THE “FLYING BULL” INN.
The road now rises gradually to a considerable height, being carried along the ridge of Rake Down, an elevated site now covered with large and pretentious country residences, but less than fifty years ago a wide tract of uncultivated land that grew nothing but gorse and ling, grass and heather, and bore no houses. The view hence is peculiarly beautiful over the wooded Sussex Weald, towards Midhurst, whose name, even now, describes its situation amid woods. The hollow below is Harting Coombe, and the neighbouring villages of Harting and Rogate recall the time when wild deer roamed the oak woods and the jealously-guarded Chases of Waltham and Woolmer.
THE “FLYING BULL” SIGN.
THE ‘JOLLY DROVERS’
Just beyond the long line of modern houses stands another roadside inn, the “Jolly Drovers,” planted ’mid capacious barns and roomy outhouses, at the angle of another country lane, leading to Rogate. The “Jolly Drovers” looks an old house, but it was built so recently as the ’20’s, by a frugal drover named Knowles, who saw a profitable investment for his savings in building a “public” at what was then a lonely spot called Shrubb’s Corner.
THE “JOLLY DROVERS.”
And now, all the remaining five miles into Petersfield, the road goes along a fine, healthy, breezy country, bordered for a long distance by park-like iron fences and carefully-planted sapling firs, pines, and larches. At a point three and a half miles distant from Petersfield comes the hamlet of Sheet, where the road goes down abruptly between low, sandy cliffs, and brings us into the valley of the Rother, here a tiny stream that trickles insignificantly under a bridge, and rises, some three miles away, behind Petersfield, amid the hills and hangers of Steep, on the grounds of Rothercombe Farm, and then flows on through Sussex. The Sussex and Hampshire borders have, indeed, followed the road nearly all the way from Milland, but now we plunge directly into Hants. The character of the country changes, too, almost as soon as we are over the line; the chalk begins to replace the sand and gravel hitherto met,and the trees are fewer. Only by Buriton and at Up Park, to the south, is there much woodland; but at the latter place the deep shady copses and the ferny dells where the red deer still browse are delightful. Up Park should hold a place in the memory of loyal sportsmen, for it was here, long before Goodwood was used as a running-ground, that many celebrated races were held; and here the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV., won his first race, in 1784, when his “Merry Traveller” beat Sir John Lade’s “Medly Cut.” And so into Petersfield.
PETERSFIELD
The old market town of Petersfield is one of those quiet places which, to the casual stranger, seem to sleep for six days of the week, and for one day of every seven wake up to quite a sprightly and business-like mood. But Petersfield is even quieter than that. Its market is but fortnightly, and for thirteen days out of every fourteen the town dozes tranquilly. The imagination pictures the inhabitants of this old municipal and parliamentary borough rubbing their eyes and yawning every alternate Wednesday, when the corn and cattle market is held; and when the last drover has gone, at the close of day, sinking again into slumber with a sigh of relief. Parliamentary, alas! the borough is no longer, since the latest Reform and Redistribution of Seats Act has snatched away the one member that remained of the two who represented these free and enlightened burgesses before the Era of Reform broke out sodestructively in 1832, and has now left the representation of Petersfield merged into that of a county division. The town lives in these days solely upon agriculture, and the needs of neighbouring fox-hunters. Once upon a time it possessed a number of woollen manufactories, but industries of this kind have long since died out, or have been transferred to more likely seats of commerce; and cattle, sheep, pigs, corn, and similar products now most do exercise the minds and muscles of local folk. It is a substantial, well-built town, looking, for all its age, like some late seventeenth-century growth, and the stranger standing in the market-place finds it difficult, if not impossible, to realize an antiquity that goes back certainly as far as the twelfth century, and dimly to an age when primitive savages, naked and dyed a brilliant blue, lived here in some clearing of the dense forest that spread over the face of the country, and hunted with ill success, and the inadequate aid of flint weapons, the wild boars and other fearsome fauna of that remote time.
EARLY DAYS
We know, chiefly from geological evidence, that when the Romans came and sailed up what is now Portsmouth Harbour, and cast anchor off the shore at Porchester, they found the southern face of Portsdown Hill as bare of trees as we see it to-day. Mounting to the crest of that imposing range, the legionaries looked down upon a forest that stretched, with few breaks, black and sullen, as far as eye could reach. This interior contained a settlement of the Belgæ at what is now Winchester, and, for the rest, unknown men and beasts; and was only to be penetrated by slow and laborious felling of trees, andclearing of tangled brushwood; while, every now and again, these determined pioneers would be startled by an irruption of ferocious Belgæ (those primitive Frenchmen), who with flint-tipped arrows sent many an invader to his long account. Those stubborn Romans, however, cleared a way, and, indeed, several ways. For, from this Portus Magnus, modern Porchester,—where their original fortress still stands, added to by mediæval builders,—Roman roads were made to Venta Belgarum (Winchester), Regnum (Chichester), and Clausentum, now known as Bitterne. On either side of these roadways to and from their armed camps still stretched the woodlands, and they remained, in greater part, when the Roman power declined and the legions were withdrawn, to give room, in due time, to the invading Saxons. All these hundreds of years the dark recesses of the forest remained practically unknown; but at some safe and convenient distance from the towns of Venta or Regnum—handy for support, and yet sufficiently rural—Roman generals, prefects, and rich merchants erected elaborate villas, whose ruins are even now occasionally discovered by the ploughman as he laboriously turns over the grudging soil of Hants. Hypocausts and elaborate mosaic pavements testify to the comfort and luxury with which they surrounded themselves in those truly spacious days, while abundant traces of their roads remain. It cannot have been until late Saxon times that the site of Petersfield became at all settled, and we first hear of it as a town when William, Earl of Gloucester, conferred a charter upon it, in the dawn of the twelfth century.
That ancient document is still in existence, as also is its confirmation by the Countess Hawyse, the Earl’s widow in after years; and both these important parchments, together with any number of later documents, were produced in the locally-celebrated Petersfield petition in 1820 against the pretensions of the lord of the manor, who claimed rights over the municipal elections which the worthy burgesses and freeholders of the town successfully resisted.
The result of that contention is evident to-day only in a supremely dull book in which all the conflicting evidence is printed in page after page of portentous, though hazy, rhetoric. It is all very uninteresting, and the quantity of evidence so obscures the issues of the fight that he who, like the present historian, comes to a consideration of these things from the point of view of interesting the “general reader,” may be very well excused for coming away from a survey of the fray with as little knowledge of it as old Kaspar, in the poem. You cannot know “all about the war and what they fought each other for” without delving very deep indeed into the mustiest by-ways of municipal history.
The Jolliffe, the lord of the manor whose claims were thus resisted by the good folk of Petersfield, was, singularly enough, a descendant of that lover of liberty and paragon of latinity, William Jolliffe, Esq., M.P. for the borough, and a knight in 1734, who presented the leaden equestrian statue of William III., that now stands in the market square, in admiration of that “Vindicator of Liberty.”
HALF A HERO
This statue, bowed and bent and painted white, was originally set up in that part of the town known as“the New Way.” In those days it was richly gilt, and doubtless excited the awe and admiration of the travellers who passed through Petersfield; but to-day, the attitude of the King is undignified, and the airy garb of old Rome in which he is represented, not only adds nothing to our reverence, but outrages our sense of the fitness of things under these cloudy skies.
The circumstances under which this statue was erected are recounted (in a manner dear to the heart of Dr. Johnson) in a Latin inscription of equal length and magniloquence, carved upon its stone pedestal. It veils with an impenetrable obscurity the identity of this classic horseman from nine of every ten people who behold him, and it runs thus:—
It was in 1815 that this leaden presentment of Dutch William was removed to its present site, over against the “Castle” Inn, where a scion of the House he supplanted—Charles II.—had, years before, slept a night on his way to France through Portsmouth.
Gibbon’s father was the fellow-member with Sir William Jolliffe in the Parliamentary representation of Petersfield from 1734 to 1741, when he finally resigned all ambition to take part in the councils of the nation. The historian, although for many years he had a seat in the House of Commons, never represented Petersfield, but only the remote Cornish borough of Liskeard. In this connection, the return for the three candidates who offered themselves for election in 1774 may be of interest. Between them they polled only a hundred and twenty-five votes, in the following order:—
And this is the number of the free and independent electors who at that time cared to exercise the glorious privilege of the franchise!
As showing the relative importance of towns and villages in olden times, it may be noted that Petersfield was an appanage of the manor of Buriton, and that the ecclesiastical parish was a part of the rectory of the same village until 1886. Yet the ancient parish church of St. Peter the Apostle at Petersfield is a fine building, parts of which go back to Norman times. Indeed, the chancel arch and some elaborate arcading in the church are very fine examples of that period, and tend to show the importance with which the early Norman builders invested this spot. But even to-day the living of the quiet village of Buriton is very much more valuable than that of the borough town of Petersfield.
PETERSFIELD MARKET-PLACE.
PETERSFIELD HOSTELRIES
So much for the history of Petersfield. Busy days it had in coaching times, and its inns were of the best, as befitted a place where the coaches stopped to change teams. They are still here: the chiefest of them, the “Castle,” is now a school, and a very fine building it is, whether as school or hostelry. It stands boldly fronting the market-place, and is to be seen in the accompanying illustration, behind the statue of William III. It is the place where Charles II. stayed, on his way to Portsmouth, and is referred to by Pepys:—
“May 1st.Up early and bated at Petersfield in the room which the King lay in lately at his being there. Here very merry and played with our wives at bowles. Then we set forth again, and so to Portsmouth, seeming to me to be a very pleasant, strong place.”
The other inns where the jaded traveller of fifty years ago was certain of being well and adequately received, were the “Dolphin,” the “White Hart,” and the “Red Lion,” all of them flourishing still. Of these the “Dolphin” is the largest, standing at the corner of Dragon Street, where the high-road passes by. The courtyards and coach-houses of the “Dolphin” are a sight to see and to wonder at. You gaze at them, and presently the old times seem to come crowding back. The eight-and-twenty coaches(more or less, as you choose your period) that fared either way upon the Portsmouth Road seem more real to you who look upon these capacious stables; and the passengers, the coachmen and guards, the ostlers, and the horsey hangers-on of such places come upon the imagination with a great deal more of reality than is gained from the reading of books, howsoever eloquent.
Cobbett on one of his rides stayed at Petersfield, and put up at this old house. “We got,” says he, “good stabling at the ‘Dolphin’ for our horses. The waiters and people at innslook so hard at usto see us so liberal as to horse-feed, fire, candle, beds, and room, while we are so very very sparing in the article of drink! They seem to pity our taste!”
The memory of old times dies hard, and they still tell you here of the wonderful goat that was used to take his pleasure in following the up-coaches from here to Godalming, returning day by day to sleep in the straw of the “Dolphin” stables. For years this singular animal escorted the coaches, until one day, after running some distance with the mail, he turned round three times, trotted off home, and during the rest of his life eschewed the delights of the road altogether. That was in 1825, and the tale has lost nothing in the telling these seventy years.
For the rest, the “Dolphin” is a singularly dull and unromantic-looking house, painted a leaden hue. Within, it is all long dark corridors and unexpected corners. Commercials frequent it; although inquiries have not yet discovered what commercial gentlemen sell at Petersfield. Sportsmen come here too, andtourists of the pedestrian variety. In the old days, of the period between the coaching era and the present time, the “Dolphin” was very much neglected; the flooring precipitous and mostly worn out, so that the unsophisticated guest who jumped incautiously from his bed in the morning would, very likely, thrust his foot through some unexpected hole, to the imminent danger of the ceiling of the room beneath; or else would find himself rushing, with the steep gradient of the floor, into obscure corners of his apartment. The mirrors, also, in those days, left much to be desired of the guest who shaved himself, for they were either cracked or wavy, or both; and the traveller who, greatly daring, reaped a stubbly chin with trouble and cold water before one of those uncertain looking-glasses, in which his features flickered dizzily, required both stout nerves and a steady hand.
“SHAVED WITH TROUBLE AND COLD WATER.”
ELBOW ROOM
The dullness of that time has gone, and the roads are tolerably travelled to-day. The “Dolphin” rejoices in level flooring and decent repair, but the town, although so neat and cleanly, and, withal, prosperous, is a town of few wayfarers. You stand in the chief street and look with some surprise at twin evidences of considerable commerce—a large and modern Bank building, and a larger and still more modern Post-office. At the farther end of this street is the market-place, a spacious square, in which the fortnightly market, already referred to, is held; and the high jinks of the July fair are performed. On market Wednesdays you can scarce move for drovers and farmers, for graziers, and for a peculiarly knowing-looking class of men who might be horse-dealers or jockeys, or ’bus-drivers, or even cabmen: all wear the unmistakable look that they acquire who have much acquaintance with the noble animal, the Friend of Man. A very specialist crowd, this; and what they are ignorant of in the way of swedes and turnips, oil-cake, corn, or top-dressing, is scarce worth the acquiring. The market-place is partly filled on theseoccasions with pens in which sheep are closely huddled together, while cattle occupy the remainder of the space. The lowing of the cattle in a resonant diapason, the barking of the drovers’ dogs, the querulous bleating of the sheep, and the hum of the people, amount altogether to an agriculturalcharivarias typical of a rural market-day as may be found in England.
BURITON
A short mile off the road, two miles below Petersfield, is the charmingly-situated village of Buriton. It is reached by a winding lane turning off the high-road, beside a finger-post and two ugly modern cottages. Hop-fields and maltings border the lane, which suddenly, at one of its turns, discloses the village, tucked away in the sheltered lower slopes of the rolling South Downs, clothed in places with short grass, and in others bald and showing the white chalk; while just above the village are woodlands of tall elm and branching oak, vociferous with rooks. These “hangers,” as hillside woods are locally termed, are a special feature of this part of Hampshire, and are not to be found in anything like this profusion in any other part of the county. They form the loveliest setting imaginable to an old-world village of this character, and it is difficult to say at what season of the year such a place as Buriton, backed with its woods, is most beautiful. Spring finds the forest trees bare and black, with waving branchesscraping, like wizard fingers, gnarled and crooked, the leaden skies of moist February and windy March; and with April comes the stirring of the sap that sets off every little twig with the fairy-like pale green buds of future leaves, until a distant view of the hanger seems clothed in a tender emerald mist. Spring passes and leaves the hillside trees clothed with a thick coat of summer foliage that forms the best of backgrounds to the red roofs of the village; and when leafy summer mellows into russet autumn the hanger is one mass of brilliant colour; gorgeous reds and yellows and tints of dull gold. When November fades away in mists and midnight frosts into Christmastide and the bleak days of January, when days draw out and “the cold begins to strengthen,” as the country folk say, then the hanger is etched black and solemn against the snow-powdered downs, and you can discern every high-perched homestead of the rooks, swinging in the topmost branches of the tallest trees, and looking twice their actual size by this adventitious juxtaposition of black and white.
And, indeed, Buriton is as cheerful in winter’s frosts as in summer’s heat. The village itself is commendably old-fashioned and typically English of the eighteenth century. True, a post and telegraph office stands in the village street, but that is the only anachronism: for the rest, it is a picture by Caldecott come to life. Caldecott saw in his mind’s eye a characteristically English village of the time of the Georges, and he crystallized his vision in many tinted drawings. Here, then, is such a village in very truth, with its ancient church fronting an open space inthe village street, where a broad horse-pond, fed by a trickling rill, reflects the ivied church tower in summer, and in winter-time bears the shouting, red-faced urchins who come sliding upon its surface as merrily as English boys have done from time immemorial. Fronting the other side of the pond is the old farm-house of Mapledurham, stuccoed, ’tis true, and plebeian enough to a casual observer, but bearing traces of antiquity in its gables, whence Tudor windows peep from out the handiwork of the modern plasterer, and thereby indict him for an artless fellow, with never a soul above contracts and cheap utility.
AN IDEAL MANOR HOUSE
Behind the church, in midst of rick-yards and their pleasing litter of fragrant straw, stands Buriton Manor House, a solid, staid, and comfortable four-square building of mellowed red brick, frankly unornamental, and therefore pleasing. Built in the days of Queen Anne, you can yet scarce imagine (being a Londoner, and used to the grime of the eighteenth-century houses of the capital), as you stand in front of it, these cleanly walls to be so old. Yet there are brilliant lichens upon the bricks that are not the growth of yesterday, and the cumbrous sashes of the tall plain windows are not of the fashion of to-day. Some windows, too, are blank and bricked up; reminiscences, these, of the days of the window-tax, days when the light of heaven was appraised by the Inland Revenue authorities, and to be bought at a price in coin of the realm. So here, in very truth, is the Manor House of Caldecott’s fancy, and of Washington Irving’s picture-like prose.
E Gibbon
GIBBON ACCORDING TO BOSWELL
And here lived, for a time, Edward Gibbon, the historian, whose birthplace we passed at Putney; and it is for this personal interest, for this hero-worshipping object, that I have turned aside from the high-road to visit Buriton. Gibbon, you will say, is a quaint figure for the hero-worshipper to admire outside his stately pages of Roman History, and I have no mind to deny your contention. He was, indeed, a humorous figure of a man, the more so, doubtless, because he was so supremely unconscious of the whimsical figure he cut before his contemporaries. The difference between the majestic swingand rounded periods of his literary style, and his personal appearance and his private habits of thought, is scarce less than ludicrous. Gibbon was, in fine, exceedingly human, and his person was almost grotesque. Do you, I wonder, conceive in that luminous optic, the “mind’s eye,” when thinking of the man who wrote the stately prose of the “Decline and Fall,” the figure of a little snub-nosed gentleman, with a square head, a prodigious development of chins, and a wagging paunch? Surely never. Yet this was the appearance of the man, and portraits and caricatures of him all agree in showing this great literary figure of last century’s close as a very whimsical-looking human figure indeed.
It cannot with certainty be said whence Gibbon derived his singular appearance. Not (one would say) from either his father or his mother, who were both, to judge from their portraits, very comely persons. But if neither his face nor his figure would have served to make Gibbon’s fortune, certainly his agreeable manners stood him in good stead; and although Boswell describes him, in ferociously unfriendly terms, as “an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,” of the race of “infidel wasps and venomous insects,” he seems to have been in good favour with polite society. But then Bozzy’s mind had room for only one hero.
He was not (curiously enough) at all eager in the early part of his career to be recognized for his literary abilities, for, when a young man, he was solicitous to be known as a good figure in polite society. Thus when, in 1762, we find the French Ambassador, theDuc de Nivernais, giving him introductions to the foremost French writers of the time, we hear him complaining that the Duke treated him “more as a man of letters than as a man of fashion.” He was, indeed,veryhuman! This quality (or defect?) is seen again in a letter, still extant, in which he says, years later, upon his determination not to stand again for Parliament:—“A seat in Parliament I can only value as it is connected with some official situation of emolument.” Does that not endear him to you at once, who live in these Pharisaical times, when men seek election to the House on the score of philanthropy, of patriotism, of service to mankind; on any ground, in fact, but the fundamental consideration of self-interest?
Gibbon lived and wrote in the days when the literary patron still existed, and although the historian was a man of some pretensions in his own county, and on his ancestral acres at Buriton, yet he found the powerful friendship of Holroyd, afterwards first Earl of Sheffield, most useful, not only in literature, but in his career as a Member of Parliament. The almost lifelong friendship between the two was manifested even in death, for Gibbon sleeps, not in the Abbey, nor among his fathers at Buriton, but in the Sheffield vault at Fletching, in Sussex.
AN AMATEUR SOLDIER
The mind of this singular man was, indeed, not apt to run in the direction of ancestor-worship, and old acres represented only so much money to him when, a year after the publication of his History, he sold the estate. Years before, in his father’s time, he held the captaincy of a battalion of Hampshire Militia (a sortof bachelor Sir Dilberry Diddle), and thus he says of himself in the “Memoirs,” in a manner unconsciously humorous:—“I for two and a half years endured a wandering life of military servitude.” Thus seriously did he look upon the perfunctory drilling of yeomen; the pleasant field-days between Portsmouth and Petersfield, and the Sunday church-parades, in which the militia, gorgeous in sky-blue coats with red facings; in white breeches with black gaiters; with astonishing hats and careful perukes finished off daintily with pigtails and black silk ribbons, bore a gallant part, exciting the admiration of the ladies, and the scornful animosity of those sober bachelors who belonged neither to the Militia, the Fencibles, nor to that doughty body of men, the Petersfield Cavalry; all good men and true, ready to shed their last drop of blood for their country, in the unlikely event of an invasion; but, meanwhile, none the less averse from a little parade of pomp and circumstance and the showing off of fine feathers. They were gaudy and most remarkable figures, these old militia-men, and the modern “Saturday afternoon soldier” is to them as a London sparrow is to a peacock for comparison. Neither is there any adequate compare between the work done by these old fellows and the modern amateur soldier. Gibbon and his contemporaries may have boasted of their “military servitude,” and the historian may have profoundly believed the statement, that hints more than it really expresses—“The captain of Hampshire grenadiers was not useless to the historian of the Roman Empire;” but their services were more to the eye than to practicalefficiency, and they would have resented, even to the laying down of their firelocks, the hard work which a battalion of Cockney rifle volunteers endures with cheerfulness.
But Gibbon grew tired of his military exploits; and presently, when the militia were disbanded, his father sent him travelling on the Continent. It was at Rome, amid the ruins of the Capitol, that, in 1764, he conceived the first idea of his great work, but it was not until 1788 that the final volume was issued, after years of incredible toil and research.
Whatever the popularity of Gibbon may be now, a hundred years after his death, certainly his “Decline and Fall” had an extraordinary run when it first appeared. The entire impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarce adequate to the demand, and it was said at the time that “the book was on every table and on almost every toilet.” From that day to this there have been well-nigh twenty editions, some of them consisting of as many as fourteen volumes, and, as a sign of Gibbon’s sometime popularity, it may be mentioned that the entries under his name in the British Museum catalogue number about a hundred and twenty.
Not many pilgrims make their way to Buriton for Gibbon’s sake, yet were you to turn aside from the high-road, you would find the place interesting beyond expectation. Lyingperduamong the hills, although so near the traffic of the outer world, it is, and has ever been, but rarely visited by the stranger, and has thus come to retain a distinct and individual character.
Push open the old wrought-iron gates of the churchyard and look around. The church itself is just a typical building, with some few special features. It has, of course, been restored, but the fury of the restorer has been wreaked with greater effect elsewhere, and he has come to Buriton in a manner comparatively mild and harmless. He has left even the fine Decorated window of the south chapel, and has not cast out all the memorials of the dead and used their shattered fragments for mending the village street—as he has been known to do elsewhere. You can, in fact, discover the names of some of Gibbon’s ancestors upon the walls, and not all the original encaustic tiles have been thrown away. Prodigious!
RESTORERS’ INIQUITIES
But others have (truth to tell) been less fortunate. Poor cadavers! laid to rest within the church, with storied ledger-stones above, decently recounting both virtues they had and had not, they have been ruthlessly removed, and as the stranger paces round the exterior of the church, he walks upon their memorials, laid end to end, to form a solid footpath for the good folks o’ Sundays. The frosts of winter crack them; the nailed boots of the rustics wear down the well-cut inscriptions that date from the seventeenth century to within a few generations of ourselves; and they will presently be worn quite away.
Here—stop and look—is the epitaph of one, a considerable fellow in his day, a barrister of the Middle Temple. Here is his coat-of-arms, and here his panegyric, writ, doubtless, by loving hands, and cut, most certainly, by an artist in his mortuarycraft. Ha! barrister, where are your fees, your brief-bag, your writs of escheat andfi fa? Would you could arise and with all your former eloquence denounce the paltry fellows who have filched your gravestone for the paving of a churchyard path, whereon the casual clodhopper thumps his ponderous way and the meditative tourist pauses to moralize, and with the ferrule of his walking-stick scrapes away the dirt that hides your identity.
Where this solemn paving was used to be, are spread now, over the nave of the church, coloured tiles that wear a neat and cleanly, but distressingly secular, look. You might be pacing the tiled hall of a suburban villa, rather than the House of God. “But one must live,” the restoring architect will tell you. The greater the cost of his commission the larger will be the amount from his five-percentage; so, out go the old stones and in come the patent tiles, while that gentleman pockets his money and sets off to fresh fields and pastures new.
BUTSER HILL
Another country lane affords the opportunity of regaining the Portsmouth Road from Buriton, without undergoing what always is the penance of retracing one’s steps. It brings the traveller out into the highway just below where the railway crosses, underneath a bridge; while away in front lies the long slope that climbs steadily and straighttowards the crest of Butser Hill, that tall knob of the South Downs rising to a height of nine hundred and twenty-seven feet above the Meonware country, and commanding views stretching to Salisbury in one direction, and in others extending to Andover, to the Isle of Wight, and to the rich lands of the Sussex Weald.
Butser Hill is the highest ground in Hampshire. Here the traveller enters upon the chalk country extending to the southern slopes of Portsdown Hill, and here the character of the scenery changes suddenly with the geological strata. Beech woods, oak and fir, give place to barren downs, clothed only with a short and scanty covering of grass, or with meagre patches of gorse. In favoured nooks, sheltered from the winds and brought by the painful unremitting labour of years to a condition not altogether prohibitive of cultivation, farmsteads stand, with their surrounding barns and cow-sheds, the whole comprised within walls constructed of flints picked plentifully from the land.
Here, on the incline leading across Butser Hill, may be noticed the beginning of these things. At one point, to the left hand, turns off what was once the old road, leading across the Hill, now a secluded track-way, bringing the explorer upon excavations in the chalk, and suddenly upon lime-kilns and lime-burners, working away in a solitude where every sound re-echoes from the enclosing chalk in gruff and hollow murmurs. The old road was in course of time abandoned for the new, which marches straight ahead and is carried in a deep andprecipitous cutting through the hill-top. The winds whistle shrilly through this chalky gorge, and the frosts and thaws loosen great pieces of chalk which come down into the road with tremendous leaps, and break into a thousand fragments at the bottom. It is a lonely place. A single cottage stands some distance away; the lime-burners are hidden in their resounding dell, and the only company the wayfarer has on ordinary days through the cutting are the two notice-boards that, with a fine disregard of punctuation, caution folks “against Chalk falling from the Sides by Order.” These, together with a board warning cyclists that “This Hill is Dangerous,” are not cheering to the spirits on a winter’s day.
It was on Butser Hill that a post-boy from the “Anchor,” at Liphook, was stopped by an unmounted highwayman, who took the horse he was riding and cantered off upon its back, in the direction of London. The post-boy returned, sorrowful, to Petersfield, where he procured another horse and rode back to Liphook.
On his way, riding up to the turnpike-gate at Rake, he received information of the robber’s passing through, and, upon reaching the “Anchor,” told the landlord of what had happened. Immediately “mine host” organized pursuit, and so quickly did the party take to the road that they overtook man and horse at Hindhead. When the highwayman observed his pursuers gaining upon him, he lost his nerve, and did the very worst thing possible under the circumstances. He dismounted and attempted to conceal himself amid the gorse of that wild spot.But he was soon discovered, captured, and hauled off in custody; afterwards receiving sentence of transportation at Winchester Assizes.
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
Passing through the precipitous cutting of Butser Hill, the road now comes upon the bare and windy expanse of Oxenbourne Downs, where, at a distance of fifty-eight miles from London, stands beside the road the “Coach and Horses” Inn, marked on the Ordnance maps “Bottom” Inn, and known in coaching days as “Gravel Hill” Inn, from the hill in the Downs rising at some distance to the rear, covered in patches with scrub and gorse. This is the roadside inn referred to by Dickens in “Nicholas Nickleby.”
We left Nicholas and Smike looking down into the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and now take up their journey over Rake Hill and the heights of Butser to this lonely roadside inn, which Dickens, using the latitude allowed to novelists, describes as twelve miles from Portsmouth. It is, in fact, thirteen miles, but its identity is unassailable, because there is no other house beside the road for miles on either hand.
“Onward they kept with steady purpose, and entered at length upon a wide and spacious tract of downs, with every variety of little hill and plain to change their verdant surface. Here, there shot up almost perpendicularly into the sky a height so steep, as to be hardly accessible to any but the sheep and goats that fed upon its sides, and there stood a huge mound of green, sloping and tapering off so delicately, and merging so gently into the level ground, that you could scarce define its limits.Hills swelling above each other, and undulations shapely and uncouth, smooth and rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown negligently side by side, bounded the view in each direction; while frequently, with unexpected noise, there uprose from the ground a flight of crows, who, cawing and wheeling round the nearest hills as if uncertain of their course, suddenly poised themselves upon the wing and skimmed down the long vista of some opening valley with the speed of very light itself.
“By degrees the prospect receded more and more on either hand, and as they had been shut out from rich and extensive scenery, so they emerged once again upon the open country. The knowledge that they were drawing near their place of destination gave them fresh courage to proceed; but the way had been difficult, and they had loitered on the road, and Smike was tired.
“Thus twilight had already closed in, when they turned off the path to the door of a roadside inn, yet twelve miles short of Portsmouth.
“‘Twelve miles,’ said Nicholas, leaning with both hands on his stick, and looking doubtfully at Smike.
“‘Twelve long miles,’ repeated the landlord.
“‘Is it a good road?’ inquired Nicholas.
“‘Very bad,’ said the landlord. As, of course, being a landlord, he would say.
“‘I want to get on,’ observed Nicholas, hesitating. ‘I scarcely know what to do.’
“‘Don’t let me influence you,’ rejoined the landlord. ‘Iwouldn’t go on if it was me.’”
And so here they stayed the night, much to their advantage, in a manner familiar to the readers of Dickens. Of their progress to Portsmouth the next day, with Mr. Vincent Crummles and his troupe, we will say nothing, for no other outstanding features of the road are described between this and Hilsea Lines.
THE “COACH AND HORSES” INN.
CHALTON DOWNS
Oxenbourne Downs are succeeded, on the map, by Chalton (originally “Chalkton”) Downs; but they are all one to the eye that ranges over their almost trackless hills and hollows.
It was in the neighbourhood of Chalton Downs that a terrific, if, in some of its details, a somewhat farcical, encounter took place between two highwaymen and a mail-coach in the winter of 1791. The coach had set out from the “Blue Posts” at Portsmouth in the afternoon, and the coachman drove up through Purbrook and on, past Horndean, with the greatest difficulty, in face of a blinding snowstorm. But when he had come, as daylight faded away, to these bleak and open downs, he found it utterly impossible to lash his tired horses a step farther. The situation probably reads a great deal more interesting than those who experienced it had any idea of. To be snowed up on an open down, miles away from anywhere, reads prettily enough in Christmas numbers, but, as an experience, it does not bear repetition. There were, on this occasion, four “insides” and two “outsides”; andthe lot of these last two, together with that of the coachman and guard, must have been simply Dantesque in its chilly horrors. The coachman was a humane creature, and determined, at any rate, not to expose his shivering horses to the storm; so he unharnessed them and was proposing to lead them into Petersfield, when two fellows, well mounted, and apparently furnished with a perfect armoury of pistols, rode up through the falling snow and the gathering gloom, and demanded the passengers’ money, or the usual alternative.
A HOMERIC FIGHT
But the guard was a fellow of courage and resolution, and so was one of the “insides,” a midshipman journeying to London for his Christmas. Quick as thought, the guard whipped out his blunderbuss from its case, and, at the same time, the midshipman bounded out of the coach, and laid one fellow head downwards in the snow by leaping on his horse and delivering a scientific blow on the side of his face. The other highwayman was, meanwhile, in single combat with the guard, who having, so to speak, entrenched himself behind the half-buried coach, opened fire in answer to a pistol-shot from the enemy.
The blunderbuss of last century was an appalling weapon, with a bore like that of a small cannon, and a bell muzzle which poured forth slugs and small shot in a stream that spread, fan-like, until at the distance of a yard or so it could be confidently relied upon, not only to hit the object aimed at, but anything else within a space of six feet on either side. The guard fired, and when the smoke and roar of the discharge, like that of a piece of ordnance, had finally died away,the second highwayman’s horse was discovered plunging in the snow, peppered with shot from shoulders to hind-quarters. The man himself was wounded in the leg, but was seen to be advancing through the snow upon the guard, with another pistol aimed at his head. He pulled the trigger, but the snow had damped his powder, and it snapped harmlessly. The guard was now in a somewhat similar position with the wasp who has delivered his sting, and is afterwards rendered comparatively harmless: for the loading of a blunderbuss was an operation that required time and care and a large quantity of powder and shot, and not a moment’s grace was he granted. Meanwhile, he was required to act.
The blunderbusses of that time were furnished with a hinged bayonet, rather under a foot in length, and doubled back upon the barrel. To release the bayonet and bring it into an offensive position, one had but to touch a catch, and it sprang out with terrific force and remained fixed.
The guard, touching the spring, remained upon the defensive, with bayonet fixed, while the highwayman, dismounted, came trampling down the snow and leaving behind him a trail of blood, trickling from the slug-wounds in his leg. Arrived at the back of the coach, from which peered the guard’s red nose and the gaping bore of his blunderbuss, he fired, and the guard would in all likelihood have been killed, had not the midshipman, by creating a diversion in the rear with the butt of the coachman’s heavy whip, not only destroyed his aim, but stretched him senseless in the snow. The enemy were now utterly defeated.The first highwayman, on recovering from the blow he had received, found his hands securely tied behind him, in a thoroughly efficient and workmanlike manner characteristic of a sailor, and the second was treated in the same way, with the help of the guard and the entirely unnecessary aid of the remaining passengers, who now crawled from under the seats, where they had taken refuge on the first alarm.