DEER-STEALERS
The severity of the laws which governed a Chase and punished deer-stealers was simply barbarous. Cranborne had its courts and Chase Prison where offenders and deer-stealers were punished by mutilation, imprisonment, or fine, according to the crime, the status of the offender, or the comparative state of civilisation of the period in which the offence was committed. But whether the punishment for stealing deer was the striking off of a hand, or imprisonment in a noisome dungeon, or merely being mulcted in a larger or smaller sum, there were always those whounlawfully killed the buck in these romantic glades. Sometimes, for the devilment of it, the dashing young blades of the countryside—sons of the squires and others—would hunt the deer.
‘From four to twenty assembled in the evening, dressed in cap and jack and quarter-staff, with dogs and nets. Having set the watchword for the night and agreed whether they should stand or run if they should meet the keepers, they proceeded to the Chase, set their nets, and let slip their dogs to drive the deer into the nets; a man standing at each net, to strangle the deer as soon as they were entangled. Frequent desperate and bloody battles took place; the keepers, and sometimes the hunters, were killed.’
Other law-breakers were of a humbler stamp, and ferocious enough to murder keepers at sight. Thus, in 1738, a keeper named Tollerfield was murdered on his way home from Fontmell Church; and another at Fernditch, near ‘Woodyates Inn.’ For the latter crime a man named Wheeler was convicted, and suffered the extreme penalty of the law; his body being hanged in chains at the scene of the murder. His friends, however, in the course of a few nights cut the body down, and threw it into a very deep well, some distance away. The weight of the irons caused it to sink, and it was not discovered until long afterwards.
One of the most exciting of these encounters between the deer-stealers and the keepers took place on the night of 16th December 1781. Chettle Common, away at the back of the ‘Cashmoor Inn,’ was the scene of this battle. The stealers, assembling in disguise atPimperne, marched up the road through the night, and headed by a Sergeant of Dragoons, then quartered at Blandford, poured through the Thickthorn Toll-gate, armed with weapons called ‘swindgels,’ which appear to have been hinged cudgels, like flails. It would seem that the object of this expedition was the bludgeoning of a few keepers, rather than the stealing of deer. At any rate, the keepers expected them, and armed with sticks and hangers, awaited the attack. The fight was by no means a contemptible one, for in the result one keeper was killed and several disabled, while the stealers were so badly knocked about that the whole expedition surrendered, together with the Sergeant of Dragoons, who had a hand sliced off at the wrist by a hanger. The hand was subsequently buried, with military honours, in Pimperne churchyard.
Leader and followers alike were committed to Dorchester Gaol, and were eventually sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude, reduced to a nominal term, in consideration of the severe wounds from which they were suffering. One wonders how far mercy, and to what extent the wish not to be at the expense of medically attending the prisoners, influenced this decision. As for the Dr. Jameson of this raid, he retired from the Dragoons on half-pay, and, coming to London, set up shop as a dealer in game and poultry!
WILTSHIRE MOONRAKERS
Ten years later, a keeper killed a stealer, and another murderous encounter took place on 7th December 1816 near Tarrant Gunville, at a gate in the woods which the melodramatic instincts of thepeasantry have named ‘Bloody Shard,’ while the wood itself is known as ‘Blood-way Coppice.’
Cranborne Chase was also at this time a haunt of smugglers, who found its tangled recesses highly convenient for storing their ‘Free Trade’ merchandise on its way up from the sea-coast. Whether or not the original ‘Wiltshire moonrakers’ belonged to the Wilts portion of the Chase or to some other part of the county, tradition does not say.
That Wiltshire folk are called ‘moonrakers’ is generally known, and it is usually supposed that they obtained this name for stupidity, according to the story which tells how a party of travellers crossing a bridge in this county observed a number of rustics raking in the stream in which the great yellow harvest-moon was shining. Asked what they were doing, the reply was that they were trying to rake ‘that cheese’ out of the water. The travellers went on their way, laughing at the idiotcy of the yokels. One tale, however, only holds good until the other is told. The facts seem to be that the rustics were smugglers who were raking in the river for the brandy-kegs they had deposited there in the gray of the morning, and that the ‘travellers’ were really revenue-officers; those ‘gaugers,’ or ‘preventive men’ who were employed to check the smuggling which was rife a hundred years ago. It may be thought that the seaside was the only place where smuggling could be carried on, but a moment’s reflection will show that the goods had to be conveyed inshore for inland customers. Smuggling, in fact, was so extensive, and brought to such a perfection ofsystem that forwarding agents were established everywhere. Kegs of spirits, being bulky, were hidden for the day in ponds and watercourses, wherever possible, and removed at night for another stage towards their destination, being deposited in a similar hiding-place at the break of day, and so forth until they reached their consignees. Thus the ‘moonrakers’ by this explanation are acquitted of being monumental simpletons, at the expense of losing their reputation in another way. But everyone smuggled, or received or purchased smuggled goods, in those times, and no one was thought the worse for it.
Atthe distance of a mile up the bye-road from Tarrant Hinton, in Eastbury Park, still stands in a lonely position the sole remaining wing of the once-famed Eastbury House, one of those immense palaces which the flamboyant noblemen and squires of a past era loved to build. Comparable for size and style with Blenheim and Stowe, and built like them by the ponderous Vanbrugh, the rise and fall of Eastbury were as dramatic as the building and destruction of Canons, the seat of the ‘princely Chandos’ at Edgware. Of Canons, however, no stone remains, while at Eastbury a wing and colonnade are left, standing sinister, sundered and riven, the melancholy relics of a once proud but hospitable mansion.
DODINGTON
Eastbury was begun on a scale of princely magnificenceby George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who, having presumably made some fine pickings in that capacity, determined to spend them on becoming a patron of the Arts and an entertainer of literary men, after the fashion of an age in which painters were made to fawn upon the powerful, and poets to sing their praises in the blankest of blank verse. Every rich person had his henchmen among the followers of the Muses, and they were petted or scolded, indulged or kept on the chain, just as the humour of the patron at the moment decreed. Unfortunately, however, for this eminently eighteenth-century ambition of George Dodington, he died before he could finish his building. All his worldly goods went to his grand-nephew, George Bubb, son of his brother’s daughter, who had married a Weymouth apothecary named Jeremias Bubb. Already, under the patronage of his uncle, a member of Parliament, and an influential person, George on coming into this property assumed the name of Dodington; perhaps also because the obvious nickname of ‘Silly Bubb’ by which he was known might thereby become obsolete.
George Bubb Dodington, as he was now known, immediately stopped the works on his uncle’s palace, and thus the unfinished building remained gaunt and untenanted from 1720 to 1738. Then, as suddenly as the building was stopped, work was resumed again. The vast sum of £140,000 was spent on the completion. Tapestries, gilding, marbles, everything of the most costly and ornate character was employed, and the grounds which had been newly laid out eighteenyears before, and in the interval allowed to subside into a wilderness, were set in order again. The reason of this sudden activity was that Dodington had become infected with that same ‘Patron’ mania which had caused his uncle to lay the foundation stones of these marble halls. He was at this period forty-seven years of age, and in those years had filled many posts in the Government, and about the rival Whig and Tory Courts of the King and the Prince of Wales. Scheming and intriguing from one party to the other, he had always been ambitious of influence, and now that even greater accumulations of wealth had come to him, he set up as the host of birth, beauty, and intellect in these Dorsetshire wilds.
The gossips of the time have left us a picture of the man. Fat, ostentatious, extravagant, with the love of glitter and colour of a barbarian, he was yet a wit of repute, and had undoubtedly some learning. He possessed, besides, a considerable share of shrewdness. If he lent £5000 to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and never got it back, we are not to suppose that he ever expected to be repaid. That was, no doubt, regarded as practically an entrance-fee to the exalted companionship of a prince of whom it was written, when he came to an untimely end:—
But since it’s Fred who is dead, there’s no more to be said.
But since it’s Fred who is dead, there’s no more to be said.
But since it’s Fred who is dead, there’s no more to be said.
A WHIMSICAL FIGURE
That same Fred thoughthimselfthe clever man when he remarked ‘Dodington is reckoned clever, but I have borrowed £5000 of him which he will never see again’; but Dodington doubtless imagined the sum to have been well laid out; which, indeed,would have been the case had not the prince died early. Mæcenas was, in fact, working for a title, and this was then regarded as the ready way to such a goal. They say the same idea prevails in our own happy times; but that £5000 would not go far towards the realisation of the object. But, be that as it may, Dodington did not win to the Peerage as Lord Melcombe until 1761, and as he died in the succeeding year, his enjoyment of the ermine was short. As, however, the working towards an object and its anticipation are always more enjoyable than the attainment of the end, he is perhaps not to be regarded with pity, or thought a failure.
One who partook of his hospitality at Eastbury, and did not think the kindness experienced there a sufficient reason for silence as to his host’s eccentricities and failings, has given us some entertaining stories. The State bed of the gross but witty Dodington at Eastbury was covered with gold and silver embroidery; a gorgeous sight, but closer inspection revealed the fact that this splendour had been contrived at the expense of his old coats and breeches, whose finery had been so clumsily converted that the remains of the pocket-holes were clearly visible. ‘His vast figure,’ continues this reminiscencing friend, ‘was always arrayed in gorgeous brocades, and when he paid his court at St. James’s, he approached to kiss the Queen’s hand, decked in an embroidered suit of silk, with lilac waistcoat and breeches; the latter in the act of kneeling down, forgot their duty and broke loose from their moorings in a very indecorous and uncourtly manner.’ Thatmust have been a sore blow to the dignity of one who possessed, as we are told, ‘the courtly and profound devotion of a Spaniard towards women, with the ease and gaiety of a Frenchman to men.’
Rolling down the Exeter Road, from his London mansion, or from his suburban retreat of ‘La Trappe,’ at Hammersmith, in his gilded, old-fashioned chariot, he gathered a variety of literary men at what Young calls ‘Pierian Eastbury.’ Johnson, sick of the Chesterfields and the whole gang of literary patrons, scornfully refused Dodington’s proffered friendship; but Fielding, Thomson, Bentley, Cumberland, Young, Voltaire, and others were not slow to revel in these more or less Arcadian delights. Christopher Pitt wrote to Young, congratulating him on his stay here:—
Where with your Dodington retired you sit,Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit;Where a new Eden in the wild is found,And all the seasons in a spot of ground.
Where with your Dodington retired you sit,Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit;Where a new Eden in the wild is found,And all the seasons in a spot of ground.
Where with your Dodington retired you sit,Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit;Where a new Eden in the wild is found,And all the seasons in a spot of ground.
While Thomson, moved to it by the Burgundy or the more potent punch, has celebrated palace and park in hisAutumn.
RUINED EASTBURY
Dodington had either no stomach for fighting, or else was a good fellow beyond the common run, as the following affair proves. Eastbury marches with Cranborne Chase, and one day the Ranger found one of Dodington’s keepers with his dogs in a part of the Chase called Burseystool Walk. The keeper was warned that if he was found there again, his dogs would be shot and himself prosecuted; but despite this warning he was found near the same spot a fewdays later, when the Ranger, having a gun in his hand, put his threat into execution and shot the three dogs as they were drinking in a pool, with their heads close together, in one of the Ridings. Dodington, in a first outburst of fury, sent a challenge to the Ranger over this affair, and the Ranger bought a sword and sent a friend to call on the challenger to fix time and place for the encounter; but by that time Dodington had thought better of it, and instead of making arrangements to shed the enemy’s gore, invited both him and his friend to dinner. They met and had a jovial time together, and the sword remained unspotted.
On Dodington’s death his estates passed to Earl Temple, who could not afford to keep up the vast place. He accordingly offered an income of £200 a year to anyone who would live at Eastbury and keep it in repair. No one came forward to accept these terms; and so, after the pictures, objects of art, and the furniture had been sold, the great house was pulled down, piecemeal, in 1795, with the exception of this solitary fragment.
There is room for much reflection in Eastbury Park to-day, by the crumbling archway with the two large fir-trees growing between the joints of its masonry; by the remaining wing, or the foundations of the rest of the vanished house, which can still be distinctly traced in the grass during dry summers. The stories of ‘Haunted Eastbury’ and of the headless coachman and his four-in-hand are dying out, but the panelled room in which Doggett, Earl Temple’s fraudulent steward, shot himself is still to be seen.Doggett had embezzled money, and when discovered found this the only way out of his trouble.
When the church of Tarrant Gunville, just outside the Park gates, was rebuilt in 1845 the workmen found his body, the legs tied together with a yellow silk ribbon which was as bright and fresh as the day it was tied.
Returningto the road at Tarrant Hinton, a steep hill leads up to the wild downs again, with a corresponding descent in three miles into the village of Pimperne whose chief part is situated in the same manner, along a byeway at a right angle to the coachroad. There is a battered cross on an open space near the church, and the church itself has been severely restored. Christopher Pitt was Rector of Pimperne, and it requires no great stretch of imagination to conjure up a vision of him pacing the road to Eastbury, and composing laudatory verses on Dodington and his ‘flowing wit’; rendered, perhaps, the more eloquent by anticipations of the flow of Burgundy already quoted. He died in 1748, fourteen long years, alas! before the wine had ceased to flow at that Pierian spot.
BLANDFORD
From this haunt of the Muses it is two miles to the town of Blandford Forum, whose name it is sad to be obliged to record is nowadays shamefully docked to ‘Blandford,’ although the market, whencethe distinctive appellation of ‘Forum’ derived, is still in existence.
One comes downhill into Blandford, all the way from Pimperne, and it remains a standing wonder how the old coachmen managed to drive their top-heavy conveyances through the steep and narrow streets by which the town is entered from London, without upsetting and throwing the ‘outsides’ through the first-floor windows.
If the outskirts of Blandford town are of so mediæval a straitness, the chief streets of it are spacious indeed and lined with houses of a classic breadth and dignity, as classicism was understood in the days of George the Second, when the greater part of the town was burnt down and rebuilt. One needs not to be in love with classic, or debased classic, architecture to love Blandford. The town is stately, and with a thoroughly urban air, although its streets are so quiet, clean, and well-ordered. Civilisation without its usual accompaniments of rush and crowded pavements would seem to be the rule of Blandford. You can actually stand in the street and admire the architectural details of its houses without being run over or hustled off the pavement. In short, Blandford can beseen, and not, like crowded towns, glimpsed with intermittent and alternate glances at the place and at the traffic, for fear of jostling or being jostled.
Who, for instance, reallyseesLondon. You can stand in Hyde Park and see that, or in St. Paul’s and observe all the details of it; but does anyone ever reallyseeCheapside, Fleet Street, or the Strand, whenwalking? The only way to make acquaintance with these thoroughfares is to ride on the outside of an omnibus, where it is possible to give an undivided attention to anything else than the crowds that throng the pavements.
The progress of Blandford seems to have been quietly arrested soon after its rebuilding in 1731, and so it remains typical of that age, without being actually decayed. So far, indeed, is it from decay that it is a cheerful and prosperous, though not an increasing, town. Red moulded and carved brick frontages to the houses prevail here, and dignity is secured by the tall classic tower of the church, which, although not in itself entirely admirable, and although the stone of it is of an unhealthy green tinge, is not unpleasing, placed to advantage closing the view at one end of the broad market-place, instead of being aligned with the street.
Most things in Blandford date back to ‘the fire,’ which forms a red-letter day in the story of the town. This may well be understood when it is said that only forty houses were left when the flames had done their worst, and that fourteen persons were burnt, while others died from grief, or shock, or injuries received. Blandford has been several times destroyed by fire. In Camden’s time it was burned down by accident, but was rebuilt soon after in a handsome and substantial form. Again in 1677 and in 1713 the place was devastated in the same manner. The memorable fire of 1731 began at a soap-boiler’s shop in the centre of the town.
A pump, placed in a kind of shrine under the
GIBBON
Image unavailable: BLANDFORD.BLANDFORD.
churchyard wall, bears an inscription recounting this terrible happening:—
In remembranceOf God’s dreadful visitation by Fire,Which broke out the 4th of June, 1731,and in a few Hours not only reduced theChurch, but almost the whole Town, to Ashes,Wherein 14 Inhabitants perished,But also two adjacent Villages;AndIn grateful Acknowledgement of theDivine Mercy,That has since raised this Town,Like the Phœnix from its Ashes,To its present flourishing and beautiful State;and to prevent,By a timely Supply of Water,(With God’s Blessing) the fatalConsequences of Fire hereafter:This MonumentOf that dire Disaster, and ProvisionAgainst the like, is humbly erectedByJohn BastardA considerable SharerIn the great Calamity,1760.
Between 1760 and 1762 Gibbon, the historian of theDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was constantly in the neighbourhood of Blandford, camping on the downs which surround the town, and enjoying all the pomp and circumstance which may have belonged to his position as a Captain of Hants Militia.
Of these amateur soldierings he speaks as a‘wandering life of military service,’ a very amusing view of what everybody else but that pompous historian regarded as mere picnics.
But Gibbon, although his person was not precisely that of an ideal military commander, and although the awkward squads he accompanied were not easily comparable with the legions of old Rome, affected to believe that the military knowledge he thus acquired among the hills and woodlands of Hants and Dorset was of the greatest use in helping him to understand the strategic feats of Cæsar and Hannibal in Britain or across the Alps. Let us smile!
In after years, when living at Lausanne, amid the eternal hills and mountains of Switzerland, he looked back upon those days with regret, alike for the good company of his brother officers, the jovial nights at the ‘Crown’ in ‘pleasant, hospitable Blandford,’ and for the interference those happy times caused to his studies; when, instead of burning the midnight oil, he drank deeply of the two-o’clock-in-the-morning punch-bowl.
Many of Blandford’s natives have risen to more than local eminence. Latest among her distinguished sons is Alfred Stevens, that fine artist who designed the Wellington Monument in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as yet, unhappily, incomplete. He came into contact with governments and red-tape, and broken in spirit and in health by disappointments, died in 1875. A tablet on the wall of his birthplace in Salisbury Street records the fact that he was born in 1817.
Image unavailable: TOWN BRIDGE, BLANDFORD.TOWN BRIDGE, BLANDFORD.
WINTERBORNE WHITCHURCH
Sixteen and a quarter miles of very varied road brought the old coachmen with steaming horses clattering from Blandford into Dorchester, past the villages of Winterborne Whitchurch, Milborne St. Andrew, and the village of Piddletown, which is by no means a town, and never was.
It is a long, long rise out of Blandford, past tree-shaded Bryanstone and over the Town Bridge, to the crest of Charlton Downs, a mile out; where, looking back, the town is seen lying in a wooded hollow almost surrounded by park-like trees in dense clumps—the woods of Bryanstone. From this point of vantage it is clearly seen how Blandford is entered downhill from east or west.
Very hilly, very open, very white and hot and dusty in summer, and covered with loose stones and flints after any spell of dry weather, the road goes hence steeply down into Winterborne Whitchurch, where the ‘bourne,’ from which the place takes the first half of its name, goes across the road in a hollow, and the church stands, with its neighbouring parsonage and cottages, in a lane running at right angles to the high-road, for all the world like Tarrant Hinton and Little Wallop. John Wesley, the grandfather of the founder of the ‘Wesleyans’—or the ‘Methodys,’ as the country people call Methodists—was Vicar of Winterborne Whitchurch for a time during the Commonwealth; but as he seems never to have been regularly ordained, he was thrown out at the Restorationby ‘malignants’ and began a kind of John the Baptist life amid the hills and valleys of Dorsetshire, an exemplar for the imitation of his grandsons in later days. Itineracy and a sturdy independence thus became a tradition and a duty with the Wesleys. Thus are sects increased and multiplied, and no more sure way exists of producing prophets than by the persecution and oppression of those who, left judiciously alone, would live and die unknown to and unhonoured by the world.
Milborne St. Andrew, close upon three miles onward, is placed in another of these many deep hollows which, with streams running through them, are so recurrent a feature of the Exeter Road; only the hollow here is a broader one and better dignified with the title of valley. The stream of the ‘mill-bourne,’ from which the original mill has long since vanished (if, indeed, the name of the place is not, more correctly, ‘Melbourne,’ ‘mell’ in Dorsetshire meaning, like the prefix of ‘lew’ in Devon, a warm and sheltered spot), is a tributary of the river Piddle, which, a few miles down the road gives name to Piddletown, and along its course to Aff-Piddle, Piddletrenthide, Piddlehinton, Tolpiddle, and Turner’s Piddle.
MILBORNE ST. ANDREW
Milborne St. Andrew is a pretty place, and those who know Normandy may well think it, with its surrounding meads and feathery poplars, like a village in that old-world French province. Almost midway along the sixteen and a quarter miles between Blandford and Dorchester, it still keeps the look of an old coaching and posting village, although the last coachand the days of road-travel are beyond the recollection of the oldest inhabitant. Here, in the midst of the village, the street widens out, where the old ‘White Hart,’ now the Post Office, with a great effigy of a White Hart, and a number of miniature cannons on the porch roof, waits for the coaches that come no more, and for the dashing carriages and post-chaises that were driven away with their drivers and their gouty red-faced occupants to Hades, long, long ago. Is the ‘White Hart,’ standing like so many of these old hostelries beside the highway, waiting successfully for the revival of the roads, and will it live over the brave old days again with the coming of the Motor Car?
Meanwhile, given fine weather, there are few pleasanter places to spend a reminiscent afternoon in than Milborne St. Andrew.
The old church is up along the hillside, reached with the aid of a bye-road. Its tower, like that of Winterborne Whitchurch, shows the curious and rather pleasing local fashion of building followed four hundred years or so back, consisting of four to six courses of nobbled flints alternating with a course of ashlar. A stone in the east wall of the chancel to the memory of William Rice, servant to two of the local squires here for more than sixty years, ending in 1826, has the curious particulars:—
He superintended the Harriers, and was the first Man who hunted a Pack of Roebuck Hounds.
He superintended the Harriers, and was the first Man who hunted a Pack of Roebuck Hounds.
At a point a mile and a half farther used to stand Dewlish turnpike gate, where the tolls were taken before coming down into Piddletown.
This large village is the ‘Weatherbury’ of some of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex stories, and the Jacobean musicians’ gallery of the fine unrestored church is vividly reminiscent of many humorous passages between the village choir inUnder the Greenwood Tree. An organ stands there now, but the ‘serpent,’ the ‘clar’net,’ and the fiddles of Mr. Hardy’s rustic choir would still seem more at home in that place.
Between this and Dorchester, past that end of Piddletown called ‘Troy Town,’ is Yellowham—one had almost written ‘Yalbury’—Hill, crowned with the lovely woodlands described so beautifully under the name of ‘Yalbury Woods’ in that story, and drawn again in the opening scene ofFar from the Madding Crowd, where Gabriel Oak, invisible in his leafy eyrie above the road, perceives Bathsheba’s feminine vanities with the looking-glass.
Descending the western side of the hill and passing the broad park-lands of Kingston, we enter the town of Dorchester along the straight and level road running through the water-meadows of the river Frome. Until a few years ago this approach was shaded and rendered beautiful by an avenue of stately old elms that enclosed the distant picture of the town as in a frame; but they were cut down by the Duchy of Cornwall officials, in whose hands much of the surrounding property is placed, and only the pitiful stumps of them, shorn off close to the ground, remain to tell of their existence. As Dorchester is approached the road is seen in the distance becoming a street, and going, as straight as ever, and with a continuous rise,
‘CASTERBRIDGE’
Image unavailable: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ DORCHESTER.THE ‘WHITE HART,’ DORCHESTER.
through the town, with the square tower of St. Peter’s and the spiky clock-tower of the Town Hall cresting the view in High West Street, and in High East Street the modern Early English spire of All Saints nearer at hand. The particular one among the many bridges and culverts that carry the rivulets under the road here, mentioned by the novelist in hisMayor of Casterbridgeas the spot where Henchard, the ruined mayor, lounged in his aimless idleness, amid the wastrels and ne’er-do-weels of Casterbridge, is the bridge that finally brings the road into the town, by the old ‘White Hart Inn.’ It is the inevitable lounging-stock for Dorchester’s failures, who mostly live near by at Fordington, the east end of the town, where the ‘Mixen Lane’ of the story, ‘the mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant’ was situated.
It is a transfigured Dorchester that is painted by the novelist in that story; or, perhaps more exactly, the Dorchester of fifty years ago. ‘It is huddled all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot of garden-ground by a box-edging,’ is the not very apt comparison with the tall chestnuts and sycamores of the surviving avenues. ‘It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green tablecloth. The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow 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 floatedin at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.’
This peculiarity of Dorchester, a four-square clearly-definedappliquéof town upon a pastoral country, has been gradually disappearing during many years past, owing to an increase of population that has burst the ancient bounds imposed by the town being almost completely surrounded by the Duchy of Cornwall lands. This property, known by the name of Fordington Field (and not the existence at any time of a ford on the Frome), gives the eastern end of Dorchester its title. The land, let by the Duchy in olden times, in quarters or ‘fourthings’ of a carucate, gave the original name of ‘Fourthington.’ A great deal of this property has now been sold or leased for building purposes, and so the avenues that once clearly defined with their ramparts of greenery the bounds of Dorchester are now of a more urban character.
THE BLOODY ASSIZE
Dorchester shares with Blandford and with Marlborough a solid architectural character of a sober and responsible kind. As in those towns, imaginative Gothic gables and quaint mediæval fancies are somewhat to seek amid the overwhelming proportion of Renaissance, or neo-classic, or merely Queen Anne and Georgian red-brick or stone houses. The cause of this may be sought in the recurrent disastrous fires that on four occasions practically swept the town out of existence, as in the case of Marlborough and Blandford. The earliest of these happened in 1613. Over three hundred houses were burnt on that occasion, and property amounting to nearly a quarter of a million sterling lost. This insistent scourge of the West ofEngland thatched houses visited the town again, nine years later, and also in 1725 and 1775. Little wonder, then, that mediæval Dorchester has to be sought for in nooks and corners. But if like those other unfortunate towns in these circumstances, it is very different in appearance, the streets being comparatively narrow and the houses of a more stolid and heavy character; so that only in sunny weather does Dorchester strike the stranger as being at all a cheerful place.
Image unavailable: JUDGE JEFFREYS’ CHAIR.JUDGE JEFFREYS’ CHAIR.
All the incidents in Dorchester’s history seem insignificant beside the tremendous melodrama of the ‘Bloody Assize.’ The stranger has eyes and ears for little else than the story of that terrible time, and longs to see the Court where Jeffreys sat, mad with drink and disease, and sentenced the unhappy prisoners to floggings, slavery, or death. Unhappily, that historic room has disappeared, but ‘Judge Jeffreys’ chair’ is still to be seen in the modern Town Hall, and one can approach in imagination nearer to that awful yearof 1685 by gazing at ‘Judge Jeffreys’ Lodgings,’ still standing in High West Street, over Dawes’ china shop.
It must have been with a ferocious satisfaction that Jeffreys arrived here to open that Assize, for Dorchester had been a ‘malignant’ town and a thorn in the side of the Royalists forty years before. A kind of wild retribution was to fall upon it now, not only for the share that this district of the West had in Monmouth’s Rebellion in this unhappy year, but for the Puritanism of a bygone generation.
Jeffreys reached here on 2nd September and the Assize was opened on the following day, lasting until the 8th. Macaulay has given a most convincing picture of it:—
‘The Court was hung, by order of the Chief Justice, with scarlet; and this innovation seemed to the multitude to indicate a bloody purpose. It was also rumoured that when the clergyman, who preached the assize sermon, enforced the duty of mercy, the ferocious mouth of the Judge was distorted by an ominous grin. These things made men augur ill of what was to follow.
GEORGE THE THIRD
‘More than three hundred prisoners were to be tried. The work seemed heavy; but Jeffreys had a contrivance for making it light. He let it be understood that the only chance of obtaining pardon or respite was to plead guilty. Twenty-nine persons who put themselves on their country, and were convicted, were ordered to be tied up without delay. The remaining prisoners pleaded guilty by scores. Two hundred and ninety-two received sentence of death. The wholenumber hanged in Dorsetshire amounted to seventy-four.’
It is a relief to turn from such things to the less tragical coaching era. The ‘King’s Arms,’ which was formerly the great coaching hostelry of Dorchester, still keeps pride of place here, and its capacious bay-windows of old-fashioned design yet look down upon the chief street. Instead, however, of the kings and princes and the great ones of the earth who used to be driven up in fine style in their ‘chariots’ a hundred years ago, and in place of the weary coach-travellers who used to alight at the hospitable doors of the ‘King’s Arms,’ the commercial travellers of to-day are deposited here by the hotel omnibus from the railway station with little or no remains of that pomp and circumstance which accompanied arrivals in the olden time. King George the Third was well acquainted with this capacious house, for his horses were changed here on his numerous journeys through Dorchester between London, Windsor, and Weymouth. He kept a commonplace Court in the summer at Weymouth for many years, and thus made the fortune of that town, while his son, the Prince of Wales, was similarly making Brighthelmstone popular. If we are to believe the story of the Duchesse d’Abrantes, Napoleon had conceived the very theatrical idea of kidnapping the King on one of these journeys. The exploit was planned for execution in the wild and lonely country between Dorchester and Weymouth: possibly beneath the grim shadow of sullen Maumsbury, or of prehistoric Maiden Castle. The King and his escort were to have been surprised by a partyof secretly-landed French sailors, and his Majesty forthwith hustled on board an open boat which was then to be rowed across the Channel to Cherbourg. According to this remarkable statement, the English coastguards had been heavily bribed to assist in this affair. It was magnificent, but it was not war—nor even business. As an elaborate joke, the project has its distinctly humorous aspects, as one vividly conjures up a picture of ‘Farmer George,’ helplessly sea-sick, leaning on the gunwale of the row-boat, with the equally unhappy sailors toiling away at rowing those seventy miles of salt water. Then, too, the thought of that essentially unromantic King compelled to cut a ridiculous figure as a kind of modern travesty of the imprisoned Richard Lionheart, raises a smile. But, although Napoleon, who was not a gentleman, may very possibly have entertained this rather characteristic notion, he certainly never attempted to put it into execution, and the road to Weymouth is by so much the poorer in incident.
But to return to the ‘King’s Arms,’ which figures in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s story. Here it was, looking in with the crowd on the street, that Susan saw her long-lost husband presiding as Mayor at the banquet, the beginning of all his troubles.
Although the stranger who has no ties with Dorchester to help paint it in such glowing colours as those used by that writer, who finds it ‘one of the cleanest and prettiest towns in the West of England,’ cannot subscribe to that description, the town is of a supreme interest to the literary pilgrim, who can identify many spots hallowed by Mr. Hardy’s genius.
THE ROMAN ROAD
Image unavailable: DORCHESTER.DORCHESTER.
There are those in Dorsetshire who bitterly resent the Tony Kytes, the Car Darches, the Bathshebas, and in especial poor Tess, who flit through his unconventional pages, and hold that he deprives the Dorset peasant of his moral character; but if you hold no brief for the natives in their relation to the Ten Commandments, why, it need matter little or nothing to you whether his characters are intended as portraitures, or are evolved wholly from a peculiar imagination. It remains only to say that they are very real characters to the reader, who can follow their loves and hatreds, their comedy and tragedy, and can trace their footsteps with a great deal more personal interest than can be stirred up over the doings of many historical personages.
TheExeter Road begins to rise immediately on leaving Dorchester. Leaving the town by a fine avenue of ancient elms stretching for half a mile, the highway runs, with all the directness characteristic of a Roman road, on a gradual incline up the bare and open expanse of Bradford Down, unsheltered as yet by the stripling trees newly planted as a continuation of the dense avenue just left behind. The first four miles of road from the town are identical with the RomanVia Iceniana, the Icen Way or Icknield Street; and on the left rises, at the distance of a mile away, the sombre Roman earthwork of MaidenCastle crowning a hill forming with the earthen amphitheatre of Poundbury on the right hand, evidence, if all else in Dorchester were wanting, of the importance of the place at that remote period.
At the fourth milestone the Exeter Road leaves that ancient military way, and, turning sharply to the left, goes down steeply, amid loose gravel and rain-runnels, to Winterborne Abbas, with an exceedingly awkward fork to the road to Weymouth on the left hand half-way down. Bold and striking views of the sullen ridge of Blackdown, with Admiral Hardy’s pillar on the ridge, are unfolded as one descends.
WinterborneAbbas, one of the twenty-five Winterbornes that plentifully dot the map of Wilts and Dorset, lies on the level at the bottom of this treacherous descent: a small village of thatched cottages with a church too large for it, overhung by fir trees, and a remodelled old coaching inn, apparently also too large, with its sign swinging picturesquely from a tree-trunk on the opposite side of the road which, like the majority of Dorsetshire roads, is rich in loose flints.
Half a mile beyond the village, a railed enclosure on the strip of grass on the left-hand side of the road attracts the wayfarer’s notice. This serves to protect from the attentions of the stone-breaker a group of eight prehistoric stones called the ‘Broad Stone.’
THE RUSSELLS
Image unavailable: WINTERBORNE ABBAS.WINTERBORNE ABBAS.
The largest is 10 feet long by 5 feet, and 2 feet thick, lying down. A notice informs all who care to know that this group is constituted by the owner, according to the Act of Parliament, an ‘Ancient Monument.’ The cynically-minded might well say that the hundreds of similar ‘ancient monuments’ with which the neighbouring downs are peppered might also be railed off, to give a welcome fillip to the trade in iron fencing, and certainly this caretaking of every misshapen stone without a story is the New Idolatry.
Just beyond this point is the castellated lodge of the park of Bridehead, embowered amid trees. The place obtains its name from the little river Bride or Bredy which rises in the grounds and flows away to enter the sea at Burton (= ‘Bride-town’) Bradstock, eight miles away; passing in its course the two other places named from it, Little Bredy and Long Bredy.
Now the road rises again, and ascends wild unenclosed downs which gradually assume a stern, and even mountainous, character. Amid this panorama, in the deep hollows below these stone-strewn heights, are gracious wooded dells, doubly beautiful by contrast. In the still and sheltered nooks of these sequestered spots the primrose blooms early, and frosts come seldom, while the uplands are covered with snow or swept with bleak winds that freeze the traveller’s very marrow. One of these gardens in the wilderness is Kingston Russell, the spot whence the Russells, now Dukes of Bedford, sprang from obscurity into wealth and power. Deep down in their retirement, the world (or such small proportion of it as travelled in those days) passed unobserved, thoughnot far removed. For generations the Russells had inhabited their old manor-house here, and might have done so, in undistinguished fashion, for many years more, had it not been for the chance which brought John Russell into prominence and preferment in 1502. He was the Founder of the House and died an Earl, with vast estates, the spoil of the Church, showered upon him. He was the first of all the Russells to exhibit that gift of ‘getting on’ which his descendants have almost uniformly inherited. Unlike him, however, they have rarely commanded affection, and the Dukes of Bedford, with much reason, figure in the public eye as paragons of meanness and parsimony.