned in the time of Saxon Athelstan were
re-established. The castle, whose name alone survives, in that of Castle
Hill, was then built, and, in the added strength it gave, was the source
of many troubles soon to come. It was surprised and seized for the
Empress Maud in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four years later,
in the absence of its governor, the Earl of Gloucester, who returning,
recaptured the town after a three-weeks’ siege. At length the treaty of
peace and tolerance between Stephen and Maud gave the townsfolk—those few
of them who had been courageous enough to remain, and fortunate enough to
survive—an opportunity of creeping out of the cellars, and of looking
around and reviewing their position. “Hope springs eternal,” and these
remnants of the Wareham folk were in some measure justified of their
faith, for it was not until another half-century had passed that the town
was again besieged and taken. That event was an incident in the
contention between King John and his Barons, and a feature of it was the
destruction of the castle, never afterwards rebuilt.
[Picture: Wareham]
That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could possibly
have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and personal warfares, for
it rendered Wareham a place of little account in the calculations of
mediæval partisans; and then it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the
Civil War of Crown and Parliament, when old times came again, in the
bewildering circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament
against the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined
and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the property of
their friends before they could recover it, and then stormed and
surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse of History herself
ceases to keep tally. Few people looked on: most took an active part,
and the rector himself, “a stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good
things,” was wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times. The
obvious criticism here is that they must have been short sentences. The
Parliamentary commander, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was for punishing the
“dreadful malignancy shown towards the cause of righteousness” by the
Wareham people, and advised that the place be “plucked down and made no
town”; but this course was not adopted.
Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many horrid deeds.
In that castle whose site alone remains, Robert de Belesme was starved to
death in 1114, and on those walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit
and prophet, one Peter of Pomfret, who had prophesied that the King
should lose his crown, was hanged and quartered in 1213, after having
been fed, in the manner of the prophet Micaiah, with the bread of
affliction, and the water of affliction, in the gruesome dungeons of
Corfe. For King John, the Ahab of our history, had a way of his own with
seers of visions and prophesiers of disaster; and his way, it will be
allowed, very effectually discouraged prying into futurity.
Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called “Bloody
Bank,” three poor fellows who had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion
were hanged, portions of their bodies being afterwards exposed, with
ghastly barbarity, in different parts of the town.
Following the long broad street from where the town is entered across the
Frome, the “Black Bear” is passed, prominent with its porch and the great
chained effigy of the black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the
roof of it. Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a
terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered tablet,
handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we now come to the
northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to the banks of the Piddle,
may, looking backwards, see those old defences, the so-styled “walls,”
heaped up with magnificent emphasis.
They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and although it is
a drama long since played, and the curtain rung down upon the last act,
two hundred and fifty years ago, this scenery of it can still eloquently
recall its dragonadoes and blood-boltered episodes.
CHAPTER XIII
WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS
LEAVING Wareham by West Street, where there is a “Pure Drop” inn, perhaps
suggesting the sign of the public where John Durbeyfield boozed, at
far-away Marlott, a valley road leads by East Stoke to the remains of
Bindon Abbey.
The ruins of Bindon Abbey are few and formless, standing in tree-grown
and unkempt grounds, where a black and green stagnant moat surrounds a
curious circular mound. Those who demolished Bindon Abbey did their work
thoroughly, for little is left of it save the bases of columns and the
foundations of walls, in which archæological societies see darkly the
ground plan of the old Cistercian monastery. A few stone slabs and
coffins remain, among them a stone with the indent of a vanished
life-sized brass to an abbot. The inscription survives, in bold
Lombardic characters—
ABBAS RICARDUS DE MANERS HIC TUMULATUR
APPŒNAS TARDUS DEUS HUNC SALVANS
TUEATUR.
Close by is the stone sarcophagus in which Angel Clare, sleep-walking
from Woolbridge House (which is represented in the story as being much
nearer to this spot than it really is), laid Tess. Near the ruin, beside
the Frome, is Bindon Abbey Mill, where Angel Clare proposed to learn
milling.
[Picture: The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon Abbey] Here that thing not greatly
in accord with monastic remains and hallowed vestiges of the olden
times—a railway station—comes within sight and hearing at the end of Wool
village. Old and new, quiet repose and the bustling conduct of business,
mingle strangely here, for within sight of Wool railway station, and
within hearing of the clashing of the heavy consignments of milk-churns,
driven up to it, to be placed on the rail and sent to qualify the tea of
London’s great populations, stands the great, mellowed, Elizabethan, red
brick grange or mansion known as Woolbridge House, romantically placed on
the borders of the rushy river Frome. The property at one time belonged
to the neighbouring Abbey of Bindon, from which it came to Sir Thomas
Poynings, and then to John Turberville. Garrisoned as a strategic point
during the Civil Wars, its history since that period is an obscure and
stagnant one. Long since passed from Turberville hands, it now belongs
to the Erle-Drax family of Charborough Park and Holnest. The air of
bodeful tragedy that naturally enwraps the place and has made many a
passenger in the passing trains exclaim at sight of it, “what a fitting
home for a story!” has at last been justified in its selection by the
novelist as the scene of Tess’s confession to her husband. It was here
the newly married pair were to have spent their honeymoon. “They drove
by the level road along the valley, to a distance of a few miles, and,
reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the left, and over
the great Elizabethan bridge, which gives the place half its name.
Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged lodgings,
whose external features are so well known to all travellers through the
Frome Valley; once portion of a fine manorial residence, and the property
and seat of a D’Urberville, but since its partial demolition, a
farm-house.”
It is not altogether remarkable that Clare found the “mouldy old
habitation” somewhat depressing to his dear one; and she was altogether
startled and frightened at “those horrid women,” whose portraits are
actually, as in the pages of the novel they are said to be, on the walls
of the staircase: “two life-size portraits on panels built into the
masonry. As all visitors are aware, these paintings represent women of
middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once
seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features, narrow eye, and
smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook
nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the
point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.” They
are indeed unprepossessing dames. One is growing indistinguishable, but
the other still wickedly leers at you, glancing from the tail of her eye,
as though challenging admiration. A painted round or oval decorative
frame surrounds these Turberville portraits, for such they are, and so
they were explained to be to Clare, who uneasily recognised their
likeness in an exaggerated form, to his own darling. All the old
D’Urberville vices of lawless cunning, mediæval ferocity, and callous
heartlessness are reflected in those sinister portraits, which seemed to
him to hold up a distorting mirror to the woman he had married, and
certainly proved themselves of her kin.
[Picture: Woolbridge House]
A farm-house the place remains, the ground-floor rooms stone-flagged and
chilly to modern notions, the fireplaces vast and cavernous as they are
wont to be in such old houses. It is perhaps more romantic seen in the
middle distance than when made the subject of closer study. But it is of
course the home of a ghost story, and a very fine and aristocratic
ghost-story too, made the subject of an allusion in _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_. It seems that in that very long ago, generally referred
to in fairy stories as “once upon a time,” there was a Turberville whose
unholy passions so broke all bounds of restraint that he murdered a guest
while the two of them were riding in the Turberville family coach. But
as the guest was himself one of the family, it were a more judicial
thing, perhaps, to divide the blame. This incident in the annals of a
race who very improperly often figured as sheriffs and such-like
guardians of law and order, took place on the road between Wool and Bere,
and we are asked to believe that there are those who have heard the
wheels of the blood-stained family coach traversing this route. One or
two are said to have seen it, but _they_ are persons proved to own some
mixture of that blood, for to none other is this pleasing spectacle of a
black midnight coach and demon horses vouchsafed. But stay! Not so
pleasing after all, this proof of ancestry, for to them it is a warning
of impending disaster and dissolution.
[Picture: Woolbridge House: Entrance Front]
That is a terribly dusty road which, in six miles, leads from Woolbridge
to Bere Regis, across the heaths: in some summers—_experto crede_—so
astonishingly deep in dust that it is not only impossible to ride a
bicycle over it, but scarce possible to walk. But this heath road is as
variable as the moods of a woman. It will be of this complexion at one
time, and at another entirely different. It is perhaps only when this
desirable difference rules that one appreciates the scenery it passes
through; scenery wholly of buff sand, purple heather, furze, and bracken,
whose colours are by distance blended into that rich purple brown termed,
in _The Return of the Native_, “swart.” For this is the district of that
gloomy tale, perhaps at once the most powerful and painful in its tragic
intensity of all the Wessex novels, and one in which the element of
scenery adds most strikingly to the unfolding of futilities and
disasters. “Bere Heath” it is, according to the chartographers of the
Ordnance Survey, but to ourselves who are on literary pilgrimage bent, it
is Egdon Heath whose “swart abrupt slopes” are here seen on every side,
now rising into natural hillocks masquerading solemnly as sepulchral
tumuli, now dipping into hollows where the rainwater collects in marshy
pools and keeps green the croziers and fully-opened fronds of the bracken
much longer than the parched growths, at the crests of these rises; and
again spreading out into little scrubby plains.
Mr. Hardy, who has translated the reticent solemnity of Egdon Heath into
such poignant romance, has said how pleasant it is to think or dream that
some spot in these extensive wilds may be the heath of Lear, that
traditionary King of Wessex whose sorrows Shakespeare has made the
subject of tragedy; and he has himself, in _The Return of the Native_,
made these heaths the stage whereon a tragedy is enacted that itself bids
fair to become a classic little less classical than the works of
Shakespeare. True it is that his tragedy is in the rustic kind, and none
of the characters in it far above the homespun sort, but the stricken
worm feels as great a pang as when a giant dies, and the woes of Mrs.
Yeobright, of Clym, and of Eustacia and Damon Wildeve are none the less
thrilling than those of that
“. . . very foolish fond old man
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,”
whose wanderings are the theme of Shakespeare’s muse.
[Picture: Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath]
_The Return of the Native_ is a story of days as well as nights, of fair
weather and foul, of sunshine and darkness, but it is in essence the
story of a darkened stage. The description of Egdon in the opening
chapter is the keynote of a mournful fugue:—
“The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to
evening: it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon,
anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify
the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
“In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll
into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste
began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not
been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not
clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this
and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then, and only then,
did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of
night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate
together could be perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre
stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening
gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the
heavens precipitated it.”
An artist who should come to Egdon, intent upon studying its
colour-scheme, would be nonplussed by the more than usual fickleness and
instability of its daylight hues. Shrouded in the black repose of night,
its tone is a thing of some permanence, but under the effects of sunshine
he finds it now purple, now raw sienna, shading off into Prout’s Brown,
and again rising to glints and fleeting stripes of rich golden yellow.
It would be the despair of one who worked in the slow analytic manner of
a Birket Foster, but the joy of an impressionist like a Whistler.
[Picture: Chamberlain’s Bridge]
The extremely rich and beautiful colouring of Wool and Bere Heaths
deepens with the setting of the sun to a velvety blackness and gives to
the fir-crowned hills melodramatic and tragical significances. Such an
one is Gallows Hill, where the road goes in a hollow formed by the
massive shoulders of the tree-studded height. Here, the gossips say,
with the incertitude of rustic indifference, a man hanged himself, or was
hanged. When or why he committed what we have the authority of
conventional old-time journalism for calling “the rash deed,” does not—in
the same language—“transpire.” But certainly he selected a romantic spot
for ending, for from the ragged crest, underneath one of those “clumps
and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched tops are like battlemented
towers crowning black-fronted castles of enchantment,” the moorland,
under the different local names of Hyde Heath, Decoy Heath, and Gore
Heath, but all one to the eye, goes stretching away some ten miles, to
Poole Harbour, seen from this view-point, on moonlit nights, glancing
like a mirror in a field of black velvet.
[Picture: Rye Hill, Bere Regis]
A juicy interlude to the summer dryness of these wastes is that dip in
the road where one comes to the river Piddle at Chamberlain’s Bridge, a
battered old red brick pont that, by the aid of the quietly gliding
stream and the dark, boding mass of fir-crowned Mat Hill in the
background, makes a memorable picture. Only when Bere Regis comes within
sight are the solitudes of Egdon left behind. Steeply down goes the way
into the village, down Rye Hill, past the remarkably picturesque old
thatched cottage illustrated here, perched on its steep roadside bank,
and so at last on to the level where Bere Church is glimpsed, standing
four-square and handsome in advance of the long street, backed by dense
clumps of that tree, the fir, which has so strong an affection for these
sandy heaths. Here then is the introduction to the
“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill” of the Wessex novels, the “half-dead townlet .
. . the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered the
D’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there for full five hundred
years.”
CHAPTER XIV
BERE REGIS
THIS “blinking little place,” and now perhaps a not even blinking, but
fast asleep village, was at one time a market-town, and, more than that,
as its latinised name would imply, a royal residence. Kingsbere, said to
mean “Kingsbury”—that is to say, “King’s place” or building—really
obtained its name in very different fashion. It was plain “Bere,” long
before the Saxon monarchs came to this spot and caused the latter-day
confusion among antiquaries of the British “bere,” meaning an underwood,
a scrub, copse, bramble, or thorn-bed, with the Anglo-Saxon “byrig.” We
have but to look upon the surroundings of Bere Regis even at this day, a
thousand years later, to see how truly descriptive that British name
really was. It was of old a place greatly favoured by royalty, from that
remote age when Elfrida murdered her stepson, Edward the King and Martyr,
at Corfe Castle, and thrashed her own son Ethelred here with a large wax
candle, for reproaching her with the deed. Those events happened in A.D.
978, and it is therefore not in any way surprising that no traces of the
ferocious Queen Elfrida’s residence have survived. Ethelred, we are
told, hated wax candles ever after that severe thrashing, and doubtless
hated Bere as well; but it was more than ever a royal resort in the later
times of King John, who visited it on several occasions in the course of
his troubled reign. Thenceforward, however, the favours of monarchs
ceased, and it came to depend upon the good will of the Abbots of Tarent
Abbey and that of the Turbervilles, who between them became owners of the
manor.
The village street of Bere is bleak and barren. It is a street of rustic
cottages of battered red brick, or a compost of mud, chopped straw, and
lime, called “cob,” built on a brick base, often plastered, almost all of
them thatched: some with new thatch, some with thatch middle-aged, others
yet with thatch ancient and decaying, forming a rich and fertile bed for
weeds and ox-eyed daisies and “bloody warriors,” as the local Dorsetshire
name is for the rich red wall-flowers. Sometimes the old thatch has been
stripped before the new was placed: more often it has not, and the merest
casual observer can, as he passes, easily become a critic of the
thoroughness or otherwise with which the thatcher’s work has been
performed, not only by sight of the different shades belonging to old and
new, but by the varying thicknesses with which the roofs are seen to be
covered. Here an upstairs window looks out immediately, open-eyed, upon
the sunlight; there another peers blinkingly forth, as behind beetling
eyebrows, from half a yard’s depth of straw and reed, shading off from a
coal-black substratum to a coffee-coloured layer, and thence to the amber
top-coating of the latest addition. Warm in winter, cool in summer, is
the testimony of cottagers towards thatch; and earwiggy always, thinks
the stranger under such roofs, as he observes quaint lepidoptera
ensconced comfortably in his bed. Picturesque it certainly is, expensive
too, although it may not generally be thought so; but it is more enduring
than cheap slates or tiles, and, according to many who should know, if
indeed their prejudices do not warp their statements, cheaper in the long
run.
[Picture: Bere Regis]
It is, in fine, not easy to come to a definitive pronouncement on the
merits or demerits, the comparative cheapness or costliness, of rival
roofing materials. The cost of the materials themselves, payments for
laying them, and the astonishing difference between the enduring
qualities of thatch well and thatch indifferently laid forbid certitude.
But all modern local authorities are opposed to thatch, chiefly on the
score of its liability to fire. All the many and extensive fires of
Dorsetshire have been caused by ignited thatch; or else, caused in other
ways, have been spread and magnified by it. Yet, here again your rustic
will stoutly defend the ancient roofing, and declare that while such a
roof is slowly smouldering, and before it bursts into a blaze, he can
dowse it with a pail of water. No doubt, but that water, from a well
perhaps two hundred feet deep, and that ladder from some neighbour
half-a-mile away, are sometimes not to be brought to bear with the
required celerity.
This, let it be fervently said, is not an attack upon thatch: it is but
the presentation of pros and cons, and is no argument in favour of that
last word in utilitarian hideousness, corrugated galvanized iron, under
whose shelter you freeze in winter and fry in summer.
Meanwhile, here are ruined cottages in the long street of Bere, whose
condition has been brought about by just such causes, and whose
continuation in that state is due, not to a redundancy of dwellings, but
because the Lady of the Manor at Charborough, despising the insignificant
rents here, will not trouble about, or go to the expense of, rebuilding.
Hence the gaps in the long row, like teeth missing from a jaw.
Not a little hard-featured and stern at first sight, owing to the entire
absence of the softening feature of gardens upon the road, this long
street of Bere has yet a certain self-reliant strong-charactered aspect
that brings respect. It has, too, the most interesting and beautiful
church, rich in historical, and richer in literary, associations.
[Picture: Bere Regis]
Bere Regis in its decay is a storehouse of old Dorset speech and customs.
To its cottagers vegetables are “gearden-tackle,” sugar—at least, the
moist variety—is “zand,” and garden-flowers all have quaint outlandish
names. The rustic folk have a keen, if homely philosophy. “Ef ’twarnt
for the belly,” said one to the present writer, in allusion to cost of
living, “back ’ud wear gold.” “Bere,” said another—an ‘outlandish’
person he, who had only been settled in the village a decade or so and
accordingly was only regarded as a stranger, and so indeed regarded
himself—“Bere, a poor dra’lattin twankyten pleace, ten mile from
anywheer, God help it!” which is so very nearly true that, if you consult
the map you will find that Dorchester is ten miles distant, Corfe Castle
twelve, Wimborne twelve, Blandford eight, and Wareham, the nearest town,
seven miles away.
“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” as Mr. Hardy elects to rechristen Bere Regis,
owes the ultimate limb of that compound name to Woodbury Hill, a lofty
elevation rising like an exaggerated down, but partly clothed with trees,
on the outskirts of Bere Regis. The novelist describes this scene of an
ancient annual fair, now much shrunken from its olden import, rather as
it was than as it is. “Greenhill was the Nijni Novgorod of South Wessex;
and the busiest, merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number was
the day of the sheep-fair. This yearly gathering was upon the summit of
a hill, which retained in good preservation the remains of an ancient
earthwork, consisting of a huge rampart and entrenchment of an oval form,
encircling the top of the hill, though somewhat broken down here and
there. To each of the two openings, on opposite sides, a winding road
ascended, and the level green space of twenty or thirty acres enclosed by
the bank was the site of the fair. A few permanent erections dotted the
spot, but the majority of the visitors patronised canvas alone for
resting and feeding under during the time of their sojourn here.”
The place looks interesting, viewed from beneath whence two
forlorn-looking houses are seen perched on the very ridge of the windy
height. But it is always best to remain below, and so to keep romantic
illusions; and here is no exception. Climbing to the summit, those two
houses are increased to fifteen or seventeen red-brick, storm-beaten
cottages, some thatched, others slated, mostly uninhabited; all
commonplace. The fair is still held in September, beginning on the 18th,
the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Formerly it lasted a week, and,
at the rate of a hundred pounds a day in tolls to the Lord of the Manor,
brought that fortunate person an annual “unearned increment” as the
Radicals would call it, of £700. Nowadays those tolls are very much of a
negligible quantity.
Here it was, during the sheep fair, that Troy, supposed to have long
before been drowned in Lulworth Cove, but living and masquerading as Mr.
Francis, the Great Cosmopolitan Roughrider, enacted the part of Dick
Turpin in the canvas-covered show, and, looking through a hole in the
tent, unobserved himself, observed Bathsheba,
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