WIMBORNE MINSTER
Wimborne Minsteror “Warborne” inTwo on a Tower—is, or was, for the Romans and their works are altogether vanished from the town, theVindogladiaof the Antonine Itinerary. If you speak of it in the curt irreverent way of railways and their time-tables, or in the equally curt, but only familiar, manner of its inhabitants, it is merely “Wimborne.” In their mouths, elision of the “Minster” merely connotes affection and use, as one drops the titles or the “Mister” of a friend, in speaking of him; but in the case of railway usage it is the offensive familiarity of the ill-bred, or, at the least, a derogatory saving of space and type.
This common practice is all the more historically an outrage, for had there been no Minster, there would have been no town of Wimborne. It derives from an early religious settlement, founded inA.D.700 near the site of the forgotten Roman station, by Cuthburga, one of those unsatisfactory princess spouses of the pietistic period of Saxon dominion, who, married to the King of Northumbria, refused him conjugal rights and finally established herself here, living a life of “continual watchings and fastings,” and finally dying of them.We are not concerned to follow the mazes of the early history of town and church. It suffered the usual plunderings and burnings, the nuns were occasionally carried off, sometimes against their will, at other times with their consent, and at last, somewhere aboutA.D.902, monks replaced them. The whole foundation was re-established by Edward the Confessor, and remained as a Collegiate church until 1547, when it was disestablished, its revenues seized, and the building wholly converted to the purposes of a parish church.
Sturminster Marshall
Anthony Etricke’s Tomb, Wimborne Minster
Wimborne Minster might be made the subject of a lengthy architectural disquisition. Its two towers, western and central, are themselves pointers to its history; for they show, not in the different periods at which they were built, but in the richness of the one and the comparative plainness of the other, the combined uses of the building in days of old. The central tower, of transitional Norman design, and remarkably like the towers of Exeter cathedral, was originally surmounted by a stone spire, which fell in 1600. Its elaboration is explained by its having been a part of the monastic church, while the western tower erected about 1460, belonged to the parochial building.
The church, endowed with two—and two dissimilar—towers, is a splendid feature in the streets of the old town. It and the town gain dignity and interest in an amazing degree, and here in Wimborne the pinnacled battlemented outlines “make” both town and Minster, in the pictorial sense. They bulk darkly and largely across the yellow sandiness of the broad market-place, and sort themselves into endless and changeful combinations down thenarrower streets. Apart, too, from these important considerations, the Minster is exceptionally rich in curious features, outside its architectural details.
Our ancestors possessed a quaint mixture of serious devotion and light-hearted childishness, and we are the richer for it. Thus, high up on the external wall of the western tower, the observant will notice the odd little effigy, carved, painted and gilt, resembling a grenadier of a century ago, or a French gendarme of a pastrégime: it is difficult to assign it with certainty, and assuredly it does not look so old as 1600, the date when it is stated to have been placed here. His business is that of a quarter-jack, and he strikes the quarters upon a bell on either side of him. The clock within, an astronomical contrivance made in 1320 by that same ingenious Glastonbury monk, Peter Lightfoot, who was the author of the famous clock of Wells Cathedral, represents the courses of the sun, moon, and stars.
The Minster, in short, is a museum of antiquities, found particularly interesting by the half-day excursionists from Bournemouth who are its chief visitors and carry away a fine confused recollection of their scamper round it. Here, in a room above the vestry, is the Chained Library, a collection of over two hundred and forty volumes, mostly chained to iron rods. Some of the books are very early, but the collection was formed in 1686. Perhaps, for the sake of its story, the copy of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World” is even more interesting than “The Whole Duty of Man” and the “Breeches Bible,” for it still displays the carefully mended hundred leaves burnt through whenthe boy, afterwards poet, Prior fell asleep over his reading of it and upset the candle, with this result. Each damaged page was neatly mended by him and the missing letters so carefully restored that it is difficult, until attention is drawn to the repair, to detect anything exceptional. Prior was born at Wimborne in 1664, as a brass tablet in the western tower to his “perennial and fragrant” memory tells us.
The Wimborne Clock-JackBut of paramount interest to sightseers, far transcending the ironbound deed-chests, some hollowed from a single trunk, and the tombs of the noble and knightly, is the last resting-place of Anthony Etricke, in the south wall of the choir aisle. Anthony Etricke was a personage of some local distinction in his day, for besides being a man of wealth, he was first Recorder of Poole. He has also won a little niche in the history of England by no effort of his own: a distinction thrust upon him by circumstance, and one which might have fallen upon any other local magistrate. Sentimentally speaking, it is also a wholly invidious and undesirable fame or notoriety, and was so regarded by the good folk of the town. Etricke, residing at Holt, near the spot where the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth was captured, was the magistrate before whom the wretched fugitive was brought. Another might possibly, greatly daring, have secured the escape of that romantic figure, andby so doing at the same time have altered the course of English history and earned the admiration of those who admire chivalric deeds. But Etricke was not of this stamp, and was, moreover, of that old faith which the bigoted James was striving to reintroduce: while Monmouth was the Protestant champion. Alas! poor champion. Etricke at once performed his bounden duty as a magistrate, and also satisfied his own private feelings; and Monmouth ended miserably.
Etricke never regained popularity in his district, and lived for eighteen years longer, a shunned and soured man. The story tells how he took what may surely be regarded as the odd and altogether insufficient revenge of declaring that he would be buried neither in the church of Wimborne nor out of it, and accordingly in his lifetime had a niche prepared here, in the wall, where the polished black slate sarcophagus, still seen above ground, was placed. He was eccentric beyond this, for he had conceived the date of his death and caused it to be boldly carved on the side, between two of the seven shields of arms that in braggart fashion are made to redound to the glory of the Etricke family. That year he had imagined would be 1691, but he actually survived until 1703, and the date was accordingly altered (as seen to this day) when at last, to the satisfaction of Wimborne, he did demise. For the keeping of his tomb in good repair he left twenty shillings annually, a sum still administered by the Charity Commissioners; and it certainly cannot be said that he does not receive value for his money, because his eccentric lair is maintained, heraldic cognisances and all, in the most perfect condition.Any ill-will this solemn personage may have felt towards Wimborne is altogether robbed of satisfaction nowadays, and his gloomy ghost may, for all we know, be enraged at the thought of the attraction his eccentricity has for visitors and the trade in photographs it has provoked, much to the material well-being of the town.
Wimborne Minster; The Minster and the Grammar School
The pilgrim of the Hardy country, come to Wimborne—I should have said “Warborne”—to see that Grammar School where, to quote Haymoss Fry, “they draw up young gam’sters’ brains like rhubarb under a ninepenny pan, my lady, excusing my common way,” is like to be disappointed, for the place where “they hit so much larning into en that ’a could talk like the day of Pentecost” is no longer an ancient building. ’Tis true, the foundation is what the country folk might call an “old arnshunt” thing enough, being the work indeed of that very great founder of schools and colleges, the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII. It was refounded by Queen Elizabeth, who stripped all the credit of this good deed in a naughty world from the memory of the pious countess, and willed that it should be styled “The Grammar School of the Foundation of Queen Elizabeth in Wimborne Minster in the County of Dorset.” That was pretty bad, but worse came with the whirling years. James I., like the shabby fellow he was, raised a question respecting the validity of its charter, and was only bought off with £600; and Charles I., unlike the noble, magnanimous sovereign he is commonly thought to be, bled the institution to the tune of another £1,000, by a similar dodge. The wonder is that it has survivedat all, and not only survived, but flourished and was able, so long ago as 1851, to build itself that new and substantial home which is so scholastically useful, but at the same time disappointing to the literary pilgrim who, at the place where Swithin St. Cleeve was educated, hoped to find a picturesque building of mediæval age.
WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY
Wimborneshall here be the starting-point of a twenty-eight miles route, that in its south-easterly to north-westerly direction, is as easy as the one north to south of the road between Sherborne and Weymouth. It follows the valley of the Stour the whole way, and only at its conclusion brings up butt against the hill on which Shaftesbury is built.
There is at the outset from Wimborne a choice between the easeful and the toilsome. You may elect to go directly up-along, to the height frowned down upon by the greater height of Badbury Rings, or may go more circuitously but by more level ways, through Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall. On the first route, beautifully overhung by elms, lies Kingston Lacy, the old seat of the Bankes family, rebuilt by Sir Ralph Bankes in 1663, and now a very treasure-house of art and historic relics. Here one may, greatly favoured, see and touch those keys of Corfe Castle, held so stoutly by the valorous Lady Bankes in the two sieges she withstood.
A younger avenue of beeches lines the exposed road across the shoulders of what has been identified asMons Badonicus—Badbury Rings—the scene of the overwhelming victory gained inA.D.520, overCerdic and his Saxons by King Arthur and his Britons. In later years, when at last Saxon dominion had spread, and this had become Wessex, Saxons themselves encamped where of old they had been defeated, and after them the Danes occupied this inhospitable height. It is now tufted with a clump of fir-trees, and, solemn and darkly looming against a lowering sky, looks a fitting scene for any national portent of evil.
They are less impressive roads that lead by the Stour to Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall. There the farmer reaps his heavy crops of hay and cereals, and ploughs and sows and reaps again, and history is only a matter of comparison between this year of a poor harvest, when prices are high and marketable produce little, and last year of a bumper, when the horn of Ceres was full and prices low. No matter what the yield, there is ever a something to dash the farmer’s cup from his expectant lips.
At Bailey Corner, three miles from Wimborne, a broad main road branches off from our route, going to Bere Regis and Dorchester. This is the road made at the suggestion of Mr. Erle-Drax of Charborough Park, whose property, it may be supposed, gained in some way from it. Charborough Park is one of the originals whence Welland House and the tower ofTwo on a Towerwere drawn, and therefore demands a deviation of two miles from our route.
It is a straight road and a lonely that leads to the main entrance-lodge of this seat of the Erle-Drax family, past a long-continued brick boundary-wall that must have cost a small fortune, and decorated at intervals with arches surmounted by effigies ofstags and lions. Time has dealt very severely with some of the squire’s stags, shorn here and there of a limb, and in one instance presenting a headless awfulness to the gaze of the pilgrim, who can scarce repress a shudder at sight of it, even though the destruction provides a little comedy of its own, in the revelation that these imposing “stone” decorations are really of plaster, and hollow.
The principal entrance to Charborough Park, the one feature that breaks the long, straight perspective of this undeviating road, seems to have been erected by the squire as a species of permanent self-advertising hoarding, for it is boldly inscribed: “This road from Wimborne to Dorchester was projected and completed through the instrumentality of J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, Esq., M.P., in the years 1841 and 1842.” Cæsar himself could have done no more than was performed by this magnate of the many names, and could not with greater magnificence have suppressed the fact that what his Parliamentary influence procured, the public purse paid for.
There is this essential difference between Charborough Park and “Welland House.” Charborough is very closely guarded from intrusion, and none who cannot show a real reason for entering is allowed through the jealously closed and locked gates of the lodges.
The residence of Lady Constantine was, however, very readily accessible, and, “as is occasionally the case with old-fashioned manors, possessed none of the exclusiveness found in some aristocratic settlements. The parishioners looked upon the park avenue as their natural thoroughfare, particularly for christenings, weddings, and funerals, which passedthe squire’s mansion, with due considerations as to the scenic effect of the same from the manor windows.” So much to show the composite nature of the scene drawn inTwo on a Tower.
The tower—the “Rings Hill Speer” of the story—stands in the park, at a considerable distance from the house on the other side of a gentle dip, but well within sight of the drawing-room windows. In between, across the turf and disappearing into the woodlands to right and left, roam the deer that so plentifully inhabit this beautiful domain. The tower is approached by roomy stone staircases, now overgrown with grass, moss, and fungi, and so far from it or its approaches being in “the Tuscan order of architecture,” they are designed in a most distinctive and aggressive Strawberry Hill Gothic manner. Built originally by Major Drax in 1796, and struck by lightning, it was rebuilt in 1839.
Returning now from this interlude and regaining Bailey Corner, we come to Sturminster Marshall, a place that now, for all the dignity of its name, is just a rustic village, with only that name and an ancient church that was the “Stour Minster” of the Earls of Pembroke, the Earls Marshal of England, to affirm its vanished importance. Its village green, bordered with scattered cottages, has a maypole, painted, like a barber’s pole, with vivid bands of red, white, and blue.
An expedition from this point, across the Stour to Shapwick, although a roundabout pilgrimage, is not likely to be an unrewarded exertion, for that is a village which, although unknown to the greater world, has a local fame that, so long asrustic satire lives, will assuredly not be allowed to die.
The Tower, Charborough ParkShapwick is not remote from the sea, but it might be a midland village (and exceptionally ignorant at that) if we are to believe the legend which accounts for the local name of “Shapwick Wheel-offs,” by which its villagers are known. According to this injurious tale, a shepherd, watching his sheep on Shapwick Down at some period unspecified—let us call it, as the children do, “once upon a time,” or “ever so long ago”—found a live crab, or lobster, that had fallen out of an itinerant fishmonger’s cart. He was so alarmed at the sight of the strange thing that he hurried into the village with the news of it, and brought all the people out to see. With them was the oldest inhabitant, a “tar’ble wold man,” incapable of locomotion, brought in a wheelbarrow to pronounce, out of the wisdom his accumulated years gave him, what this unknownmonster might be. When his ancient eyes lighted upon it, or rather, in the Do’set speech: “When a sin ’en, a carled out, tar’ble feared on ’en, ‘wheel I off, my sonnies, wheel I off.’” So they wheeled him off, accordingly, well pleased to leave that mysterious thing to itself.
As may well be supposed, the Shapwick folk are by no means proud of their nickname, and it is therefore a little surprising to find an old and very elaborate weathervane in the village, surmounting the roof of a barn, and giving, in a quaintly silhouetted group, a pictorial representation of the scene. It seems that there were originally three more figures, behind the barrow, but they have disappeared. Perhaps this is evidence of attempts on the part of Shapwick folk to destroy the record of their shame.
A succession of pretty villages—Spetisbury, Charlton Marshall, Blandford St. Mary—enlivens the five miles of road between Sturminster Marshall and Blandford; and then Blandford itself, already described, is entered. Passing through it, and skirting the grounds of Bryanstone, the Stour, more beautiful than earlier on the route, is crossed, and the twin villages of Durweston and Stourpaine, one on either bank, are glimpsed. Then comes the large village of Shillingstone, still steadfastly rural, despite its size, and keeping to the ancient ways more markedly than Sturminster Marshall, for it not only shares with that village the peculiarity of owning a maypole, but a maypole of exceptional height, and one still dressed and decorated with every spring. This tall pole, tapering like the mast of a ship,is a hundred and ten feet in height, and most carefully guarded with wire stays against destruction by the stormy winds that in winter sweep down the valley of the Stour.
Weather-Vane at Shapwick: The “Shapwick Monster”
If we were to name the Shillingstone maypole in accordance with the date of its annual garlanding, it would rather be a “Junepole,” for it is on the 9th of that month that the pretty old ceremony and its attendant merrymakings are held. This apparently arbitrary selection of a date is explained by the old May Day games and rejoicings having been held on May 29th, in the years after the Restoration of Charles II. in 1660; and by the change from Old Style to New, more than a hundred and fifty years later. That change, taking away eleven days, converted what would have been May 29th into June 9th; and thus by gradual change this survival of the ancient pagan festivalof Floralia is held when May Day has itself passed and become a memory.
The pole has several times been restored. Its present appearance is due to the restoration of October 1868, but the arrow vane with which it was then surmounted appears to have been blown down, and its improving mottoes—“Tanquam sagitta” (Like as an arrow), and “Sic et nos” (So even we)—lost. Another Latin inscription is Englished thus:
“Their maypole, decayed by age, the rector and inhabitants of Shillingstone, keeping their yearly May Games with all due observance, have carefully restored it on the ninth day of June 1850:
“The fading garland mourns how short life’s day,The towering maypole heavenward points the way.Read thou the lesson—seek to gather nowUndying wreaths to twine a deathless brow.”
“The fading garland mourns how short life’s day,The towering maypole heavenward points the way.Read thou the lesson—seek to gather nowUndying wreaths to twine a deathless brow.”
All very pious and proper, no doubt, but wofully lacking in the May Day spirit of the joy of life, and more fitting to the “Memento mori” fashion of the neighbouring churchyard.
In this old church of Shillingstone—or “Shilling-Okeford,” as from the old manorial lords it was once named—the pilgrim may see by the evidence of an old tablet how a certain William Keen, a merchant of London, fleeing terror-struck from the Great Plague, was overtaken by it and died here in 1666.
The reader, versed in the oddities of place-names, will perhaps not require the assurance that the name of Shillingstone has nothing whatever to do with shillings; but if he doubts, let it at once be said that it was so called long before that coin was known. It was originally “Oakford” andbecame “Schelin’s Oakford,” or “Schelin’s Town,” when the manor was in Norman times given to an ancestor of those who for centuries later continued to hold it and in more elaborate fashion styled themselves Eschellings.
The Maypole, Shillingstone
Down over intervening hills the road, for a little space forsaking its character of a valley route, comes beside the stream again at Piddleford—or, as the Post Office authorities prefer to call it “Fiddleford”—on the way to Sturminster Newton, the “Stourcastle” ofTess. This is the place mentioned at the opening of the story, to which Tess was driving the load of beehives from Marnhull at night,when the lantern went out and the mailcart dashing into the trap, killed the horse, Prince; thus starting the tragical chain of events that led at last to Winchester gaol.
Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn
Of Sturminster Newton, impressively styled on ordnance maps “Sturminster Newton Castle,” Leland says: “The townlette is no greate thing, and the building of it is mene,” and, although it would not occur to a modern writer to adopt that term, certainly there is little that is notable about it. There is no “minster,” no “castle,” and no “new town,” and little to say, save that an ancient six-arched bridge crosses the weedy Stour and that the battered stump of the market cross in the main street seems in its decay to typify the history of themarket itself. As the church has been rebuilt, and as the castle on the outskirts is now little more than a memory, the only resort is to turn for some point of interest to that quaintly thatched old inn, the White Hart, very much older than the tablet, “W. M. P. 1708,” on its front would lead many to suppose. It was probably restored at that date, after those troublous times had passed in which the cross, just opposite, lost its shaft, and when, in the fighting in the streets between the Parliamentary dragoons and the associated clubmen of the west, this house and others were fired and Sturminster Newton very generally given over to the horrors of a brutal conflict between troops trained to arms and a peasantry unskilled in the use of the weapons with which they had hastily equipped themselves. But, unprofessional soldiers though they were, the clubmen at Sturminster gave an excellent account of themselves, killing and wounding a number of the dragoons, and taking sixteen others prisoners.
WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY(continued)
Onwardsfrom Sturminster Newton the road comes into the rich Vale of Blackmore and traverses levels watered by the Lidden, in addition to the Stour. Turning here to the right-hand and avoiding the way to Stalbridge, we follow the steps of Tess to her home at “Marlott,” a village to be identified with Marnhull.
Could we associate any cottage here with the birthplace of Tess, how interesting a landmark that would be! But it is not to be done. “Rolliver’s,” the “Pure Drop” inn, may be the “Crown,” but you who call there to wet a particularly dry whistle on a scorching day will not find the name of Rolliver over the door, either of this house or of another, with the picture-sign of a dashing hussar outside. As to whether either or both of them keep “a pretty brew,” as we are told Rolliver’s did, I cannot tell you, for when dry, I drink ginger-beer if it is to be got, and, if it isn’t, go thirsty, refusing alike malt-liquors and the abominable gaseous compounds made cheaply of harmful materials, sold expensively, and rather thirst-provoking than quenching.
Marnhull is not precisely the type of village the readers ofTesswould picture as the home of a heroine whose adventures have so constant a background of dairying. It is, or was, a quarry-village, and the shallow pits that supplied for stone the church and the cottages are still prominent in a field to the left of the road to Shaftesbury. Thus Marnhull is somewhat formal and prim, and instead of the abundant thatch noticeable in the typical villages of dairy farms, its houses are roofed with slates and tiles.
Marnhull
The church of Marnhull has a singularly fine tower, which, although the details of its Perpendicular design are largely intermingled with Renaissance ornament, is in general outline a beautiful and imposing specimen of Gothic, built in that period—the early eighteenth century—generally thought impossible for Gothic art. It was in1718 that this fine work arose out of the heap of ruins into which the old tower had suddenly fallen, but it has almost every appearance of being three hundred years older, and it seems likely that, as it now stands, it was a free copy of its predecessor.
The body of the church is of much earlier date, and well supplied with mediæval effigies and finely carved capitals to its pillars. But it is not without amusement that one reads the flamboyant epitaph to the Reverend Mr. Conyers Place, M.A.,
“the youngeft son of an ancient and reputable family in the County of York, who, after he had been liberally educated at Trinity College, in Cambridge, was invited to the Mafter-fhip of the Grammar School in Dorchester, which he governed many years with great succefs and applaufe till, weary of the fatigue of it, he chofe to refign it. He was endowed with many excellent talents, both natural and acquired: a lively wit, a sound judgement, with solid and extenfive learning: he was eminently Studious, yet remarkably facetious: attached to no party, nor addicted to any caufe but that of Truth and Religion, in the defence of whofe Doctrines he wrote many learned and ingenious Treatifes; while he was efteemed by all worthy of the greateft Preferments, he lived content with the praife of deferving without enjoying any but the small Rectory of Poxwell, in this County, which he held two years, and in the Pofsefsion of which he died.”
“the youngeft son of an ancient and reputable family in the County of York, who, after he had been liberally educated at Trinity College, in Cambridge, was invited to the Mafter-fhip of the Grammar School in Dorchester, which he governed many years with great succefs and applaufe till, weary of the fatigue of it, he chofe to refign it. He was endowed with many excellent talents, both natural and acquired: a lively wit, a sound judgement, with solid and extenfive learning: he was eminently Studious, yet remarkably facetious: attached to no party, nor addicted to any caufe but that of Truth and Religion, in the defence of whofe Doctrines he wrote many learned and ingenious Treatifes; while he was efteemed by all worthy of the greateft Preferments, he lived content with the praife of deferving without enjoying any but the small Rectory of Poxwell, in this County, which he held two years, and in the Pofsefsion of which he died.”
Shaftesbury, six miles onward from Marnhull, is soon seen, standing as it does majestically upon a commanding hill. It looks perhaps best from the point where the old farmstead of Blynfieldstands, at the foot of the long and winding ascent, whence you see the hillside common stretching up to the very edge of the town. From distant points such as this, “Shaston,” as Mr. Hardy, the milestones, and old chroniclers agree to call it, wears the look of another Jerusalem the Golden, and any who, thus looking upon this town of old romance, should chance to come no nearer, might well carry away an impression of a fairy city whose architecture was equal to both its half-legendary history and its natural surroundings. If such a traveller there be, let him rest assured that nothing in Shaftesbury, saving only the view over limitless miles of Vale, stretching away into the distance, is worth the climbing up to it, and that to make its near and intimate acquaintance is only to dispel that distant dream of an unearthly beauty which afar off seems to belong to it.
Shaftesbury’s streets are in fact more than ordinarily commonplace, and its houses grossly tasteless. It is as though, despairing of ever bringing Shaftesbury back to a shadow of the magnificence of history and architecture it once enjoyed, the builders of the modern town built houses as plastiferously ugly as they could. “Shaston” is described with a wonderful sympathy and lightness of touch by Mr. Hardy:—“The ancient British Palladour was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now ruthlessly swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy,which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and squires. The bones of King Edward ‘the Martyr,’ carefully removed thither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores. To this fair creation of the great Middle Ages the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death-knell. With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin; the martyr’s bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.”
“The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain; but, strange to say, these qualities, which were noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually unvisited to-day. It has a unique position on the summit of an almost perpendicular scarp, rising on the north, south and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture—South, Mid, and Nether Wessex—being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller’s eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible by a railway, it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on thatside. Such is, and such was, the now-forgotten Shaston or Palladour.”
That finely inaccurate chronicler, or rather romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who never lacked “historical” details while his imagination remained in good preservation, has some picturesque “facts” to narrate of Shaftesbury. It was founded, says he, by Hudibras, grandfather of King Lear, a trifle of 950 years before the Christian era. Between that shamelessly absurd origin and the earliest known mention of the place, inA.D.880, when Alfred the Great founded a nunnery here, there is thus a gulf—a very yawning gulf, too—of one thousand, eight hundred and thirty years.
“Caer Palladour,” as it had been in early British times, became “Edwardstow” when, in the year 979, the body of the young king “martyred” at Corfe Castle was translated from its resting-place at Wareham, but although his shrine was the scene of many miracles and greatly resorted to, we do not find that change of name so greatly favoured as was the like change made in East Anglia, when, early in the eleventh century, the town that had been Beodric’s Weorth became, with the miracle-mongering of St. Edmund’s shrine, that town of St. Edmundsbury which we know as Bury St. Edmunds. No: as the expressive modern slang would phrase it, the name of “Edwardstow” never really “caught on,” and Caer Palladour, which had in the beginning of Saxon rule become “Shaftesbyrig,” has so remained.
Nowadays the only vestiges of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury are the fragments of encaustic tiles and carved stones, rarely and with difficulty brought to light by antiquarian societies, painfully diggingon the spot once occupied by it; and the great abbey estates, the booty at the Dissolution seized by, or granted to, Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, now belong to the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor crest of a wheatsheaf is prominent in the town.
There are three parish churches at Shaftesbury; St. James’s, as you climb upwards towards the town, and Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s in the town itself. It is St. Peter’s which is seen in the illustration of Gold Hill, by whose incredibly steep ascent the pilgrim takes his way up from the deep recesses of the Vale. This is the most difficult approach, paved with granite setts divided off into broad steps, so that in wet weather the hillside shall not slip away into those depths; and with the craggy sides shored up by ancient stone buttresses of prodigious bulk. The building that closes in the view next the church tower, leaving but a narrow entrance alley into the town, is the Town Hall and Market House.
There are, of course, wider and less steep entrances to Shaftesbury, but this shows it on its most characteristic side.
Shaftesbury is chiefly associated in the pages of the Wessex novels withJude the Obscure, for here it was that the long-suffering and inoffensive Phillotson—who (why?) always reminds me of Wordsworth—obtained the school, which he and the distracting Sue were to jointly keep. Their house, “Old Grove’s Place,” is easily recognisable. You come to it past Bimport, near the fork of the roads that run severally to Motcombe and to East Stower, on the edge of the plateau. It is an old house with projecting porch and mullioned windowsthrough which it would be quite easy, as in the story, to see the movements of any one inside; and the upper room over the entrance is not too high above the pavement for any one who, like Sue, leaped from the window, to alight without injury.Those people are probably few who feel an oppressiveness in old houses such as that which worried the highly strung and neurotic Sue Bridehead: “We don’t live in the school, you know,” said she, “but in that ancient dwelling across the way called Old Grove’s Place. It is so antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully. Such houses are very well to visit, but not to live in. I feel crushed into the earth by the weight of so many previous lives there spent. In a new place like these schools, there is only your own life to support.”
Gold Hill, Shaftesbury
Close by are the schools. Looking upon them the more than usually sentimental pilgrim, with, it may be, some ancient tender passages of his own, stored up in the inviolate strong-box of his memory, to be unlocked and drawn forth at odd times, may think he identifies that window whence Sue, safely out of reach, spoke with Jude, standing down on the footpath, and said, “Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!”
WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH
Itis by the direct road to Cranborne, and past the Gate Inn at Clapgate, that one reaches Horton, where, at the intersection of the two broad main roads from Wimborne to Cranborne, and from Shaftesbury to Ringwood, stands Horton Inn, a fine, substantial old house, once depending upon a great coaching and posting traffic, and even now that only an occasional cyclist stays the night, dispensing good, old-fashioned, solid comforts in its cosy and comfortable rooms. When Horton Inn was built, let us say somewhere about the time of Queen Anne (who, poor soul! is dead), those who designed it, disregarding any temptations to be picturesque, devoted their energies to good, honest workmanship, with the result that nowadays one sees a building certainly lacking in imagination, with windows equidistant and each the counterpart of its fellow, but disclosing in every quoin and keystone, and in each well and truly laid course of brickwork, the justness and thoroughness of its design and execution. Within doors it is the same: unobtrusive but excellent workmanship characterises panelling and window-sashes, doors and handrails,with the result that in its old age Horton Inn has an air of distinction and dignity strongly marked to those who take an interest in technical details, and attracting the notice of even the least observant, who from its superior air generally conceive it to be an old mansion converted to its present use. It is the subject of an allusion in the tale ofBarbara of the House of Grebe: the “Lornton Inn” whence Barbara eloped with the handsome Willowes, and where she was to meet her disfigured husband, posting along the road from Southampton, on his return from foreign parts.
The village of Horton, down the road, at some little distance from the inn, has an oddly German-looking tower to its church, containing the monument of “Squire Hastings” of Woodlands, who died, aged 99 years, in 1650.
On an eerie hillside near by, in what of old was Horton Park, but sold by the Sturts in 1793 to the Earl of Shaftesbury, and disparked, stands the many-storied tower of what was once an observatory built by Humphry Sturt. It is now an empty shell, through whose ruined windows the wind sighs mournfully at night, and the moonlight gleams ghostlike. It is an ugly enough place in daylight, but should you particularly desire to know what the creepy, uncanny feeling of being haunted is like, why then, walk up on a windy night to “The Folly,” as the villagers call it, and stand in it, listening to the wind howling, grumbling or whispering in and out of the long, shaft-like building, and nocturnal birds fluttering and squeaking on the upper ledges. It is not a little gruesome.
This is one of the originals whence Mr. Hardydrew his idea of the tower inTwo on a Tower, and is certainly the most impressive of them. Very many years have passed since the old tower was used, and since the park in which it stands was converted into a farm.
The Observatory, Horton
The Woodlands estate, on the broad acres belonging to the Earl of Shaftesbury, is a sandy, heathy district of furze and pine-trees, with a conspicuous ridge in the midst, shaped in a semicircle and crested with those sombre trees. Here is Shag Heath and the cultivated oasis called “The Island” where on July 8th, 1685, the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth was captured, hiding amid the bracken and undergrowth, beneath an ash-tree. He might possibly have succeeded in stealing away to the coast and so escaping, despite the thoroughness of the search made by the Sussex Militia, spurred to it by the reward of £5,000, offered for the capture of the fugitive, had it not been for the information given by an old woman who lived in a cottagenear at hand. She had seen him, disguised as a shepherd, threading his way cautiously through the heath, and he was accordingly discovered near the spot she had indicated by a militiaman named Parkin. The Duke, half-starved and unkempt from his hunted wanderings since the fatal Sedgemoor fight of three days earlier, was found in possession of his badge of the George, a pocket-book and several guineas. In his pockets were a number of peas, the remains of a quantity he had plucked, to stave off his hunger.
Horton Inn: the “Lornton Inn” of “Barbara of the House of Grebe”
Monmouth Ash
A total of £5,500 was divided among Lord Lumley, the officers, militiamen, and others concerned in the capture. Among these was Amy Farant,whose information had directly led to it, and she received a sum of fifty pounds.
Local tradition points out the spot on the hillside where this woman’s cottage formerly stood, overlooking the field called “Monmouth Close” and the horror always felt by the rustics at the taking of what they still call the “blood-money” is seen in the story told of her after-years. The price of blood brought a curse with it. She fell upon evil times, and at last lived and died in a state of rags and dirt, shunned by all. After her death, the cottage itself speedily earned a sinister reputation, and was at length either pulled down, or allowed to decay. The spot is still called locally Louse, or more genteelly Slough, Lane.
The “Monmouth Ash”—or “Aish,” in the country speech—still survives, with a difference. Those who, looking upon the present tree and thinking, despite its decrepit and propped-up condition, that it cannot be over two hundred years old—and therefore that this cannot be the precise spot—may, with the reservation already made, be reassured of its absolute genuineness. The original trunk grew decayed in the long ago, and was blown down, but the present tree is a growth from the “stool,” or root, of that under which the unhappy Protestant Champion was discovered.
OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW
Beyondthe rainbow is Fairyland, but no one has ever penetrated to that country, save in dreams, to which nothing is impossible. There is also a Rainbow-land in Dorsetshire, certainly not impossible of achievement, but still a district of which no one knows anything, saving only those who live in it, and those sturdy fellows, the carriers, the Marco Polos and Livingstones of this age and country, who every week or so travel from it to the nearest market-town, and back again. The carriers are men of strange speech and dress. Although sturdy, they move slowly both in body and mind; and their tilt-carts are as slow as themselves, and as dusty and travel-worn as the caravans of any African expedition. The Rainbow country of Dorset is, in fact, a country innocent of railways. It is comprised within a rough circle made by tracing a course from Bere Regis to Piddletrenthide, Cerne Abbas, Minterne Magna, Holnest, Sherborne, Milborne Port, Stalbridge, Sturminster Newton, and Blandford, and is not only in parts extremely hilly, but includes Bulbarrow, one of the highest hills in Dorsetshire, 927 feet above sea-level, and Nettlecombe Tout; among a fine diversified arrayof lesser eminences. There is thus some considerable difficulty in travelling out of it, and a very widespread disinclination to penetrate into what may, not without considerable warranty, be termed its “wilds.”
Bingham’s Melcombe
Wise men, who study maps, and from the tracks of watercourses deduce easier, or at any rate, rather less arduous, routes, may find a means of winning to this Rainbow country by turning off the Piddletown and Bere Regis road at Burlestone, and thence making along the slight valley of the Chesil Bourne or Divelish stream. The small village of Dewlish on the map points to the amazing colonial energyof the Roman, for here, in a district that even we moderns are accustomed to think remote, was found a fine Roman pavement, many years ago. In another two miles and a half the valley closes in, and the neighbourhood of those big brothers, Bulbarrow and Nettlecombe Tout, is evident from their smaller kindred, on either hand.
Here, under the shelter of the everlasting hills, and in a “lew” warm hollow surrounded by benignant trees that lovingly shut it in, is Bingham’s Melcombe. A little pebbly brook, the Chesil Bourne, prattles down the combe, sheep-bells sound from the hillsides, cattle low in the meadows, and rooks scold and gibber, or lazily caw, in over-arching elms; otherwise, all is still, for much more than even the rustic scenes of Mr. Hardy’s especially farming story, Bingham’s Melcombe is “far from the madding crowd,” and there is nothing of it but a farmstead, the tiny church, and the little gem of an ancient manor-house. For all that Bingham’s Melcombe is so insignificant, it has sent out at least one distinguished man. Fluellen boasted that there were “good men porn at Monmouth,” and here was born that Sir Richard Bingham who earns the praise of Fuller, as being “a brave soldier andfortis et felixin all his undertakings.” He lies, as a brave soldier should, but all brave soldiers cannot, in Westminster Abbey. The Binghams of Bingham’s Melcombe came from a younger son of the Binghams of Sutton Bingham in Somersetshire, and early allied themselves with prominent families. The ducally crowned lion rampant of the Turbervilles quartered on their ancestral shield owes its place there to the marriageof Robert Bingham, about the reign of Henry III., or Edward I., with the daughter and heiress of Robert Turberville.
These long-descended Binghams maintained their hold upon this lovely old home of theirs from the middle of the thirteenth century until recently. Now it has passed into other hands. A member of the family, Canon Bingham, was the original of the “Parson Tringham,” the learned antiquary, who, in the opening pages ofTess of the D’Urbervilles, so indiscreetly informs old John Durbeyfield, the haggler, of his distinguished ancestry.
The manor-house of Bingham’s Melcombe, within its courtyard, is a perfect example of a sixteenth-century country residence. The courtyard, entered by a gatehouse, discloses stone-gabled buildings at the sides, with the highly carved and decorated projecting gable of the hall in front; displaying with a wealth of mantling the Bingham coat of arms, the whole overgrown with trailing roses.
A wild, chalky country, very knobbly and with constant hills and dales, leads away to westward, past Melcombe Horsey, to the hamlet and starved hillside farms of Plush, where flints abound, water is scarce, and farmers are obliged to depend largely upon the “dew-ponds” made on the arid downs. Here is Dole’s Ash farm, the original of “Flintcomb Ash,” the “starve-acre place” where Tess toiled among the other weariful hands in the great swede-fields, “a hundred odd acres in one patch,” with not a tree in sight: Rainbow-land is not all fertile and roseate. The farm, as Mr. Hardy describes it, is situated “above stonylanchets—the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes,” and is at the other extreme from the fertility and sheltered beauty of the Valley of the Frome, the “Vale of Great Dairies.”
Very different from the forbidding westerly range from Bingham’s Melcombe is the country immediately to the east. There the village of Milton Abbas lies enfolded between the richly wooded hills, where the little Mill Bourne rises, at the foot of an alarming but wonderfully picturesque descent; and the woodland shade comes to the back door of every cottage.
Milton Abbas is a remarkable place, and owes its long lines of regularly spaced cottages, all of the same design, to the autocratic whim of Joseph Damer, Baron Milton and first Earl of Dorchester, who (then a commoner) purchased the large and beautiful estate in 1752, and, demolishing the old village, which rose humbly on the outskirts of the magnificent abbey, rebuilt it, a mile away, in 1786. Milton Abbas is, indeed, the precursor of many recent “model” villages, and typical of the highhanded ways of the eighteenth-century landed gentry, who could not endure the sight of a cottage from the windows of their mansions; and so forthwith, in the manner of Eastern potentates, whisked whole villages and populations away from between the wind and their gentility. Each cottage is built four-square, with thatched roof and equidistant doors and windows, all in the Doll’s House or Noah’s Ark order of architecture, and there is scarce a pin to choose between any of them. Half-way downthe street is the almshouse, and opposite is the church, and from their presence it will be seen that Lord Dorchester’s village-transplanting was complete and highly methodical. Now that time has weathered his model village, and the chestnut trees planted between the cottages have grown up, Milton Abbas is a not unpleasing curiosity.
Milton Abbas
But Milton Park, beyond the village, contains the greatest surprise, in the almost perfect condition of the surviving abbey church, rising in all the stately bulk and beautiful elaboration of a cathedral; beside the great mansion built for Lord Dorchester in 1771 by Sir William Chambers, familiar to Londoners as the architect of Somerset House.
Milton Abbas, an early “Model” Village
That explorer of this Wessex unknown country, this Land Beyond the Rainbow, who, setting forth uninstructed in what he shall find, comes all unwittingly upon this generally unheard-of abbey, is greatly to be envied, for it is to him as much of a surprise as though its existence had never beenbreathed beyond the rim of the hills down in whose hollows it lies hid; and to him falls the exquisite pleasure of what is nothing less than a discovery. Coming into the park, all unsuspectingly, the abbey church is disclosed against a wooded background of hills, strikingly like the first glimpse of Wells Cathedral, underneath the Mendips.
Milton Abbey, the “Middleton Abbey” ofThe Woodlanders, was founded so early asA.D.933, by Athelstan, and in thirty years from that date became a Benedictine monastery. Nothing, however, of that early time has survived, and the great building we now see belongs to the period between 1322 and 1492, when it was gradually rebuilt, after having been struck by lightning and wholly destroyed in 1309. But the noble building rising so beautifully from the gravel drives and trim lawns of this park is but a completed portion of an intended design. It consists of choir, tower, and north and south transepts, and extends a total length of 132 feet. Had not the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 put an end to this lovely retreat of the Benedictine fraternity, a nave would have been added. To Sir John Tregonwell, King’s Proctor in the divorce of Henry VIII. and Katherine of Aragon, fell what may reasonably be called this fine piece of “spoil”; for the price of one thousand pounds at which he bought the monkish estates of Milton Abbas can scarce be regarded as adequate purchase money. Coming at last into the hands of Joseph Damer, the domestic offices of the monastery, which had until then survived in almost perfect condition, were with one exception utterly destroyed, and the existing mansion built in abastard “Gothic” style, as understood by Chambers. The sole exception is the grand Abbot’s Hall, enshrined within that eighteenth-century building, and entered from the farther side of the great quadrangle. Now in use as a drawing-room, there is probably no more stately room of that description in existence. It has the combined interest and beauty of size, loftiness and exquisite workmanship in stone and carved wood, with antiquity.
Abbot Milton’s Rebus, Milton AbbeyThe abbey church stands immediately to the south of the mansion, separated from it only by lawns and a drive, and is used as a chapel by the present owner of the estate, a nephew of the late Baron Hambro, who restored it at great cost under the professional advice of that arch-restorer, Sir Gilbert Scott. The solitude, the size and beauty of the interior, are very impressive. Here is a place of worship like a cathedral, used for the prayers of a private household, and if you can by any means manage to forget the grotesquedisproportion of ancient size and magnificence to modern use, you will feel very reverent indeed.
Milton Abbey
There is a monument here to that fortunate and successful time-server, Sir John Tregonwell, who so neatly trimmed the sails of his public conduct in those times of quick-change, between the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, that, although a Roman Catholic, he managed to enrich himself at the expense of the old religion’s misfortunes, and to die at peace with all men, although in the possession of property belonging to others. There is also a most exquisitely sculptured marble monument by Carlini to Lady Milton, who died in 1775. It represents her in the costume of that period, with her husband bending anxiously over her. A quaint little piece of Gothic fancy will be seen on one of the walls, in the shape of the sculptured rebus of one Abbot William Middleton, with the Arabic date, 1514, and the device of a mill on a tun, or barrel. Thus did the strenuous minds of the Middle Ages unbend to childish fancies and puns in stone.
Turnworth House
A sign of the times may be noted, in the restoration and re-dedication of the long-desecrated Chapel of St. Catherine, on the hilltop to the east of the abbey. When the monastery was dissolved, the chapel of course fell out of use, and so remained until recently. It had in turn been used as a pigeon-house, a labourer’s cottage, a carpenter’s shop, and a lumber-room, and was falling into complete decay when Mr. Everard Hambro in 1903decided to restore it. The varied Saxon, Norman, and Perpendicular architecture was accordingly repaired, and the building reconsecrated on St. Catherine’s night of the same year.
Through Winterborne Houghton, and Winterborne Stickland, two of the eleven Dorsetshire Winterbornes, named from a chalk stream that flows into the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, we come to anotherWoodlanderslandmark, Turnworth House, the “Great Hintock House,” where Mrs. Charmond, fascinator of the surgeon Fitzpiers, lived. It is situated just as in the tale, in a deep and lonely dell:
“To describe it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the manor-house; it stood in a hole. But the hole was full of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily have been thrown over or into the birds’-nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the grey lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights. . . . The front of the house was an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-coloured freestone from local quarries. . . . Above the house was a dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were above the level of the chimneys.”
“To describe it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the manor-house; it stood in a hole. But the hole was full of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily have been thrown over or into the birds’-nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the grey lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights. . . . The front of the house was an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-coloured freestone from local quarries. . . . Above the house was a dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were above the level of the chimneys.”
From Turnworth the way out of Rainbow-land by way of Durweston, Stourpaine, and Blandford is easy: afacilis descensus, as well in spirit as in the matter of gradients, for thus you come out of the untravelled and the unknown into the well-worn tracks and intimate life of every day.
Abbot’s Ann,23
“Abbot’s Cernel,” Cerne Abbas,31–38,116,170,199–203,206,302
Abbotsbury,84,235,236
“Aldbrickham,” Reading,2
Aldershot, “Quartershot,”2
“Alfredston,” Wantage,2
Andover,23
“Anglebury,” Wareham,10,38,86,111,113–122,138,192
Anna,Lady Baxby,189
Anton, River,23,24
Athelhampton,54