CHAPTER XIII

WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS

LeavingWareham 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 TUMULATURAPPŒNAS TARDUS DEUS HUNC SALVANSTUEATUR.

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.

The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon AbbeyHere 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 hasmade 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 leersat 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.

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 inTess 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 familycoach traversing this route. One or two are said to have seen it, buttheyare 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.

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 oneappreciates 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, inThe 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, inThe 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 strickenworm 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 manFourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,”

whose wanderings are the theme of Shakespeare’s muse.

Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath

The Return of the Nativeis 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 andmeet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it.”

“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 andmeet 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.

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-studdedheight. 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.

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.”

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 inA.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 afterthat 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 towardsthatch; 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.

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 byignited 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.

Bere Regis

Bere Regis in its decay is a storehouse of oldDorset 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, who had thought him dead.

The villagers of Bere look askance upon the dwellers on this eyrie. They tell you “they be gipsy vo’k up yon,” and hold it to be the last resort of those declining in worldly estate. Villagersgoing, metaphorically, “down the hill” in the direction of outdoor relief, move to the less desirable cottages in the village, and then, complete penury at last overtaking them, continue their moral and economic descent by the geographical ascent of this hill of Woodbury, whence they are at last removed to “The Union.”

Below Woodbury Hill, on the edge of Bere Wood, the scene of an old Turberville attempt at illegal enclosure, is rural Bloxworth, whose little church contains the fine monument of Sir John Trenchard “of the ancient family of the Trenchards in Dorsetshire,” Sergeant-at-Law and Secretary of State in the reign of William and Mary. He died in 1695, aged 46. Ten years before, he had been an active sympathiser with the Duke of Monmouth, in that ill-fated rebellion, and it is told, how, when visiting one Mr. Speke at Ilchester, hearing that Jeffreys had issued a warrant for his arrest, he instantly took horse, rode to Poole and thence crossed to Holland, returning with the Prince of Orange three years later.

Above all other interest at Bere is the beautiful church, standing a little distance below the long-drawn village street, and clearly from its character and details, a building cherished and beautified by the Abbey of Tarent, by the Turbervilles, and by Cardinal Archbishop Morton, native of the place.

The three-staged pinnacled tower is very fine, the lower stage alternately of stone and flint, the three surmounting courses diapered: the second and third stages treated wholly in that chessboard fashion. The beautiful belfry windows, of three lights, divided into three stages by transoms, arefilled with pierced stonework. The exterior south wall of the church is of alternate red brick and flint, in courses of threes. There is a remarkable window in the west wall of the north aisle, and in the south wall the exceptionally fine and unusual Turbervillewindow, of late Gothic character and five lights, filled in modern times by the Erle-Drax family, of Charborough, with a series of stained-glass armorial shields, displaying the red lion of the Turbervilles, all toe-nails and whiskers, and ducally crowned, ramping against an ermine field, firstly by himself and then conjointly with the arms of the families with which the Turbervilles, in the course of many centuries, allied themselves. The Erle-Draxes have not, in honouring the extinct Turberville, forgotten themselves, for some of the shields display their arms and those of the Sawbridges, Grosvenors, Churchills, and Eggintons they married.

Bere Regis: Interior of Church

Entering, the building is seen to be even more beautiful than without. Its most striking and unusual feature—unusual in this part of the country—is the extraordinarily gorgeous, elaborately carved and painted timber roof, traditionally said to have been the gift of Cardinal Morton, born at Milborne Stileman, in the parish of Bere Regis. The hammer-beams are boldly carved into the shapes of bishops, cardinals, and pilgrims, while the bosses are worked into great faces that look down with a fat calm satisfaction that must be infinitely reassuring to the congregations.

The bench ends are another interesting feature. Many are old, others are new, done in the old style when the church was admirably restored by Street. Had Sir Gilbert Scott been let loose upon it, it may well be supposed that the surviving bench-ends would have been cast out, and nice new articles by the hands of his pet firm of ecclesiastical furnishers put in their stead. One is dated, inRoman numerals, MCCCCCXLVII; another is inscribed “IOH. DAV. WAR. DENOF. THYS. CHARYS,” and another bears a merchant’s mark, with the initial of “I. T.” The Transitional Norman pillars are bold and virile, with humorous carvings of that period strikingly projecting from their capitals. It evidently seemed to that now far-away waggish fellow who sculptured them that toothache and headache were things worth caricaturing. Let us hope he never suffered from them, but he evidently took as models some who were such martyrs.

Pew ends in Bere Regis Church

But the centre of interest to us in these pages is by the Turberville window in the south aisle, beneath whose gorgeous glass is the great ledger-stone, covering the last resting-place of the extinct family. It is boldly lettered:

Ostium sepulchri antiquaeFamillae Turberville24 Junij 1710(The door of the sepulchreof the ancient familyof the Turbervilles).

Ostium sepulchri antiquaeFamillae Turberville24 Junij 1710

(The door of the sepulchreof the ancient familyof the Turbervilles).

In the wall beneath the window is a defaced Purbeck marble altar-tomb, and four others neighbour it. These are the tombs described inTess of the D’Urbervillesas “canopied, altar-shaped, and plain; their brasses torn from their matrices,the rivet-holes remaining, like marten-holes in a sand-cliff,” and it was on one of those that Alec D’Urberville lay prone, in pretence of being an effigy of one of her ancestors, when Tess was exploring the twilight church.

The great monumentalHistory of Dorsetshiretells the enquirer a good deal of the Turbervilles who, being themselves all dead and gone to their place, have, with a slight alteration in the spelling of their name served as a peg on which to hang the structure of one of the finest exercises ever made in the art of novel writing. It seems that the Turbervilles descended from one Sir Pagan or Payne Turberville, or de Turbida Villa, who is shown in the Roll of Battle Abbey—or was shown, before that Roll was accidentally burnt—to have come over with the Conqueror. After the Battle of Hastings he seems to have been one of twelve knights who helped Robert Fitz Hamon, Lord of Estremaville, in his unholy enterprises, and then to have returned to England when his over-lord was created Earl of Gloucester. He warred in that lord’s service, in the Norman conquest of Glamorgan, and was rewarded with a tit-bit of spoil there, in the shape of the lordship of Coyty.

In the reign of Henry III. a certain John de Turberville is found paying an annual fee or fine in respect of some land in the forest of Bere, which an ancestor of his had impudently endeavoured to enclose out of the estate of the Earl of Hereford; and in 1297 a member of the family is found in the neighbourhood of Bere Regis. This Brianus de Thorberville, or Bryan Turberville, was lord of the manor, called from its situation on the river Piddle,and from himself, “Piddle Turberville,” and now represented by the little village called Bryan’s Piddle.

Bere Regis: the Turberville Window

At a later period the rising fortunes of this family are attested by their coming into possession of half of the manor of Bere Regis, the other half being, as it had long been, the property of Tarent Abbey.Still later, when at last that Abbey was dissolved, the Turbervilles were in the enjoyment of good fortune, for the other half of the manor then came to them. This period seems to have marked the summit of their advancement, for from that time they gradually but surely decayed, giving point to the old superstition which dates the decadence of many an old family from that day when it sacrilegiously was awarded the spoils of the Church. This fall from position began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, but D’Albigny Turberville, the oculist who was consulted by Pepys the diarist, and eventually died in 1696, as the tomb to him with the fulsome inscription in Salisbury Cathedral tells us, was a distinguished scion of the ancient race, as also was “George Turberville, gentleman,” and poet, born at Winterborne Whitchurch, and publishing books of poems and travels in 1570. These, doubtless, were not forms of distinction that would have commended themselves to those old fighting and land-snatching Turbervilles; but, other times, other manners.

The last Turberville of Bere Regis was that Thomas Turberville over whom the ancient vault of his stock finally closed in 1710. His twin daughters and co-heiresses, Frances and Elizabeth, born here in 1703, sold the property and left for London. They died at Purser’s Cross, Fulham, near London, early in 1780, and were buried together at Putney. Shortly afterwards their old manor-house of Bere Regis, standing near the church, was allowed to lapse into ruin, and thus their kin became only a memory where they had ruled so long. Of the old branch of the family settled in Glamorganshire, a Colonel Turberville remains the representative, butthe position of the various rustics who in Dorset and Wilts bear the name, corrupted variously into Tollafield and Troublefield, is open to the suspicion that they are the descendants of illegitimate offspring of that race. There remained, indeed, until quite recent years a humble family of “Torevilles” in Bere Regis, one of whom persisted in calling himself “Sir John.” But as Mr. Hardy says, in the course ofTess of the D’Urbervilles, instances of the gradual descent of legitimate scions of the old knightly families, down and again downwards until they have become mere farm-labourers, are not infrequent in Wilts and Dorset. Their high-sounding names have undergone outrageous perversions, as in the stated instance of courtly Paridelle into rustic Priddle; but, although they have inherited no worldly gear they own the same blood.

THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY

Dorchesteris not only the capital of Dorset: it is also the chief town of the Hardy Country. The ancient capital of Wessex was Winchester: the chief seat of this literary domain is here, beside the Frome. Four miles distant from it the novelist was born, and at Max Gate, Fordington, looking down upon Dorchester’s roofs, he resides.

The old country life still closely encircles the county town, and on market-days takes the place by storm; so that when, by midday, most of the carriers from a ten or fifteen miles radius have deposited their country folk, and the farmers have come in on horseback, or driving, or perhaps by train, the slighter forms, less ruddy faces, and more urban dress of the townsfolk are lost amid the great army of occupation that from farms, cottages, dairies, and sheep-pastures, has for the rest of the day taken possession of the streets. The talk is all of the goodness or badness of the hay crop, the prospects of the harvest, how swedes are doing, and the condition of cows, sheep, and pigs; or, if it be on toward autumn, when the hiring of farm-labourers, shepherds, and rural servants in general for the next twelve months is the engrossing topic,then the scarcity of hands and their extravagant demands are the themes of much animated talk.

Dorchester faithfully at such times reflects the image of Dorset, and Dorset remains to this day, and long may it so remain, a great sheep-breeding and grazing county, and equally great as a land of rich dairies. From that suburb of Fordington, which has for so very many centuries been a suburb that to those who know it the name bears no suburban connotation, you may look down, as from a cliff-top, and see the river Frome winding away amid the rich grazing pastures, and with one ear hear the cows calling, while with the other the cries of the newspaper boys are heard in the streets of the town. The scent of the hay and the drowsy hum of the bees break across the top of the bluff, and, just as one may read, in the exquisite description of these things in the pages ofThe Mayor of Casterbridge, the dandelionand other winged seeds float in at open windows. One may sometimes from this point, when the foliage of its dense screen of trees grows thin, see Stinsford, the “Mellstock” of that idyllic tale,Under the Greenwood Tree; but in general you can see nothing of that sequestered spot until you have reached the by-lane out of the main road from Dorchester, and, turning there to the right, come to Stinsford Church, along a way made a midday twilight by those trees which render the title of that story so descriptive.

Stinsford Church. (Mellstock)

Blue wood-smoke, curling up from cottage chimneys against the massed woodlands that surround Kingston House, grey church, largely ivy-covered and plentifully endowed with grotesque gurgoyles—these, with school-house and scattered cottages, make the sum-total of Stinsford, or “Mellstock.” The school-house is that of the young school-mistress, Fancy Day, in the story; and suggests romance; but the sentimental pilgrim may be excused for being of opinion that it is all in the book, with perhaps nothing left over for real life. At any rate, passing it, as the scholars within are, like bees, in Mr. Hardy’s words, “humming small,” one does not linger, but speculates more or less idly which was the cottage where Tranter Dewy lived, and which that of Geoffrey Day, the keeper of Yalbury Great Wood. There are not, after all, many cottages to choose from, and Mr. Hardy has so largely peopled his stories from Mellstock that each one might well be a literary landmark. The Fiddler of the Reels, Mop Ollamoor, a rustic Paganini, whose diabolical cleverness with his violin is the subject of a short story, lived in one of thesethatched homes of rural content, and in another was born unhappy Jude the Obscure. In each one of the rest you can imaginatively find the home of a member of that famous Mellstock choir, whose performances and enthusiasm sometimes rose so “glorious grand” that those who wrought with stringed instruments almost sawed through the strings of fiddle and double-bass, and those others whose weapons were of brass blew upon them until they split the seams of their coats and sent their waistcoat-buttons flying with the force of their fervid harmony, in the cumulative strains of Handel and the dithyrambics of Tate and Brady. “Oh! for such a man in our parish,” was thought to be the admiratory attitude of the parson at thefortissimooutburst of a minstrel from a neighbouring village, who had taken a turn with the local choir; but the parson’s pose was less one of admiration than of startled surprise.

All the members of that harmonious, if at times too vigorous, choir are gone to the land where, let us hope, they are quiring in the white robes and golden crowns usually supposed to be the common wear “up along”; and their instruments are perished too:

The knight is dust, his sword is rust,His soul is with the saints, we trust.

Or, as Mr. Hardy, inFriends Beyond, says of his own creations:

William Dewy, Tranter Reuben,Farmer Ledlow late at plough,Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,And the Squire and Lady SusanLie in Mellstock churchyard now.

The clergy, who were responsible for the disappearance of the old choirs, did not succeed at one stroke in sweeping them away, and in many parishes it was not until the leader had died that they broke up the old rustic harmony. “The ‘church singers,’ who played anthems, with selections ‘from Handel, but mostly composed by themselves,’ had a position in their parish. They had an admiring congregation. Their afternoon anthem was the theme of conversation at the church porch before the service, and of enquiry and critical disquisition after. ‘And did John,’ one would ask, ‘keep to his time?’ ‘Samuel was crowding very fitly until his string broked.’ This was said after a performance difficult in all the categories in which difficulty—close up even to impossibility—may be found. And there was, I was about to say, a finale, but it seemed endless; it was a concluding portion, and a long one, of the anthem.

“Mary began an introductory recapitulation, in which she was ably followed, of the words, the subject of the composition, the masterpiece of one, or many, if the choir had lent a helping hand. It happened that Mary had to manage three full syllables, and all the cadences, and trills, and quavers connected therewith, as a solo. Then followed, through all the turns of the same intricate piece, Thomas, of tenor voice, who evolved his music, but did not advance to any elucidation of the subject of his concluding effort. He only dwelt upon the same syllables, at which the good minister was seen to smile and become restless, particularly when Jonathan took on with his deep bass voice, accompanied by the tones he drew from hisbass-viol. He, as best suited a bass singer, slowly repeated the syllables that Mary and Thomas had produced in so many ways, and with such a series of intonations, ‘OUR—GREAT—SAL.’ May some who tittered at this canonisation of, as it were, a female saint, be forgiven!’ Had they waited a few minutes, the grand union of all the performers in loud chorus would have enlightened them to the fact that the last syllable was only the first of one of three ending in ‘vation,’ which would be loudly repeated by the whole choir till they appeared fairly tired out.”

The very last surviving vestige of the old village choirs of the West of England became extinct in 1893. Until then the startled visitor from London, or indeed any other part of a country by that time given over to harmoniums in chapels, cheap and thin organs in small churches, and more full-toned ones in larger, would have found the village choir of Martinstown still bass-viol and fiddle-scraping, flute-blowing, and clarionet-playing, as their forefathers had been wont to do. “Martinstown” is the style by which Wessex folk, not quite equal to the constant daily repetition of the name of Winterborne St. Martin, know that village, a little to the west of Dorchester. It is a considerable place and by no means remote, and it was therefore not the general inaccessibility of Martinstown to modern ideas that caused this survival, when every other parish had put away such things. Martinstown then provided itself with an organ, as understood to-day; and so escaped a middle period to which many another parish fell a victim, between the decay of the old church music andthe adoption of the new. When, about the accession of Queen Victoria, village minstrelsy began to relax, there came in a fashion, or rather a scourge, of mechanical barrel-organs, fitted to play a dozen or fewer, sacred tunes, according to the local purse, or the local requirements. Precisely like secular barrel organs, save only in the matter of the tunes they were constructed to play, church minstrelsy with them not only became mechanical but singularly unvaried, for, when your dozen tunes were played, there was nothing for it—if, like Oliver Twist, the congregation called for more—but to grind the same things over again. The only variety—and that was one not covenanted for—was when portions of the melody-producing works decayed and broke off. A tooth missing from a cog-wheel, or something wrong with the barrel, was apt to give an ungodly twist to the Old Hundredth, calculated to impart a novelty to that ancient stand-by of village churches, and would even have made the air of “Onward, Christian Soldiers!” stream forth in spasms, as though those soldiers were an awkward squad learning some ecclesiastical goose-step. In short, the barrel-organs were not “things seemly and of good report,” and they presently died the death.

Many regretted the old order of things, largely destroyed by the current movements in the Church. Reforming High Churchmen had seized upon the signs of weakness exhibited in the old choirs, and had made away with them wherever possible. The rustic music had, as we have seen, its humorous incidents, but it was enthusiastic and was understood and sympathised with by the people.Surpliced choirs, and others, formed as they now commonly are, from classes superior to those of which the old instrumental and vocal choirs were composed, have not that hold upon congregations, who do not sing, as the Prayer-book and the Psalm enjoin, but listen while others do the singing for them.

“Why, daze my old eyes,” said a Wessex rustic, reviewing the trend of modern life, “everything’s upsey-down. ’Tis, if ye want this and if ye want that, put yer hand in yer pocket and goo an’ git some’un to do’t for ye, or goo to the Stowers (he meant the Stores) up to Do’chester, and buy yer ’taters and have’m sint home for ’ee, cheaper’n ye can grow’m, let be the back-breakin’ work of a hoein’ of ’em, and a diggin’ of ’em and a clanin’ of ’em. An’ talking of church, why bless ’ee, tidden no manner of good yer liftin’ up yer v’ice glad-like, an’ makkin’ a cheerful noise onto the Lord, as we’m bidden to do. Not a bit. Ef ye do’t passon looks all of a pelt, and they boys in their nightshirts sets off a-sniggerin’ and they tells yer ye bissen much of a songster, they ses.”

It has already been said that the instruments, as well as the old village players of them, have perished, but at least one specimen of that oddly named instrument, the “serpent,” frequently mentioned by Mr. Hardy, has survived. This example is in the possession of Messrs. H. Potter & Co., of West Street, Charing Cross Road. The serpent belongs to such a past order of things that, like the rebecs, dulcimers, and shawms of Scriptural references, it requires explanation.

The “serpent,” then, it may be learned, althoughinvented by one Guillaume so far back as the close of the sixteenth century, first came into general use in the early part of the eighteenth. It was a wind instrument, the precursor of the bass horn, or ophicleide, which in its turn has been superseded by the valved bass brasses of the present day. The serpent of course owed its name to its contorted shape. It was generally made of wood, covered with leather, and stained black, and ranged in length from about twenty-nine to thirty-three inches. The earlier form of serpent had but six holes, but these were gradually increased, and keyed, until this now obsolete instrument, as improved by Key, of London, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, finally became possessed of seventeen keys. It went out of use, contemporaneously with the decay of the old village choirs, about 1830.

The geographical area of the heart of the Hardy Country is not very great, but the difficulties of finding one’s way about it are not small. The Vale of Great Dairies opens out, and the many runnels of the Frome make the byways so winding that to clearly know whither one is going demands the use of a very large-scale Ordnance Map. But to lose one’s self here is no disaster. You will find your way out again, and in the meanwhile will have come into intimate touch with dairying, and perhaps, if it be early summer, will find the barns and the waterside busy with sheepshearers. Seeing the dexterous shearing, the quick, practised movements of the men and the panting helplessness of the sheep, one is reminded of the similar scene inFar from the Madding Crowd.

Away across the Frome is the rustic,out-of-the-way village of West Stafford, which has a little one-aisled church, still displaying the royal arms of the time of Queen Elizabeth with that semée of lilies, the empty boast of a sovereignty over France, which, to the contemplative and sentimental student of history is as pitiful a make-believe as that of penury apeing affluence. “That gloriousSemper Eadem,” motto, “our banner and our pride,” as Macaulay says, looks a little flatulent in these circumstances of a relaxed grasp.

The long rhymed inscription outside an off-licence beerhouse in the village, displaying the Hardyean phrase of “a cup of genuine” for a glass of ale, is a curiosity in its way—

I trust no Wise Man will condemnA Cup of Genuine now and then.When you are faint, your spirits low,Your string relaxed ’twill bend your Bow,Brace your Drumhead and make you tight,Wind up your Watch and set you right:But then again the too much useOf all strong liquors is the abuse.’Tis liquid makes the solid loose,The Texture and whole frame Destroys,But health lies in the Equipoise.

Resuming the north bank of the Frome, and the road to Tincleton, a left-hand turning is seen leading across to Piddletown, by way of Lower and Upper Bockhampton—hamlets rustic to the last degree, and, by reason of being quite remote from any road the casual stranger is likely to take, unknown to the outside world. Yet the second of these, the thatched and tree-embowered hamlet of Upper Bockhampton, has the keenest interest for theexplorer of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the rustic, thatched cottage still occupied by members of the Hardy family, that Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, was born, June 2nd, 1840. It is a fitting spot for the birthplace of one who has described nature as surely it has never before been described, has pictured the moods of earth and sky, and has heard and given new significances to the voices of birds and trees, by the stubborn and intractable method of prose-writing.

Birthplace of Thomas Hardy

The cottage stands—its front almost hid from sight in the dense growths of its old garden and by the slope of the downs—at the extreme upper end of Upper Bockhampton, on the edge of the wild,called, with a fine freedom of choice, Bockhampton or Piddletown Heath, and Thorneycombe or Ilsington Woods. You enter its garden up steep, rustic steps, and find its low-ceiled rooms stone-flagged and criss-crossed with beams. At the back, its walls, withsmall latticed windows, look sheer upon a lane leading into the heart of the woodland; where, so little are strangers expected or desired that the tree-trunks bear notice-boards detailing what shall be done to those who trespass. Branches of these enshrining trees touch the thatched roof and scrape the walls, and the voices of the wind and of the woodlands reverberate from them; and when the sun goes down, the nocturnal orchestra of owls and nightingales strikes up. It is an ideal spot for the birth of one whose genius and bent are largely in the interpretation of nature; but it must not be forgotten that the chances are always against the observation and appreciation of scenes amidst which a child has been born and reared, and that only exceptional receptivity can throw off the usual effect of staleness and lack of interest in things usual and accustomed. It is thus in the nature of things that the townsman generally takes a keener interest in the country than those native to it, and the dweller in the mushroom cities of commerce finds more in a cathedral city than many of those living within the shadow of the Minster ever suspect. This is to say, parabolically, what we all know, that the nature of the seer is an exceptional nature, and rises superior to the dulling effects of use and wont: unaccountable as the winds that blow, and not to be analysed or predicated by any literary meteorological department.

Birthplace of Thomas Hardy

Returning through Lower Bockhampton, on the way to Tincleton, a ridge is presently seen on the left hand, crowned with fir-trees, and a little questing will reveal a rush-grown pool, the original of Heedless William’s Pond, mentioned inThe Fiddler of the Reels.Beyond this landmark, a cottage that fills the position of “Bloom’s End” inThe Return of the Native, is seen, and on the right-hand side the farmstead of Norris Mill Farm, where, overlooking the Vale of Great Dairies, is the original of Talbothays, the dairy where Angel Clare, learning the business from Dairyman Crick, met Tess. Below the grassy bluff on whose sides the farm-buildings stand may be traced the fertilising course of the Frome, or as Mr. Hardy calls it, the Var:—“The Var waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shadows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the water-flower was the lily.”

The “Duck” Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn

This land of fat kine and water-meads, to the south of the road, is neighboured to the northward by the outlying brown and purple stretches of Egdon Heath, into whose wilds we shall presently come. “Bloom’s End,” or a house that may wellstand for it, we have noticed, and now come upon a humble little farm on the right hand, standing with front to the road and facing upon a strikingly gloomy heather-covered hill. This is the house, once the “Duck” inn, which figures inThe Return of the Nativeas the “Quiet Woman” inn, kept by Damon Wildeve, who, a failure as an engineer, made a worse shipwreck of life here. As described in the novel, a little patch of land has by dint of supreme exertions been reclaimed from the grudging soil:

“Wildeve’s Patch, as it was called, a plot of land redeemed from the heath, and after long and laborious years brought into cultivation. The man who had discovered that it could be tilled died of the labour: the man who succeeded him in possession ruined himself in fertilising it. Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci, and received the honours due to those who had gone before.”

A casual talk with the small farmer who has taken the place reveals the fact that this soil is a hard taskmaster and yields a poor recompense. The heathery hill facing it is described exactly as it is in nature:

“The front of the house was towards the heath and Rainbarrow, whose dark shape seemed to threaten it from the sky. . . .”

“It was a barrow. This bossy projection of earth above its natural level occupied the loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.”

The soil at the back of the house is better, which indeed it could well be without being even then particularly good. It slopes towards the river, at what is described in the book as “Shadwater Weir,” where the drowned bodies of Wildeve and Eustacia were found:

“The garden was at the back, and behind this ran a still deep stream.”

Tincleton

The village of Tincleton, the “Stickleford” of casual mention in some of the short stories, is one of about a dozen cottages, clustering round a little church and school; and with presumably a few dozen more dwellings in the neighbourhood of the wide common on which Tincleton stands, to account for the existence of that school and that church. Past it and Pallington, whose hill and hilltop firs, known as Pallington Clump, are conspicuous for great distances, we turn to the left and explore a portion of Egdon Heath towards Bryan’s Piddle and Bere Regis. Everywhere the wilds now stretch forth and seem to bid defiance to the best efforts of the cultivator, but down at the hamlet of Hurst, where water is plentiful, there is an ancient red-brick farmof superior aspect, and yet with a thatched roof—an effect oddly like that which might be produced by a gentleman wearing a harvester’s hat. It is obviously an old manor-house, and besides showing evidences of former state, has two substantial brick entrance piers surmounted by what country folk, in their native satire, call “gentility balls.”

Such gentility in the neighbourhood of wild, uncanny Egdon wears, as Mr. Hardy would say, “an anomalous look.” The heath is more akin with Adam than with his descendants:

“This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness—‘Bruaria.’ Then follows the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. ‘Turbaria Bruaria’—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters relating to the district. ‘Overgrown with heth and mosse,’ says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.”“Here at least were intelligible facts regarding the landscape—far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untamable Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilisation was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalouslook. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.”

“Here at least were intelligible facts regarding the landscape—far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untamable Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilisation was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalouslook. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.”

Here, if anywhere in this poor old England of ours, generally over-populated and sorted over, raked about, and turned inside out, there is quiet and solitude. No recent manifestations of the way the world wags, no advertisement hoardings, no gasometers or mean suburbs intrude upon the inviolable heath. No one has yet suspected coal beneath the shaggy frieze coat of this remote vestige of an earlier age, and its vitals have therefore not been probed and dragged forth. A railway skirts it, ’tis true, but only on the way otherwhere, and no network of sidings has yet made a gridiron of its unexploited waste. Elsewhere trim hedges or fences of barbed-wire restrain the explorer, but here he is free to roam, and may so roam until he has fairly lost himself.

An Egdon Farmstead

It is a land wholly antithetic from the bubbling superficial feelings of cities, and has theintrospective, self-communing air of the solitary. A town-bred man,

“Heart-halt and spirit-lame,City-opprest,”

and wearied with the weariful reek of the streets, the jostling of the pavements, and the intolerable numbers of his kind, might come to a spell of recluse life in a farm on Egdon, and there rid him of that supersaturation of humanity; returning at last to his streets with a new spirit, a brisker step, and a revived hope in the right ordering of the world. So much Egdon can do for such an one.

A Farm on Egdon

I know just such a farm, in the dip of the yellow road, its thatched roofs and the near trees taking on a homely, comfortable look when nightcloses down upon the wild, when its windows are lit with a welcome ray as the sun goes down, in an angry glory in the west. This is, to me, the heart of the Hardy Country, and its surroundings seem most closely to fit his imaginings. The place has just that personality he gives his farmsteads, and the wastes near it wear sometimes just that cold indifference to humanity, and at others precisely that ogreish hostility, he in his pagan way describes.

Halting here, as the sun goes down, and the landscape changes from its daylight browns and purples to an irradiated orange, and through the siennas and umbers of an etching, to the blackness of night, I feel that here resides thegenius loci, the Spirit of the Heath.

DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND YEOVIL

Agoodmany outlying literary landmarks of the Wessex novels may be cleared up by leaving Dorchester by Charminster, and then, at a fork in the road just past Wolveton, taking the left-hand turning and following for awhile the valley road along the course of the river Frome. Not for long, however, if it is desired to keep strictly to those landmarks, do we pursue this easy course, for in another couple of miles, by Grimstone station, we shall have to bear to the right hand and make for what is known in Mr. Hardy’s pages as “Long Ash Lane,” along whose almost interminable course Farmer Darton and his friend rode, to the wooing of Sally Hall, at Great Hintock, in that short story,Interlopers at the Knap.

Long Ash Lane—in some editions of the novels styled “Holloway Lane”—is the middle one of three roads past Grimstone station. Those on either side lead severally to Maiden Newton—the “Chalk Newton” ofTess of the D’Urbervilles—and to Sydling St. Nicholas; but this is, as described in that story, “a monotonous track, without a village or hamlet for many miles, and with very seldom aturning.” For its own sake, it will therefore be easily seen, Long Ash Lane is not an altogether desirable route. It is an ancient Roman road, running eventually to Yeovil and Ilchester; passing near by, but not touching, and always out of sight of several small villages on its lengthy way. Darton and Johns found it weariful as they rode, the hedgerow twigs on either side “currycombing their whiskers,” as Mr. Hardy delightfully says; and wayfarers on foot, tired out, believe at last that it will never end:

“Unapprised wayfarers, who are too old, or too young, or in other respects too weak for the distance to be traversed, but who, nevertheless, have to walk it, say, as they look wistfully ahead: ‘Once at the top of that hill, and I must surely see the end of Long Ash Lane!’ But they reach the hill-top, and Long Ash Lane stretches in front mercilessly as before.”

After many miles this tiresome road at last comes in touch with modern life, for Evershot station and the hamlet of Holywell are placed directly beside it. Here we may turn right, or turn left, or go onward, sure in all directions of finding many scenes to be identified with the novels. Turning to the right, a road not altogether dissimilar in its loneliness from Long Ash Lane is found, but differing from it in the one essential respect of ascending the ridge of lofty downs overlooking the Vale of Blackmoor, and thus, while to the right hand disclosing a dull expanse of table-land, on the left opening out a romantic view, bounded only by distance and the inadequacies of human eyesight. This is the road along which Tess wastravelling—in the reverse direction—from Dole’s Ash Farm at Plush, the “Flintcombe Ash” of those tragical pages, to Beaminster or “Emminster,” to visit the parents of Angel Clare, her husband, when she came to that ill-fated meeting with Alec D’Urberville at the spot we now approach, Cross-in-Hand:

“At length the road touched the spot called ‘Cross-in-Hand.’ Of all spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn. It was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone pillar which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand.”

The history and meaning of this lonely pillar on the solitary ridgeway road are unknown. Thought by some to mark the old-time bounds of property under the sway of the Abbot of Cerne, others have considered it to be the relic of a wayside cross, while others yet have held it to be a place of meeting of the tenants and feudatories of the old abbey, and the hollow in the stone to have been the receptacle for their tribute. But, “whatever the origin of the relic, there was and is something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in the scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the most phlegmatic passer-by.”

Here it was that Tess, on her way to Flintcombe Ash, was surprised by the converted Alec D’Urberville, already shaken in his new-found grace and preaching mission at sight of her, and here he madeher swear upon it never to tempt him by her charms or ways. “This was once a Holy Cross,” said he. “Relics are not in my creed, but I fear you at moments.” It was not very reassuring to Tess when, leaving the spot of this singular rencounter and asking a rustic if the stone were not a Holy Cross, he replied, “Cross—no; ’twer not a cross! ’Tis a thing of ill-omen, miss. It was put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor, who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times.”

Cross-in-Hand

This pillar, “the scene of a miracle or murder, or both,” stands some five feet in height, and rises from the unfenced grassy selvedge of the road, where the blackberry bushes and bracken grow, on the verge of the down that breaks precipitously away to the vale where Yetminster lies. The rudebowl-shaped capital of the mystic stone has the coarse semblance of a hand, displayed in the manner of the Bloody Hand of Ulster.

Batcombe

Deep down below, in midst of the narrowest lanes, lies the sequestered village of Batcombe, from which this down immediately above takes its name. The church stands almost in the shadow of the hills. This also is a place of marvellous legends, for a battered old Gothic tomb in the churchyard, innocent of inscription, standing near the north wall of the church, is, according to old tales the resting-place of one “Conjuring Minterne,” a devil-compeller and astrologer of sorts, who was originally buried half in and half out of the church, for fear his master, “the horny man,” as a character in one of Mr. Hardy’s romances calls Old Nick, should have him, if buried otherwise. One would like to learn more about “Conjuring Minterne” and his strange tricks, but history is silent.

Returning to Evershot, or, as it is styled in the sources of our pilgrimage, “Evershead,” we come to Melbury Park, the seat of the Earl of Ilchester, and the principal scene of that charming story,The First Countess of Wessex, in the collection of “A Group of Noble Dames.” The great house of oddly diversified architecture, stands in the midst of this nobly wooded and strikingly varied domain, but can readily be seen, for the carriage-drive is a public right of way. This is the broad roadway through the park described in the passage where Tupcombe, riding towards “King’s Hintock Court”—as Mr. Hardy disguises the identity of the place—from Mells, on Squire Dornell’s errand, saw it stretching ahead “like an unrolled deal shaving.”

Like most of the stories of those noble dames, this romance of Betty Dornell, the First Countess of Wessex, is founded upon actual people, and largely upon their real doings. Squire Dornell of Falls Park—really Mells Park—was in real life that Thomas Horner who in 1713 married Susannah Strangways, heiress of the Strangways family and owner of Melbury Sampford; and their only child was Elizabeth, born in 1723, who in 1736, in her thirteenth year, almost precisely as in the story, was married to Stephen Fox, afterwards Earl of Ilchester, who died in 1776. The Countess died in 1792.

Tomb of “Conjuring Minterne”

But this passage of family history is best set forth in the manner customary to genealogists:

Family tree of Thomas Horner of Mells[174]

The father of the first Countess of Wessex was, it is curious to know, descended from Little Jack Horner, that paragon of selfishness who sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie, and who, the familiar nursery rhyme goes on to tell us,

“Put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,And said, What a good boy am I!”

The nursery rhyme was that, and something more. It was, in fact a satire upon that John Horner who, upon the dissolution of the monasteries, purchased for much less than it was worth the confiscated Mells estate of Glastonbury Abbey. This prize, the “plum” of the rhyme, is said to have been worth £10,000. The Horners, represented by Sir John Horner, espoused the side of the Parliament in the war with Charles I. but they have kept their plum, at every hazard and in all chances, and Mells Park is still in the family.

Melbury House

Leland tells how the house of Melbury Park was built in the sixteenth century by Sir Giles Strangways, but portions of the great T-shaped building have at later times been added, notably the wing built in the time of Queen Anne. The whole heterogeneous pile, dominated by a church-like, six-sided centraltower, occupies a raised grassy site looking upon a lake on whose opposite shore is the little manorial church of Melbury Sampford, plentifully stored with monuments of Strangways and Fox-Strangways, and in especial notable for that to the courtly and equable husband of Betty Dornell. His epitaph, by the hand of his widow, describes him as the most desirable of husbands.

Near this stone is interredStephen, Earl of Ilchester,who died at MelburySept. 26,A.D. MDCCLXXVI., agedLXXII.He was the eighth son of Sir Stephen Fox, knight.He married Elizabeth, only daughter of Thomas Horner,of Mells, in the county of Somerset, esquire,heiress-general to the family ofStrangways of Melbury, in the county of Dorset,by whom he had Henry Thomas, his eldest son,now Earl of Ilchester(who succeeds him in honours and estate)and a numerous offspring.As a small token of her great affectionto the best of husbands, fathers, friends,his disconsolate widow inscribes this marble,Sacred to his memory.Hush’d be the voice of bards who heroes praise,And high o’er glory’s sun their pæans raise;And let an artless Muse a friend review,Whose tranquil Life one blameless tenour knew,By Nature form’d to please, of happiest mien,Just, friendly, chearful, affable, serene;Engaging Manners, cultivated Mind,Adorn’d by Letters and in Courts refin’d,His blooming honours long approv’d he bore,And added lustre to that gem he wore;Grac’d with all pow’rs to shine, he left parade,And unambitious lov’d the sylvan shade;The choice by Heav’n applauded stood confess’dAnd all his Days with all its blessing bless’d;Living belov’d, lamented in his end,Unfading Bliss his mortal change attend.

Sacred to his memory.

Hush’d be the voice of bards who heroes praise,And high o’er glory’s sun their pæans raise;And let an artless Muse a friend review,Whose tranquil Life one blameless tenour knew,By Nature form’d to please, of happiest mien,Just, friendly, chearful, affable, serene;Engaging Manners, cultivated Mind,Adorn’d by Letters and in Courts refin’d,His blooming honours long approv’d he bore,And added lustre to that gem he wore;Grac’d with all pow’rs to shine, he left parade,And unambitious lov’d the sylvan shade;The choice by Heav’n applauded stood confess’dAnd all his Days with all its blessing bless’d;Living belov’d, lamented in his end,Unfading Bliss his mortal change attend.

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