THE MARTYRS
Image unavailable: SALISBURY CATHEDRAL (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).SALISBURY CATHEDRAL (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).
quarrelling with the bishops, one of whom they murdered in the turbulent times that prevailed during Jack Cade’s rebellion. Bishop Ayscough was that unfortunate prelate. He had cautiously retired to Edington, but a furious body of Salisbury malcontents marched out across the Plain, and dragging him from the altar of the church, where he was saying Mass, took him to an adjacent hill-top, and slew him with the utmost barbarity. It was for the benefit of these unruly citizens that one of Jack Cade’s quarters was consigned from London to Salisbury and elevated there on a pole, as a preliminary warning. Full punishment followed a little later.
Itis really too great a task to follow the history of Salisbury through the centuries to the present time; nor, indeed, since the city and the cathedral are from our present point of view but incidents along the Exeter Road, would it be desirable to dwell very long on their story, which, as may have been judged from what has already been said, is an exceedingly turbulent one. The fearful martyrdoms carried out in Fisherton Fields by the bloody hell-hounds of the Marian Persecution still stain the records of the Church; nor, although the very reading of them turn brain and body sick, and make even the architectural enthusiast almost turn away in disgust from that lovely cathedral, may God grantthat they ever be forgotten, as in the England of to-day they would almost seem to be. Hellish ferocity, damnable frauds, how they smirch those sculptured stones and cry insistently for remembrance!
Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop in the time of Henry the Eighth, was alive to it all, and cleared away the false relics; the ‘stinking boots, mucky combs, ragged rochetts, rotten girdles, pyled purses, great bullocks’ horns, locks of hair, filthy rags, and gobbets of wood,’ which he found here; but, with less courage than others, he recanted in Mary’s reign. Sherfield, Recorder of Salisbury, was another reformer, but he lived in less dangerous times for such men. It was in 1629 that he smashed the stained-glass window, representing the Creation, in St. Edmund’s Church. In other times he would assuredly have been burnt for this act; as it was, he was summoned before the Star Chamber. He pleaded that the window did not contain a true history of the Creation, and objected that God was represented as ‘a little old man in a long blue coat,’ which he held was ‘an indignity offered to Almighty God.’ He was committed to the Fleet Prison for this, fined £500, and required to apologise to the Bishop of Salisbury. Fortunate Mr. Sherfield!
MURDER OF THE HARTGILLS
This fair city has been almost as much of a Golgotha as the settlements of savage African kinglets are wont to be. Shakespeare has made mention of the execution of the Duke of Buckingham here in 1484 by Richard the Third, but many an one has suffered and left no such trace. That such executions were generally unjust and almost always toosevere is their sufficient condemnation; but the hanging of Charles, Lord Stourton, in 1556, is an exception. The affair for which he was put to death was the murder of the two Hartgills, father and son, at Kilmington, Somerset, and it affords an unusually instructive glimpse into the manners of the period. It seems that William Hartgill had long been steward to the previous Lord Stourton, the father of Charles. Like most stewards, he had profited by his stewardship, over and above his salary, to a considerable extent. There was no friendship wasted between him and the new lord, but the quarrels which had taken place between William Hartgill and his son on the one side, and Charles, Lord Stourton, and his servants on the other, finally came to a head when my lord demanded a written undertaking from his mother that she would never marry again, and that Hartgill should be bond for the undertaking being kept. The widowed Lady Stourton was residing at the Hartgills’ house when this demand was made. She refused to have anything to do with such a paper, and Hartgill bluntly declined as well. Lord Stourton would then appear to have determined on revenge for this defeat, and eventually, after the Hartgills had been on several occasions waylaid, threatened, and attacked by his servants, he conceived the devilish plan of a pretended reconciliation over this and other disputes in the village churchyard of Kilmington, the occasion to be used as a means of taking them off their guard, and finally disposing of them. The two victims were suspicious of this apparent friendliness; but, unhappily for them,eventually agreed to meet in that God’s Acre, on 12th January 1556, there to settle all accounts and differences. They met, and, at a previously arranged signal, Lord Stourton’s servants rushed upon the Hartgills and stabbed and battered them to death in a revoltingly cruel manner, while their master looked on with approval. The details of this cold-blooded atrocity are fully set forth in the trials of that period, for the satisfaction of any one greedy of horrors.
THE DEVIL’S HEALTH
This was in the reign of Queen Mary, when Protestants were burned at the stake with the approval of Roman Catholics; but not even in those brutal times could this affair be hushed up. Lord Stourton was arrested, brought to trial in London, and, together with four of his servants, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death. Justice was commendably swift. The two Hartgills had been done to death on the 12th of January, and on the second day of March in the same year my lord set out under escort from the Tower of London for Salisbury, the place of execution. The melancholy cavalcade came down the Exeter Road, the chief figure in it set astride a horse, with legs and arms pinioned. The first night they lay at Hounslow, the second at Staines, the third at Basingstoke, and thence to Salisbury, where, in the Market Place, on the morning of the 6th of March, they hanged him with a silken cord. His servants were turned off at the end of quite common hempen ropes, which doubtless did their business quite as neatly. The body of this prime malefactor, the organiser of the crime, wasburied with much ceremony in the cathedral, but those of the lesser criminals were treated (we may suppose) with less reverence, because you may search the building in vain for tomb or epitaph to their memory. But—quaintest touch of all—the silken rope by which Lord Stourton swung was suspended here, over his tomb, where it remained for many a long year afterwards.
The next outstanding landmark in the way of executions is the hanging of a prisoner who had just been awarded a sentence when he threw a brickbat at the Chief Justice. His lordship was considerably damaged and for this assault pronounced sentence of death upon him. The execution took place at once, outside the Council House, the unfortunate man’s right hand being first struck off.
The Civil War did not result in anything very tragical for Salisbury, the operations in and around the city being quite unimportant. The ‘Catherine Wheel Inn,’ however, was the scene of much alarm among the superstitious, when, according to a gruesome story, the Cavaliers assembled there, having toasted the King and the Royal family, proceeded to drink the health of the Devil,—and the Devil appeared, the room becoming filled with ‘noisome fumes of sulphur, and a hideous monster, which was the Devil, no doubt,’ entering, and grabbing the giver of the toast, flying away with him out of the window.
Salisbury was the scene of Penruddocke’s rising for the King in 1655. He was a county gentleman, of Compton Chamberlayne, and with some others and aband of a hundred and fifty horsemen, rode into the city at four o’clock in the morning of 14th March. They seized the Judges of Assize in their beds, opened the doors of the prison, and imprisoned the judges in the place of the released convicts. Then, finding the citizens too timid to join them in their revolt against Cromwell, they sped across country, into Devon, where they were captured.
Charles the Second was welcomed by Salisbury’s citizens, just as they welcomed every one else; practising with much success St. Paul’s admirable precept, to be ‘all things to all men.’ When James the Second came here, on his way to meet, and fight, the Prince of Orange, he was escorted, with every show of deference and respect, to his lodgings at the Bishop’s Palace by the Mayor, and when he had slunk away, and the Prince came, less than four weeks later, and was lodged in the same house, the same Mayor did precisely the same thing.
From the beginning of the seventeenth century onward the citizens began to dearly love kings and great personages, or, if they did not love them, effectually pretended to do so. When plague ravaged the city of London, no one coming from that direction was allowed to enter Salisbury, and even Salisbury’s own citizens returning home from that infected centre were obliged to remain outside for three months, while goods were not permitted to be brought nearer than Three Mile Hill. But Charles the Second and his Court, flying from London from the disease, were welcomed all the same!
BRUTAL SCENES
Coach passengers entering Salisbury even so late as 1835 were sometimes witnesses of shocking scenes that, however picturesque they might have rendered mediæval times, were brutalising and degrading in a civilised era. Almost every year of the nineteenth century up to that date was fruitful in executions. In 1801 there were ten: seven for the crime of sheep-stealing, one for horse-stealing, one for stealing a calf, and one for highway robbery. The practice of hanging criminals on the scenes of their crimes afforded spectacles of the most extraordinary character, as instanced in the procession that accompanied two murderers, George Carpenter and George Ruddock, from Fisherton Gaol, on the north-west of the city, to the place of their execution on Warminster Down, 15th March 1813. Such parades were senseless, since no one ever dreamed of a rescue being attempted; but, all the same, the condemned men, placed in a cart and accompanied by a clergyman preaching of Kingdom Come, preceded by the hangman and followed by eight men carrying two coffins, were escorted all the way by a troop of Wiltshire Yeomanry, followed by some two hundred constables and local gentlemen, all walking and carrying white staves; with bailiffs, sheriffs, under-sheriffs, magistrates, a hundred mounted squires, a posse of ‘javelin men,’ more clergymen, the gaoler and his assistants, more javelin men and sheriff’s officers, more yeomanry, and, at last, bringing up the rear, a howling mob,numbering many thousands. As for the central objects in this show, ‘they died penitent,’ we are told; and indeed they could do nothing less, seeing to what trouble they had thus put a goodly proportion of the county.
Executions for all manner of crimes were so many that it would be idle to detail them; but some stand out prominently by reason of their circumstances. For example, the hanging of Robert Turner Watkins in 1819, for a murder near Purton, presents a lurid scene. His wife had died of a broken heart shortly after his arrest, and his mother was among the spectators of his end. The same kind of procession accompanied him across Salisbury Plain to the place of execution, and a similar mob made the occasion a holiday. Mother and son were able to bid one another farewell, owing to an unexpected halt on the road; and when they made a halt for the refreshments which the long journey demanded, the condemned man’s children were brought to him.
‘Mammy is dead,’ said one. ‘Ah!’ replied the man, ‘and so will your daddy be, shortly.’ At the fatal spot he prayed with the chaplain, and was allowed to read to the people a psalm which he had chosen. It was Psalm 108, which, on reference, will not prove to be particularly appropriate to the occasion. Then he blessed the fifteen thousand or so present, felt the rope, and remarked that it could only kill the body, and was turned off, amid the sudden and unexpected breaking of one of the most terrific thunderstorms ever experienced on the Plain.
HUMANE JURIES
They hanged a gipsy, one Joshua Shemp, in 1801,for stealing a horse, and afterwards discovered that he was innocent, according to a monument still to be seen in Odstock churchyard. In 1802 John Everett suffered death for uttering forged bank-notes, followed in 1820 by William Lee, who died for the same offence. So late as 1835, two men were hanged for arson; but public opinion had already been aroused against such severity, judges and juries taking every advantage offered by faults in the drawing up of indictments to acquit all those criminals not guilty of murder whose crimes were then met by capital punishment. The statutes left no choice but death for the convicted incendiary, the horse-or sheep-stealer, and many another; and so many a guilty person was acquitted by judges and juries horrified by the thought of incurring blood-guiltiness by sending such men to the scaffold. The law allowed loopholes for escape, and so when thestraw-rick, to which a prisoner was charged with setting fire, was proved to have beenhay, he was found ‘Not guilty.’ Blackstone called this action taken by juries ‘pious perjury,’ and so it certainly was when, to avoid shedding blood, they used to find £5 and £10 notes which prisoners sometimes were charged with stealing, to be articles to the value of twelvepence or a few shillings, according as the case required.
The last lawless scenes around Salisbury were enacted at the close of 1830, when the so-called ‘Machinery Riots,’ which had spread all over the country, culminated here in fights between the Wiltshire Yeomanry and the discontented agricultural labourers, who, fearing that steam machinery, then
Image unavailable: ST. ANNE’S GATE, SALISBURY.ST. ANNE’S GATE, SALISBURY.
ALDERBURY
beginning to be adopted, was about to take away their livelihood, scoured the country in bands, wrecking and burning farmsteads and barns. The ‘Battle of Bishop Down,’ on the Exeter Road between ‘Winterslow Hut’ and Salisbury, was fought on 23rd November, and was caused by the collision of a large body of rioters who were marching to the city with the avowed object of pillaging it, and a mixed force of yeomanry and special constables. All the coaches, together with every other kind of traffic, were brought to a standstill. Stone-throwing on the part of the rioters, and bludgeoning by the specialconstables were succeeded by charges of the yeomanry, and the contest resulted in the capture of twenty-two rioters, who were locked up in Fisherton Gaol. The next day a number of rioters were surprised in the ‘Green Dragon Inn,’ Alderbury, and marched off to prison; and the day after, twenty-five were taken in a fight near Tisbury, after one of their number had been killed. There were no fewer than three hundred and thirty prisoners awaiting trial when the Special Commissioners arrived for that purpose on 27th December. Many of the prisoners were transported, and others had short terms of imprisonment; but a leader, called ‘Commander’ Coote, who was captured by two constables at the Compasses, Rockbourn, was hanged at Winchester.
Andnow for some little-known literary landmarks. Salisbury, of course, is the scene of some passages inMartin Chuzzlewit; but it is outside the city that we must go, on the road to Southampton, to find the residence of that eminent architect, Mr. Pecksniff; or the ‘Blue Dragon,’ where Tom Pinch’s friend, Mrs. Lupin, was landlady. St. Mary’s Grange, four miles from Salisbury, is the real name of Mr. Pecksniff’s home, but the house is only vaguely indicated in the novel. It is different with the ‘Blue Dragon,’ which is an undoubted portrait of the ‘Green Dragon Inn,’ at Alderbury, despite thefact that the sign-board has since disappeared. ‘A faded, and an ancient dragon he was; and many a wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail had changed his colour from a gaudy blue to a faint, lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he hung; rearing in a state of monstrous imbecility on his hind legs; waxing, with every month that passed, so much more dim and shapeless, that as you gazed on him at one side of the sign-board, it seemed as if he must be gradually melting through it, and coming out upon the other.’
The ‘Green Dragon’ is a quaint gabled village inn, standing back from the road. It is even more ancient than any one, judging only from its exterior, would suppose, for a fine fifteenth-century mantelpiece, adorned with carved crockets and heraldic roses, yet remains in the parlour, a relic of bygone importance.
As for Mrs. Lupin, the landlady, it is supposed that Dickens drew the character from a real person. If so, how one would like to have known that cheery woman. Do you remember how Tom Pinch left Salisbury to seek his fortune in London? and how Mrs. Lupin met the coach on the London road with his box in the trap, and a great basket of provisions, with a bottle of sherry sticking out of it? and how the open-handed fellow shared the cold roast fowl, the packet of ham in slices, the crusty loaf, and the other half-dozen items—not forgetting the contents of the bottle—with the coachman and guard as they drove along the old road to London through the night?
A WORD-PICTURE
‘Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic burial-grounds about them, where graves are green, and daisies sleep—for it is evening—on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past paddock-fences, farms and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks, cut slice by slice away, and showing in the waning light like ruined gables, old and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry water-splash, and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!’
Quite so. And an excellent picture of the coaching age, although ‘Yoho!’ smacks too much of the sea for a coach. In his haste he wrote that word when he surely meant ‘Tallyho!’ Nor is this a correct portrait of the Exeter Road by any manner of means. Dickens, usually so precise in topographical details, has generalised here. A true and stirring picture of country roads in general, there are farms, and villages, and churches all too many for this highway. It should have been ‘Yoho! across the bleak and barren down. Yoho! by the blasted oak on the lonely common,’ and so forth, so far as Andover, at any rate. And what was thatwater-splash doing on a main road in the flower of the coaching age, when all the runnels and streams across the mail routes were duly bridged? But it is not very odd that Dickens should have been so inexact here, for he beganMartin Chuzzlewitin 1843, and it was not until long after the book was published, in 1848, that he really explored the Exeter Road. Forster tells us that Dickens, in company with himself, Leech, and Lemon, stayed at Salisbury in the March of that year, and ‘passed a March day in riding over every part of the Plain; visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt’s “Hut” at Winterslow.’
It must be obvious how exquisitely fitted, both by reason of its situation and circumstances, ‘Winterslow Hut’ is for the novelist’s use, and that, had he explored it before, that wild spot would have found a place in the pages ofMartin Chuzzlewit, together with detailed references to some of Salisbury’s old coaching inns, of which there were many, this being a meeting-place of several roads, besides being on the great highway to the West.
VANISHED INNS
So far back as 1786 there were three coaches passing through Salisbury on their way from London to Exeter, daily. Firstly, the ‘Post Coach’ every morning at eight o’clock, with the up coach to London every afternoon at four o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Secondly, a mail coach, specially advertised as carrying a guard all the way, every morning at ten o’clock, Sundays excepted, and the up mail every night at ten o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Thirdly, a ‘Diligence,’ which passed through every nightabout eight o’clock, the up coach at twelve, midnight. All these coaches stopped, and were horsed, at the ‘White Hart.’ In 1797 there were five coaches to and from London, daily, and three on alternate days; and three waggons, two every day, the other on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
In those times, when highwaymen were numerous and daring and travellers appropriately anxious, stage-coach proprietors in Salisbury advertised the fact of their conveyances being provided with an armed guard, and that any one making an attempt at robbery would be handed over to justice. But, notwithstanding such bold announcements, all the friends and relatives of citizens daring the journey to London used to assemble on the London road and tearfully watch the coaches as they toiled up Bishop Down and over the crest of Three Mile Hill, into the Unknown. The spot is still called ‘Weeping Cross.’
Of the old Salisbury coaching inns, a goodly number have been either pulled down or converted to other purposes. The ‘King’s Head,’ the ‘Maidenhead,’ the ‘Sun,’ the ‘Vine,’ the ‘Three Tuns,’ and others have entirely disappeared; and the ‘Spread Eagle,’ the ‘Lamb,’ ‘Three Cups,’ ‘Antelope,’ and the ‘George’—where Pepys stayed and was overcharged—have become shops or private residences; while the beautiful old ‘Three Swans’ was converted into a Temperance Hotel five years ago.
There is a passage in Sir William Knighton’s Diary under date of 1832, which, although written without any special emphasis, is highly picturesque and informativeon the subject of travelling at that time. It gives in one phrase a glimpse of the waiting-room which was a feature of all-coaching inns, and in another shows that it was possible to bargain for fares. Only in this instance the bargain was not struck.
He had come at half-past one in the morning into Salisbury by a cross-country coach, and waiting for the arrival of the mail to Exeter, ‘sat quietly by the fire in the common dirty room appropriated to coach passengers.’
For twenty minutes, he says, he had for companion a man who had just disengaged himself from an irritable rencontre with the coachman of the mail. He had waited from two o’clock in the afternoon to go on to Bristol, but when the time arrived he quarrelled with the coachman about whether he should pay nine shillings or twelve, the passenger insisting upon nine, the whip three shillings more; upon which the traveller decided not to go, returned to the coachroom, and ordered his bed. Sir William asked him if it really was worth while to lose the time and to pay for a bed at the inn over this unsuccessful negotiation, and to this the man replied that it was not. ‘In fact,’ said he, ‘we have both been taken in. The coachman thought I would pay, and I thought he would take my offer.’
Itis a nine-miles journey, due north from Salisbury to Stonehenge, but although it would, under
PEPYS AT OLD SARUM
Image unavailable: VIEW OF SALISBURY SPIRE FROM THE RAMPARTS OF OLD SARUM.VIEW OF SALISBURY SPIRE FROM THE RAMPARTS OF OLD SARUM.
other circumstances, be unduly extending the scope of this work to travel so far from the highway, we need have no compunction in making this trip, for it brings us to one of the most interesting places on the Amesbury and Ilminster route to Exeter—to Stonehenge, in fact, and passes by the wonderful terraced hill of Old Sarum. You can see Old Sarum looming ahead immediately after passing the outlying houses of Salisbury, and if you come upon it when a storm is impending, as in Constable’s picture, the impression of size and strength created is one not soon to be forgotten. As to coming upon it in the dark, as Pepys did, the sight is awe-inspiring.
Time and place conspired to frighten him. ‘So over the Plain,’ he says, ‘by the sight of the steeple, to Salisbury by night; but before I came to the town, I saw a great fortification, and there alighted, and to it, and in it; and find it prodigious, so as to fright me to be in it all alone at that time of night, it being dark. I understand since it to lie that that is called Old Sarum.’
To climb the steep grassy ramparts, one after the other, and to descend into and climb out of the successive yawning ditches is a tiring exercise, but perhaps in no other way is it possible to gain anything like a proper idea of the strength of the place. Nor in there any more sure way of arriving at the relative scale of it than by observing the stray cyclist standing on the topmost ramparts and gazing toward the distant spire of Salisbury.
There are other things than ancient history that make Old Sarum memorable. It was the head andfront of the electoral scandals that brought about the great Reform Act of 1832. Although it contained neither a single house nor an inhabitant, Old Sarum survived as a Parliamentary borough until that date, and regularly returned two members. Lord John Russell, introducing the Reform Bill to the House of Commons, remarked that Old Sarum was a green mound without a single habitation upon it, and like Gatton, also an uninhabited borough, returned two members, while great towns like Birmingham and Manchester were entirely without Parliamentary representation. The two members sent to Parliament were merely the nominees of the Lord of the Manor, elected by two dummy electors who, shortly after each dissolution of Parliament, were granted leases in the borough of Old Sarum—leases known as ‘burgage tenures.’ Their voting done, they quietly surrendered their leases, which were not granted again until a like occasion arose. The elections took place at the ‘Parliament Tree,’ which, until 1896 (when it was blown down in a snowstorm), stood in a meadow between the mound and the village of ‘Stratford-under-the-Castle.’ It was supposed to have marked the site of the Town Hall of the vanished town. Cobbett, riding horseback past the spot, anathematised this ‘rotten borough’ and the system that allowed such things. He calls it ‘The Accursed Hill.’ The only house standing near is the ‘Old Castle Inn.’
Beyond it the road dips steeply to the downs, and so continues, with regular undulations, unsheltered from storms or frosts, or the fierce heat of the summer sun, to Amesbury.
Image unavailable: OLD SARUM (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).OLD SARUM (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).
AMESBURY
Amesbury is a sheltered village, lying in a valley between these downs. It was on the alternative coach route taken by the ‘Telegraph,’ ‘Celerity,’ ‘Defiance,’ and ‘Subscription’ coaches, which, leaving Andover, came by Weyhill, Mullen’s Pond, and ‘Park House Inn.’ This way came the ‘Telegraph’ coach on its journey to London, 27th December 1836, through the thick of that terrible snowstorm of which we find copious mention on every one of the classic roads. It began when they reached Wincanton, and from that place they struggled on up to the Plain, where it was a white world of scurrying snowflakes, howling winds, and deep drifts. Down into Amesbury, and to the hospitable ‘George’ there, was but a momentary respite, for the determined coachman, although immediately snowed up in the open country beyond the village, sent for help and, assisted by a team of six fresh post-horses with a post-boy to every pair, charged up the hills in the direction of Andover, with that fortune which is said to favour the brave. That is to say, he and His Majesty’s mails got through to London, where the story was duly chronicled in the papers of the period.
Here, or hereabouts, it was that the up Exeter ‘Celerity’ coach came into collision with the ‘Defiance’ at one o’clock in the morning of 25th July 1827, resulting in the death of a gentleman who was thrown off the roof of the ‘Celerity’ and instantly killed, and in serious injuries to others. Both coaches were overturned. The ‘Celerity’ coachman, according to the evidence at the subsequent trial, was to blame for reckless driving, and for endeavouring to taketoo much of the road; but the lawyers found a flaw in the indictment, which stated that he was driving three geldings and a mare, and as it could not be proved that this description was correct, the matter dropped.
Andnow to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up the steep road from Amesbury taken by the coaches. Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an awful thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, or can come upon the place at dead of night either by moonlight, or in the blackness of a moonless midnight, you will fail to be impressed; unless you are a literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, not by thoughts of the mythical human sacrifices offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by the last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the place has an immediate human interest which otherwise it lacks in the immeasurably vast space of time dividing us from the period of its building and of the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make a wide circle round it on the Plain. Solitary, with nothing to give it scale, even the brakes that convey irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this Mystery, sphinx-like, offers an insoluble riddle to archæologists of all the ages.
No one, despite the affected archaisms and the
STONEHENGE
Image unavailable: THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER ‘TELEGRAPH,’ ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER ‘TELEGRAPH,’ ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).
sham archæology, has described Stonehenge so impressively as that ‘wondrous boy’ Chatterton:—
A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes,Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie,It ne could be the worke of human handes,It ne was reared up by menne of claie.Here did the Britons adoration payeTo the false god whom they did Tauran name,Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie,Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame;Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee,As they were met in council for to bee.
A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes,Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie,It ne could be the worke of human handes,It ne was reared up by menne of claie.Here did the Britons adoration payeTo the false god whom they did Tauran name,Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie,Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame;Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee,As they were met in council for to bee.
A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes,Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie,It ne could be the worke of human handes,It ne was reared up by menne of claie.Here did the Britons adoration payeTo the false god whom they did Tauran name,Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie,Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame;Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee,As they were met in council for to bee.
Stonehenge was probably standing when the Romans came to Britain, and doubtless astonished them when they first saw it as much as any one else. Its surroundings were not very different then from now. A farmstead, with ugly blue-slated roof, which has appeared on the ridge of the down of late years, and possibly a road which did not exist in days of old: these alone have changed the aspect of the vast solitude in which the hoary monument stands. No hedges, no gates, never a sheep upon the meagre grass. As Ingoldsby says of Salisbury Plain, in general:—
Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see;No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles,Much less a house or a cottage for miles.
Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see;No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles,Much less a house or a cottage for miles.
Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see;No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles,Much less a house or a cottage for miles.
This, saving that intrusive farmstead, still holds good here; and although every one is inevitably disappointed with Stonehenge, as first seen at a distance, lookingso smalland insignificant in the vastness of the bare downs in which it is set, theplace, and not the great stones merely, impresses by its sadness and utter detachment from the living world, its loves and hates and interests. The birds forget to sing in this loneliness, which is awful in winter and not less awful in the emptiness visible under the blue sky and blazing sun of summer. Just the situation in which Stonehenge is placed, you understand, not Stonehenge itself, gives these feelings. ‘Do not we gaze with awe upon these massive stones?’ asks the high-falutin guide-book compiler. No, indeed we don’t. It is a pity, but it can’t be done, and the average description of Stonehenge which sets forth the grandeur and stupendous size of these stones, is pumped-up fudge and flapdoodle of the damnablest kind, which takes in no one. It is not merely the Philistine who thinks thus, but even the would-be marvellers, and those of light and leading are disquieted by secret thoughts that, had we a mind to it, and if there was money in it, we could build a better and a bigger Stonehenge by a long way.
The earliest account of this mystic monument is found in the writings of Nennius, who lived in the ninth century. The first-comer is entitled to respect, and when Nennius tells us that Stonehenge was erected by the surviving Britons, in memory of four hundred and sixty British nobles, murdered here at a conference to which the Saxon chieftain, Hengist, had invited King Vortigern and his Court, we are bound to pay some attention to the statement, although to place implicit reliance upon it would be rash, considering the fact that Nennius wrote four hundred years after the event.
Image unavailable: STONEHENGE (AFTER TURNER, R.A.).STONEHENGE (AFTER TURNER, R.A.).
WHO BUILT STONEHENGE?
But there are, and have been, many theories which profess to give the only true origin of these stone circles. An antiquary formerly living at Amesbury went to the beginnings of creation and held that they were erected by Adam. If so, it is to be hoped for Adam’s sake that he finished the job in the summer, or that if it occupied him in winter time, he had clothed himself with something warmer than the traditional fig-leaf, in view of the rigours of these Wiltshire Downs. It would be interesting also to have Adam’s opinion as to the comparative merits of Salisbury Plain and the Garden of Eden.
Then a tradition existed that Merlin, the sorcerer, arranged the circles. Those who do not think much of this view may take more kindly to the legend of our old friends the Druids, who, according to Dr. Stukeley and others, made this their chief temple; while, according to other views, the Britons before and after the Roman occupation, and the Romans themselves, were the builders. Then there are others who conceive this to have been the crowning-place of the Danish kings. The Saxons, indeed, appear to be the only people who have not been credited with the work; although, curiously enough, its very name is of Saxon derivation, and the earliest writers refer to it as ‘Stanenges,’ from Anglo-Saxon words meaning ‘the hanging-stones.’ That the Saxons discovered Stonehenge, and were puzzled by it as greatly as it must have excited the wonder of the Romans, hundreds of years before, seems obvious from this name they gave the lonely place. Ignorant as to itsuse, they either saw in the upright stones and the imposts they carried a resemblance to a gallows, or else, not being themselves expert builders, marvelled that the great imposts should remain suspended in the air.
Much of the legitimate wonderment in respect of Stonehenge lies in the mystery of how the forgotten builders could have quarried and shaped these stones, and could have cut the tenons and mortice-holes that held the tall columns, and the flat stones above them, together. Camden, the old chronicler, has a ready way out of this puzzling question. Beginning with a description of this ‘huge and monstrous piece of work,’ he goes on to say that ‘some there are that think them to be no natural stones, hewn out of the rock, but artificially made out of pure sand, and, by some glue or unctuous matter, knit and incorporate together.’
THE ‘FRIAR’S HEEL’
Stonehenge is considered to have consisted, when perfect, of an outer circle of thirty tall stones, three and a half feet apart, and connected together by a line of imposts, in whose extremities mortice-holes were cut, fitting into corresponding tenons projecting from the upright stones. The height of this circular screen was sixteen feet. A second and inner circle consisted of smaller and rougher stones, some forty in number, and six feet in height. Within this circle, again, rose five tall groups of stone placed in an ellipse, each group consisting of two uprights, with an impost above. These stones were the largest of all, the tallest reaching to a height of twenty-five feet. They were named by Dr. Stukeley, impressivelyenough, the Great Trilithons. Each of these five groups would appear to have been accompanied on the inner side by a cluster of three small standing stones, while a black flat monolith, called the ‘Altar Stone,’ occupied the innermost position. A smaller trilithon seems to have once stood near its big brethren, but it and three of the great five are in ruins. Only six imposts of the outer circle are left in their place overhead, and but sixteen of its thirty upright stones are now standing. The smaller circles and groups are equally imperfect. Some of this ruin has befallen within the historical period; one of the Great Trilithons having been wrecked in 1620, in the absurd treasure-seeking expedition of the Duke of Buckingham, while another fell on the 3rd of January 1797, during a thaw.
These circles seem to have been surrounded by an earthen bank, with an avenue leading off towards the east. Very few traces of these enclosures now remain. In midst of the avenue lies the flat so-called ‘Stone of Sacrifice,’ with the rough obelisk of the ‘Friar’s Heel,’ as the most easterly outpost of all, beyond. To the Friar’s Heel belongs a legend which gives, by the way, an even more distinguished person than Adam as the builder of Stonehenge. The Devil, according to this story, was the architect, and when he had nearly finished his work, he chuckled to himself that no one would be able to tell how it was done. A wandering friar, however, who had been a witness of it all, remarked, ‘That’s more than thee can tell,’ and thereupon ran away, the Devil flinging one of the stones left over after him.It only just struck the friar on the heel, and stuck there in the turf, where it stands to this day.
The various stones of which Stonehenge is constructed derive from widely-sundered districts. The outer circle and the five Great Trilithons are said to have been fashioned from stones that came from Marlborough Downs, and the second circle and innermost ellipse belong to a rock formation not known to exist nearer than South Wales. The ‘Altar Stone’ is different from any of the others, and the circumstance lends some colour to the theory that it, coming from some unknown region, was the original stone fetish brought from a distance by the prehistoric tribe that settled here, around which grew by degrees the subsequent great temple. There are those who will have it that this was a temple of serpent-worshippers; and an argument not altogether unsupported by facts would have us believe that Stonehenge is really a Temple of the Sun. It is a singular accident (if itisan accident) that the ‘Friar’s Heel,’ as seen from the centre of the circle, is in exact orientation with the rising sun on the morning of the Longest Day of the year, 21st June. Every year, on this occasion, great crowds of people set out from Salisbury to see sunrise at Stonehenge. There have frequently been as many as three thousand persons present on this occasion. As the spot is nine miles from that cathedral city, and as the sun rises on this date at the early hour of 3.44A.M., it requires some enthusiasm to rise one’s self for the occasion, if indeed the more excellent way is not to sit up all night. Great, therefore, is the disappointment when
SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE
Image unavailable: SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE.SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE.
the morning is misty. If this sunrise phenomenon is not an accident, then Stonehenge, as the Temple of the Sun, is the earliest cathedral in Britain. But, as we have already seen, in these multitudes of guesses at the truth, no one can arrive at the facts, and all we can do is to say frankly, with old Pepys, who was here in 1668, ‘God knows what its use was.’
The present historian has waited for the sun to rise here. Arriving at Amesbury village at half-past two in the morning, the street looked and sounded lively with the clustered lights of bicycles and conveyances gathered there; with the ringing of bicycle bells, the sounding of coach-horns, and the talk of those who had come to pay their devoirs to the rising luminary. The village inn was open all night for the needs of travellers journeying to this shrine, and ten minutes was allowed for each person, a policeman standing outside to see that they were duly turned out at the end of that time.
To one who arrived early on the scene, while the Plain remained shrouded in the grayness of the midsummer night, and the rugged stones of Stonehenge yet loomed vague and formless, the scene looking down towards Amesbury was an impressive one. Dimly the ascending white road up to the stones could be discerned by much straining of tired eyes, and along it twinkled brightly the lights of approaching vehicles, now dipping down into a hollow of this miscalled ‘Plain,’ now toiling slowly and painfully up a corresponding ascent. It is not to be supposed that it was a reverent crowd assembled here. Reverence is not a characteristic of the age,nor are cyclists as a rule, or agricultural folks, or provincials generally, inclined greatly to worship the immeasurably old. And of such this crowd was chiefly composed. It may very pertinently be asked, ‘Why, if they don’t reverence the place, do they come here at all?’ It is a question rather difficult to answer; but probably most people visit it on this occasion as an excuse for being up all night. There would seem to be an idea that there is something dashing and eccentric about such a proceeding which must have its charm for those to whom archæology, or those eternal and unsolvable questions, ‘Why was Stonehenge built, and by whom?’ have no interest. There were, for instance, two boys on the spot who had come over on their bicycles from Marlborough School, over twenty miles away. Without leave, of course! They hoped to get back as quietly as they had slipped away out of their bedroom windows. Had they any archæological enthusiasm? Not a bit of it, the more especially since it was evident they would have to hurry back before the sun was due to rise.