

This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler

      [Picture: Weymouth: St. Mary Street and statue of George III.]





                                   THE
                              HARDY COUNTRY


                          LITERARY LANDMARKS OF
                        THE      WESSEX     NOVELS

                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                            CHARLES G. HARPER
                 AUTHOR OF “THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY,” ETC.

    “Here shepherds pipe their rustic song,
    Their flocks and rural nymphs among.”

                           [Picture: Medallion]

                       _ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR_

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                          ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

                                   1904




_PREFACE_


_Dorsetshire_, _the centre of the_ “_Hardy Country_,” _the home of the
Wessex Novels_, _is a land literally flowing with milk and honey_: _a
land of great dairies_, _of flowers and bees_, _of rural industries_,
_where rustic ways and speech and habits of thought live long_, _and the
kindlier virtues are not forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in
towns_: _a land desirable for its own sweet self_, _where you may see the
beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey of which I
have spoken_, _and where that flow of milk is no figure of speech_.  _You
may indeed hear the swish of it in the milking pails at almost every turn
of every lane_.

_Thatch survives in every village_, _as nowhere else_, _and here quaint
towns maintain their quaintness at all odds_, _while elsewhere foolish
folk seek to be—as they phrase it_—“_up to date_.”  _It is good_, _you
think_, _who explore these parts_, _to be out of date and reckless of all
the tiresome worries of modernity_.

_Spring is good in Dorset_, _summer better_, _autumn—when the kindly
fruits of the earth are ingathered and __the smell of pomace is sweet in
the mellow air—best_.  _Winter_?  _Well_, _frankly_, _I don’t know_.

_To all these natural advantages has been added in our generation the
romantic interest of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels of rural life and
character_, _in which real places are introduced with a lavish hand_.
_The identity of those places is easily resolved_; _and_, _that feat
performed_, _there is that compelling force in his genius which
inevitably_, _sooner or later_, _magnetically draws those who have read_,
_to see for themselves what manner of places and what folk they must be
in real life_, _from whose characteristics such poignant tragedy_, _such
suave and admirable comedy_, _have been evolved_.  _I have many a time
explored Egdon_, _and observed the justness of the novelist’s description
of that sullen waste_: _have traversed Blackmoor Vale_, _where_ “_the
fields are never brown and the springs never dry_,” _but where the
roads—it is a cyclist’s criticism—are always shockingly bad_: _in fine_,
_have visited every literary landmark of the Wessex Novels_.  _If I have
not found the rustics so sprack-witted as they are in_ THE RETURN OF THE
NATIVE _and other stories—why_, _I never expected so to find them_, _for
I did not imagine the novelist to be a reporter_.  _But—this is in
testimony to the essential likeness to life of his women—I know_
“_Bathsheba_”; _only she is not a farmer_, _nor in_ “_Do’set_,” _and I
have met_ “_Viviette_” _and_ “_Fancy_.”  _They were called by other
names_, _’tis true_; _but they were_, _and are_, _those distracting
characters come to life_.

_A word in conclusion_.  _No attempt has here been made to solemnly_
“_expound_” _the novelist_.  _He_, _I take it_, _expounds himself_.  _Nor
has it been thought necessary to exclude places simply for the reason
that they by some chance do not find mention in the novels_.  _These
pages are_, _in short_, _just an attempt to record impressions received
of a peculiarly beautiful and stimulating literary country_, _and seek
merely to reflect some of the joy of the explorer and the enthusiasm of
an ardent admirer of the novelist_, _who here has given tongues to trees
and a voice to every wind_.

                                                        CHARLES G. HARPER.

PETERSHAM, SURREY,
      _July_ 1904.




CONTENTS

CHAP.                                                             PAGE
         I.  PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED;               1
             FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD
        II.  WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX               9
       III.  WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL                  16
        IV.  STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE                26
         V.  THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD             35
        VI.  THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER            47
       VII.  DORCHESTER                                             62
      VIII.  DORCHESTER (_continued_)                               74
        IX.  SWANAGE                                                84
         X.  SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE                                92
        XI.  CORFE CASTLE                                          105
       XII.  WAREHAM                                               114
      XIII.  WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS                        122
       XIV.  BERE REGIS                                            133
        XV.  THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY                        148
       XVI.  DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND             168
             YEOVIL
      XVII.  SHERBORNE                                             178
     XVIII.  SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH                 191
       XIX.  SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH                 205
             (_continued_)
        XX.  WEYMOUTH                                              214
       XXI.  THE ISLE OF PORTLAND                                  222
      XXII.  WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER                   232
     XXIII.  WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE                             246
      XXIV.  BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE                                  257
       XXV.  WIMBORNE MINSTER                                      270
      XXVI.  WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY                       277
     XXVII.  WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY (_continued_)         288
    XXVIII.  WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH           297
      XXIX.  OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW                    302
             INDEX                                                 313

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Weymouth: St. Mary Street and Statue of George III.     _Frontispiece_
Fawley Magna                                                         3
High Street, Oxford, _Facing_                                        4
High Street, Winchester                                             11
Winchester Cathedral, _Facing_                                      14
Weyhill Fair                                                        24
Salisbury Cathedral                                                 30
Stonehenge                                                          32
Pentridge                                                           36
Eastbury                                                            41
Blandford Forum                                                     45
The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew                            49
Weatherbury Castle                                                  50
The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle                                     51
Piddletown                                                          55
A Quaint Corner in Piddletown                                       57
Lower Walterstone Farm; Original of “Bathsheba’s                    59
Farm” in _Far from the Madding Crowd_
Ten Hatches, Dorchester                                             69
Dorchester Gaol                                                     75
The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester                                   77
Colyton House, Dorchester                                           79
The Old Church, Swanage                                             89
Encombe                                                             95
Corfe Castle                                                        99
Corfe Castle, _Facing_                                             106
Approach to Wareham: The Walls of Wareham                          116
Wareham                                                            119
The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon Abbey                                   123
Woolbridge House                                                   125
Woolbridge House: Entrance Front                                   127
Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath, _Facing_                                128
Chamberlain’s Bridge                                               130
Rye Hill, Bere Regis                                               131
Bere Regis                                                         135
Bere Regis                                                         137
Bere Regis: Interior of Church                                     141
“Toothache,” Bere Regis                                            143
“Headache,” Bere Regis                                             143
Bere Regis: The Turberville Window                                 145
Stinsford Church; the “Mellstock” of _Under the                    149
Greenwood Tree_
Birthplace of Thomas Hardy                                         158
Birthplace of Thomas Hardy                                         159
The Duck Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn in                 161
_The Return of the Native_
Tincleton                                                          163
An Egdon Farmstead                                                 165
A Farm on Egdon                                                    166
Cross-in-Hand, _Facing_                                            170
Batcombe                                                           171
Tomb of “Conjuring Minterne”                                       173
Melbury House, _Facing_                                            174
Sherborne Abbey Church, _Facing_                                   184
Long Burton                                                        192
Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum                                        194
Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore                             195
Cerne Abbas                                                        201
The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey, _Facing_                               202
The Cerne Giant                                                    203
Cerne Abbas                                                        206
Wolveton House                                                     207
Weymouth and Portland from the Ridgeway                            209
The Wishing Well, Upwey                                            211
Weymouth Harbour                                                   219
Sandsfoot Castle                                                   223
Bow and Arrow Castle                                               229
Portisham                                                          233
The Road out of Abbotsbury                                         235
Sheep-Shearing in Wessex, _Facing_                                 236
West Bay, Bridport                                                 239
High Street and Town Hall, Bridport                                243
Sutton Poyntz: the “Overcombe” of _The Trumpet                     247
Major_
Bincombe                                                           249
Poxwell Manor                                                      251
Owermoigne: the Smugglers’ Haunt in _The Distracted                253
Preacher_
Lulworth Cove                                                      254
Lulworth Cove                                                      255
Lytchett Heath: The Equestrian Effigy of George                    256
III.: Entrance to Charborough Park, _Facing_
Bournemouth: The Invalids’ Walk                                    258
Poole Quay                                                         267
Sturminster Marshall: Anthony Etricke’s Tomb,                      270
Wimborne Minster, _Facing_
The Wimborne Clock Jack                                            273
Wimborne Minster: the Minster and the Grammar                      274
School, _Facing_
The Tower, Charborough Park                                        281
Weather-vane at Shapwick: the “Shapwick Monster”                   283
The Maypole, Shillingstone                                         285
Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn                             286
Marnhull                                                           289
Gold Hill, Shaftesbury                                             295
The Observatory, Horton, _Facing_                                  298
Horton Inn: the “Lorton Inn” of _Barbara of the                    299
House of Grebe_
Monmouth Ash                                                       300
Bingham’s Melcombe                                                 303
Milton Abbas, _Facing_                                             306
Milton Abbas, an Early “Model” Village                             307
Abbot Milton’s Rebus, Milton Abbey                                 309
Milton Abbey                                                       310
Turnworth House                                                    311

CHAPTER I


      PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD

IN the literary partition of England, wherein the pilgrim may discover
tracts definitely and indissolubly dedicated to Dickens, to Tennyson, to
Ingoldsby, and many another, no province has been so thoroughly annexed
or so effectively occupied as that associated with the Wessex novels
written by Mr. Thomas Hardy.  He holds Wessex in fee-simple, to the
exclusion of all others; and so richly topographical are all those
romances, that long ere sketch-maps showing his literary occupancy of it
were prepared and published in the uniform edition of his works, there
were those to whom the identity of most of his scenes offered no manner
of doubt.  By the circumstances of birth and of lifelong residence, the
“Wessex” of the novels has come to denote chiefly his native county of
Dorset, and in especial the neighbourhood of Dorchester, the county town;
but Mr. Hardy was early an expansionist, and his outposts were long ago
thrown forward, to at last make his Wessex in the domain of letters
almost coterminous with that ancient kingdom of Saxon times, which
included all England south of the Thames and west of Sussex, with the
exception of Cornwall.  The very excellent sketch-map prepared for the
definitive edition of Mr. Hardy’s works very clearly shows the
comparative density of the literary settlements he has made.  Glancing at
it, you at once perceive that what he chooses to term “South
Wessex”—named in merely matter-of-fact gazetteers Dorsetshire—is thickly
studded with names of his own mintage, unknown to guidebook or ordnance
map, and presently observe that the surrounding divisions of Upper,
North, Mid, Outer, and Lower Wessex—as who should say Hampshire,
Berkshire, Wilts, Somerset, and Devon—are, to follow the simile already
adopted, barely colonised.

His nearest frontier-post towards London is Castle Royal, to be
identified with none other than Windsor; while near by are Gaymead
(Theale), Aldbrickham (Reading), and Kennetbridge (Newbury).  In the
midst of that same division of North Wessex, or Berkshire, are marked
Alfredston and Marygreen, respectively the little town of Wantage,
birthplace of Alfred the Great, and the small village of Fawley Magna,
placed on the draughty skyline of the bare and shivery Berkshire downs.

Then, near the eastern border of Upper Wessex is Quartershot, or
Aldershot, and farther within its confines Stoke-Barehills, by which name
Basingstoke and the unclothed uplands partly surrounding it are
indicated.  Its “gaunt, unattractive, ancient church” is accurately
imaged in a phrase, and it is just as true that the most familiar object
of the place is “its cemetery, standing among some picturesque mediæval
ruins beside the railway”; for indeed Basingstoke cemetery and the fine
ruins of the chapel once belonging to the religious who, piously by
intent, but rather blasphemously to shocked ears, styled themselves the
“Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost,” stand immediately without the railway
station.  At Stoke-Barehills, Jude and Sue, visiting the Agricultural
Show, were observed by Arabella, Jude’s sometime wife, with some
jealousy.

                         [Picture: Fawley Magna]

Finally, northernmost of all these transfigured outer landmarks, is
Christminster, the university town and city of Oxford, whose literary
name in these pages derives from the cathedral of Christ there.  This
remote corner of his kingdom is especially and solely devoted to the
grievous story of _Jude the Obscure_, a pitiful tale of frustrated
ambition, originally published serially in _Harper’s Magazine_, under the
much more captivating, if less descriptive, title of _Hearts Insurgent_.
The story opens at Fawley Magna, to whose identity a clue is found in the
name of Fawley given the unhappy Jude.  The village, we are told, was “as
old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an upland
adjoining the undulating North Wessex downs.  Old as it was, however, the
well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained
absolutely unchanged. . . .  Above all, the original church, hump-backed,
wood-turreted and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either
cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilised as pigsty
walls, garden-seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the
flower-beds of the neighbourhood.  In place of it a tall new building of
German-Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a
new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had
run down from London and back in a day.”  Who was that obliterator thus
held up to satire?  Inquiries prove the church to have been rebuilt in
1866, and its architect to have been none other than G. E. Street, R.A.,
than whom the middle Victorian period had no more accomplished architect.
Truly enough, its design is something alien, but candour compels the
admission that, however detached from local traditions, it is really a
very fine building, and its designer quite undeserving of so slighting a
notice.

                      [Picture: High Street, Oxford]

From Fawley the scene of Jude’s tragedy changes to Christminster, the
Oxford of everyday commerce.  Oft had he, as a boy, seen from this
vantage-point the faint radiance of its lights reflected from the sky at
night, twenty miles away.  His anticipations and disillusionments, his
strong resolves and stumblings by the way, over stumbling-blocks of his
own and of extraneous making, picture a strong character brought low,
like Samson by Delilah—cheated of scholarly ambition by the guardians of
learning, who open its gates only to wealth or scholarships acquired by
early opportunity.  Take _Jude the Obscure_ as you will, it forms a
somewhat serious indictment of university procedure: “They raise pa’sons
there, like radishes in a bed.  ’Tis all learning there—nothing but
learning, except religion.”  Jude sought learning there, and Holy Orders,
but never rose beyond his trade of stonemason, and, after many fitful
wanderings through Wessex, ends tragically at Oxford.

Since _Jude the Obscure_ was written Oxford has gained another historic
personality, none the less real than the great figures of actual life who
have trodden the pavements of its High Street.  You may follow all the
innermost thoughts of that mere character in a novel, and see fully
exposed the springs that produce his actions; and thus he is made seem
more human than all your Wolseys and great dignitaries, whose doings,
smothered in dust, and whose motives, buried deep beneath their own
subterfuges and the dark imaginings of historians with little but ancient
verbiage to rely upon, seem only the spasmodic, involuntary capers of so
many irresponsible jumping-jacks.  Nowadays, when I think of Oxford, it
is to recall poor Jude Fawley’s fascination by it, like the desire of the
moth for the star, or for the candle that eventually scorches its wings
and leaves it maimed and dying.  “It is a city of light,” he exclaimed,
not knowing (as how should he have known?) that the light it emits is but
the phosphorescent glow of decay.  And when I walk the High Street, “the
main street—that ha’n’t another like it in the world,” it is not of
Newman or his fellow Tractarians I think, but of Jude the stonemason,
feeling with appreciative technical fingers the mouldings and crumbling
stones of its architecture.

In one novel, _A Pair of Blue Eyes_, Mr. Hardy has made an expedition far
beyond the confines of his Wessex.  Away beyond “Lower Wessex,” or
Devonshire—itself scarce more than incidentally referred to in the whole
course of his writings—he takes the reader to the north coast of
Cornwall, the “furthest westward of all those convenient corners wherein
I have ventured to erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of
country life and passions; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond,
the vague border of the Wessex kingdom, on that side which, like the
westering verge of modern American settlements, was progressive and
uncertain.”

“Castle Boterel” he styles the stage of his tragical story of _A Pair of
Blue Eyes_; a place to be found on maps under the style and title of
Boscastle.  That tiny port and harbour on the wildest part of a wild
coast obtains its name, in a manner familiar to all students of Cornish
topography, by a series of phonetic corruptions.  Originally the site of
a castle owned by the Norman family of De Bottreaux, its name has in the
course of centuries descended from that knightly designation to that it
now bears.  Leland, four hundred years ago, described the place as “a
very filthy Toun and il kept,” and probably had still in mind and in
nostrils when he wrote the scent of the fish-cellars and the fish-offal
which to this day go largely towards making up the bouquet of most of the
smaller Cornish fishing-ports.

Still, as in Leland’s time, goes the little brook, running down from the
tremendously hilly background “into the Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles,” and
still the harbour remains, from the mariner’s point of view, “a pore
Havenet, of no certaine Salvegarde,” winding, as it does, in the shape of
a double S, between gigantic rocky headlands, and most difficult of
approach or exit.  It will thus be guessed, and guessed rightly, that,
although poor as a harbour, Boscastle is a place of commanding
picturesqueness.  Its Cornish atmosphere, too, confers upon it another
distinction.  In the romantic mind of the novelist the district is
“pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery.
The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal
soliloquy of the waters, the bloom, of dark purple cast, that seems to
exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an
atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.”

But it is not always like that at Boscastle.  There are days of bright
sunshine, when the sea is in colour something between a sapphire and an
opal, when the cliffs reveal unexpected hues and the sands of
Trebarrow—the “Trebarwith Strand” of the novel—shine golden, in contrast
with the dark slaty headland of Willapark Point—the “cliff without a
name” where Elfride, the owner of that pair of blue eyes, saves the prig,
Henry Knight, by the singular expedient none other than the author of the
Wessex novels would have conceived.  The average reader may perhaps be
allowed his opinion that it had been better for Elfride had she saved her
underclothing and allowed Knight to drop from his precarious hand-hold on
the cliff’s edge into the sea below waiting for him.

The town of “St. Launce’s” mentioned in the book is of course Launceston,
and “Endelstow” is the village of St. Juliot’s.




CHAPTER II


                WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX

BUT, to have done with these preliminary triflings in the marches of the
Hardy Country, let us consider in what way the Londoner may best come to
a thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land.  On all counts—by force
of easy access, and by its ancient circumstance—Winchester is indicated.
“The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore-time capital of
Wessex,” stands at the gate of this literary country and hard by the
confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and history it is
closely akin.  At one in feeling with that hoary hunting preserve, it is
itself modern in but little measure, and loves to linger upon memories of
the past.  Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical
counters with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty
game of history was played; but do, by the presence of their works, make
the least impressionable feel that they were creatures of blood and
fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake nations; groping darkly in
superstition, without doubt, but perceiving the light, distant and dim,
and striving with all the strength of their strong natures to win toward
it.  They fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had done for
paganism, and were not—it really seems necessary to insist upon
it—creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals are sealed; but
lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and hated, and despaired
and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with perhaps even greater keenness,
than any Edwardian liege of this twentieth century.  Still runs the
Itchen, bright and clear as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed,
to be in their turn ousted in governance by the Norman-French; and still,
although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of Norman
domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed, stolid, and
long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and Wessex, and in him that
ancient kingdom, although unknown to modern political geographies,
survives.

Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and for your
intrinsic worth, alike.  Changing, although ever so slowly, with the
years, your developments make, not as elsewhere, for black bitterness of
heart and vain regrets for the things of sweet savour and good report,
swept away into the dustheaps and potsherds of “progress,” but for
content and happy assent.  In these later years, for example, it has
occurred to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior
and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England, ruling
at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in A.D. 901, and buried here in a spot
still shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey.  That is a noble,
heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to commemorate the
millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough keeping with
Winchester’s ancient dignity.

                    [Picture: High Street, Winchester]

Near by, where its imposing bulk is reared up against the giant
background of St. Giles’s Hill, you may still see and hear the Itchen
rushing furiously under the old City Mill by Soke Bridge, where dusty
millers have ground corn for a thousand years.  Released from the
mill-leat, the stream regains its placid temper and wanders suavely along
daisy-dappled meads to St. Cross, and so at last to lose itself in
Southampton Water; still fishful all the way, as in the days of old Izaak
Walton himself, who lies in the south transept of the cathedral yonder,
and has a sanctified place in these liberal-minded times in a tabernacle
of the restored reredos, in the glorious company of the apostles, the
saints, kings and bishops, who form a very mixed concourse in that
remarkable structure.  I fear that if they were all brought to life and
introduced to one another, they would not form the happiest of families.

But that’s as may be.  From this vantage-point by King Alfred’s statue—or
“Ælfred,” as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the
unscholarly—you may see, as described in Tess, “the sloping High Street,
from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the mediæval cross
to the bridge”; but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low
Norman tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being beckoned
afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane, and, diligently
inquiring, at last find it.  Best it is to come to the cathedral by way
of that aforesaid mediæval cross in the High Street, hard by the
curiously overhanging penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry,
which, to the astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a
backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike space of
trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old residences of cathedral
dignitaries with nothing to do and exceedingly good salaries for doing
it.  It has been remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some
sixty per cent. of the famous men whose careers are included in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ were the sons of clergymen.  No wonder
at all, I take it, in this, for it is merely nature’s compensating swing
of the pendulum.  The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing
up energy for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest
empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest scoundrels too,
have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of the Church.

That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a history to its
squatness—a history bound up with the tragical death of Rufus.  The grave
of the Red King in the cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story
whose inner history has never been, and never will be, fully explained;
but by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless king’s death
at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced by the glanced arrow said to
have been aimed at the wild red deer by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem
that the clergy were more intimately connected with that “accident” than
was seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of that
time.  It must not be forgotten that the king had despoiled the Church
and the Church’s high dignitaries with a thorough and comprehensive
spoliation, nor can it be blinked that certain of them had denounced him
and prophesied disaster with an exactness of imagery possible only to
those who had prepared the fulfilment of their boding prophecies.  “Even
now,” said one, “the arrow of retribution is fixed, the bow is
stretched.”  This was not metaphor, merely: they prophesied who had with
certainty prepared fulfilment.  And when the thing was consummated and
the body of the Red King was buried in the choir beneath the original
central tower, the ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was
not, according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the
insufficient support given to its great crushing weight by the inadequate
pillars, but to the fact that one was buried beneath who had not received
the last rites of the Church.  If indeed that be so, the mills of God
certainly do grind slowly.

For the rest, the cathedral is the longest in England.  Longer than Ely,
longer than St. Albans, it measures from east to west no less than 556
feet.  As we read in the story of _Lady Mottisfont_, Wintoncester, among
all the romantic towns in Wessex, is for this reason “probably the most
convenient for meditative people to live in; since there you have a
cathedral with nave so long that it affords space in which to walk and
summon your remoter moods without continually turning on your heel, or
seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll under cover from the
rain or sun.  In an uninterrupted course of nearly three hundred steps
eastward, and again nearly three hundred steps westward amid those
magnificent tombs, you can, for instance, compare in the most leisurely
way the dry dustiness which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and
bishops with the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of
commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest out-of-doors.
Then, if you are in love, you can, by sauntering in the chapels and
behind the episcopal chantries with the bright-eyed one, so steep and
mellow your ecstasy in the solemnities around that it will assume a rarer
and fairer tincture.”

                     [Picture: Winchester Cathedral]

In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old Guildhall every
evening at eight o’clock, the sentimental survival of an old-time very
real and earnest ordinance; the West Gate remains in the wall, hard by
the fragments of the royal castle; down in the lower extremity of the
city the bishop’s palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered,
ivy-covered walls: much in fine remains of Winchester’s ancient state.

But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for Salisbury.




CHAPTER III


                  WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL

FROM Wintoncester to Melchester—that is to say, from Winchester to
Salisbury—is twenty-three miles if you go by way of Stockbridge and
Winterslow; if by the windings of the valley roads by King’s Somborne and
Mottisfont, anything you like, from thirty upwards, for it is a devious
route and a puzzling.  We will therefore take the highway and for the
present leave the byways severely alone.

The high road goes in an ascent, a white and dusty streak, from
Winchester to Stockbridge, the monotonous undulations of the chalky downs
relieved here and there on the skyline by distant woods, and the wayside
varied at infrequent intervals by murmurous coppices of pines, in whose
sullen depths the riotous winds lose themselves in hollow undertones or
absolute silences.  But before the traveller comes thus out into the
country, he must, emerging from the West Gate, win to the open through
the recent suburb of Fulflood; for “Winton” as its natives lovingly name
it, and as the old milestones on this very road agree to style it, has
after many years of slumber waked to life again, and is growing.  It is
not a large nor a bustling suburb, this recent fringe upon Winchester’s
ancient kirtle, and you are soon out of it and breasting the <DW72> of
Roebuck Hill.  Here, looking back, the tragic outlines of the prison,
with grey-slated roof and ugly octagonal red-brick tower, cut the
horizon: an unlovely palimpsest set above the mediæval graciousness of
the ancient capital of all England, but one that has become, in some
sort, a literary landmark in these later years, for it figures in the
last scene of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_.  In the last chapter of that
strenuous romance you shall read how from the western gate of the city
two persons walked on a certain morning with bowed heads and gait of
grief.  They were Angel Clare, the husband, and ’Liza-Lu, the sister of
poor Tess, come to witness the hoisting of the black flag upon the tower
of that inimical building.  They witnessed this proof that “‘Justice’ was
done, and the President of the Immortals (in Æschylean phrase) had ended
his sport with Tess,” not from this Stockbridge road, but from the first
milestone on the road to Romsey, whence the city may be seen “as in an
isometric drawing” set down in its vale of Itchen, “the broad cathedral
tower with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the
spires of St. Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the college, and, more to
the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day
the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.  Behind the city swept
the rotund upland of St. Catherine’s Hill; further off, landscape beyond
landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging
above it.”

Turning away from the contemplation of these things, and overpassing the
crest of Roebuck Hill and its sponsorial inn, the road dips down suddenly
into the tiny village of Weeke, whose name is sometimes, with romantic
mediævalism, spelled “Wyke.”  For myself, did I reside there, I would
certainly have my notepaper stamped “Wyke next Winchester,” and find much
satisfaction therein.  Wyke consists, when fully summed up, of a
characteristic rural Hampshire church, with little wooden belfry and
walls of flint and red brick, of some scattered farms and of a roadside
pond, a great prim red-bricked house of Georgian date, and a row of
pollard limes on a grassy bank overlooking the road.

And then?  Then the road goes on, past more uplands, divided into fields
whose smooth convexity gives the appearance of even greater size than
they possess: every circumstance of their featureless rotundity disclosed
from the highway across the sparse hedges, reduced by free use of the
billhook to the smallest semblance of a hedge, consistent with the
preservation of a boundary.  Wayside trees are to seek, and the wayfarer
pants in summer for lack of shade, and in winter is chilled to the bone,
as the winds roam free across Worthy downs.

Such is the way up Harestock Hill; not so grim as perhaps this
description may convey, but really very beautiful in its sort, with a few
cottages topping the rise where a signpost points a road to Littleton and
Crawley, and where the white-topped equatorial of an observatory serves
to emphasise a wholly unobstructed view over miles of sky.  It is only
from vast skyfields such as this that one hears the song of the skylark
on those still summer days when the sky is of the intensest azure blue
and the bees are busy wherever the farmer has left nooks for the
wild-flowers to grow.  On such days the dark woods of Lainston, crowning
the distant ridge, lend a welcome shade.  Fortunately they are easy of
access, for the road runs by them and an inconspicuous stile leads
directly into one of the rook-haunted alleys of those romantic avenues
with which the place is criss-crossed.  A slightly marked footpath
through undergrowth thickly spread with the desiccated leaves of autumns
past, where the hedgehog hides and squirrels and wild life of every kind
abound, leads by a crackling track of dried twigs and the empty husks of
last year’s beech-nuts to another stile and across a byroad into another
of the five grand avenues leading to Lainston House, a romantically
gloomy, but architecturally very fine, late seventeenth-century mansion
embowered amid foliage, with a ruined manorial chapel close at hand in a
darkling corner amid the close-set mossy boles of the trees.  The spot
would form an ideal setting for one of the Wessex tales, and indeed has a
part in a sufficiently queer story in actual life.  That tale is now
historic—how Walpole’s “Ælia Lælia Chudleigh” was in 1745 privately
married, in this now roofless chapel, to Captain Hervey, a naval officer
who afterwards succeeded to the title of third Earl of Bristol.  “Miss
Chudleigh,” however, she still continued to be at Court.  Twenty-five
years later she was the heroine of a bigamy case, having married, while
her first husband was living, Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston.  This was
that lively lady who, Walpole tells us, “went to Ranelagh as Iphigenia,
but as naked as Andromeda.”

The ruined chapel has long been in that condition.  Its font lies, broken
and green with damp, on the grass, and the old ledger-stones that cover
the remains of Chudleighs and Dawleys, successive owners of the manor,
are cracked and defaced.  The “living” of Lainston is worth £60 per
annum, and goes with that of the neighbouring village of Sparsholt, the
vicar holding it by virtue of preaching here once a year.  Stress of
weather occasionally obliges him to perform this duty under the shelter
of an umbrella, when his congregation, like that of the saint who
preached to the birds, is composed chiefly of rooks and jackdaws.  But
their responses are not always well timed, and the notes of the jackdaw
sound uncommonly like the scoffings of the ribald.

One emerges from Lainston woods only to perceive this to be a district of
many woodlands.  Across the road is Northwood, where, close by Eastman’s
great school, are thick coppices of hazels and undergrowths that the
primroses and bluebells love.  In another direction lies Sparsholt.  None
may tell what the “Spar” in the place-name of this or the other Sparsholt
in Berkshire means, but “holt” signifies a wood; and thus we may perceive
that the surroundings must still wear very much the aspect they owned
when the name was conferred.  Sparsholt has no guidebook
attractions—nothing but its old thatched cottages and quiet surroundings
to recommend it.  But the fragrant scent of the wood-smoke from cottage
hearths is over all.  You may see its blue filmy wreaths curling upwards
on still days, against the dark background of foliage.  It is a rustic
fragrance never forgotten, an aroma which, go whithersoever you will,
brings back the sweet memory of days that were, and the sound of a voice
in more actual fashion than possible to the notes of a well-remembered
song, or the scent of a rose.

They are not woods of forest trees that beset this district, but hillside
tangles of scrub oaks, of hazels and alders, where the wild-flowers make
a continual glory in early spring.  There are the labyrinths of No Man’s
Land, the intricacies of Privet and Crab Wood, through whose bosquets run
the long-deserted Roman road from Winchester to Old Sarum, and the
nameless spinneys dotted everywhere about.  Away on the horizon you may
perceive a monument, capping a hill.  It is no memorial of gallantries in
war, but is the obelisk erected on Farley Mount to the horse of a certain
“Paulet St. John,” which jumped with him into a chalk-pit twenty-five
feet deep, emerging, with his rider, unhurt.  That was in 1733.  An
inscription tells how that wonderful animal was afterwards entered for
the Hunters’ Plate, under the name of “Beware Chalk Pit,” at the races on
Worthy downs, and won it.

Continuing on to Stockbridge, whose race-meeting has recently been
abolished, the way grows grim indeed, with that Roman grimness
characteristic of all the Wessex chalky down country.  The road is long,
and at times, when the sun is setting and the landscape fades away in
purple twilight, the explorer becomes obsessed, against all reason, with
the weird notion that the many centuries of civilisation are but a dream
and the distant ages come back again.  To this bareness the pleasant
little town of Stockbridge, situated delightfully in the valley of the
Anton, is a gracious interlude.  In its old churchyard the curious may
still see the whimsical epitaph to John Bucket, landlord of the “King’s
Head” inn, who died, aged 67, in 1802:

    And is, alas! poor Bucket gone?
    Farewell, convivial honest John.
    Oft at the well, by fatal stroke
    Buckets like pitchers must be broke.
    In this same motley shifting scene,
    How various have thy fortunes been.
    Now lifting high, now sinking low,
    To-day the brim would overflow.
    Thy bounty then would all supply
    To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry.
    To-morrow sunk as in a well,
    Content unseen with Truth to dwell.
    But high or low, or wet or dry,
    No rotten stave could malice spy.
    Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise
    And claim thy station in the skies;
    Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine,
    Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign.

In 1715, when the poet Gay rode horseback to Exeter and wrote a rhymed
account of his journey for the Earl of Burlington, he described
Stockbridge in doleful dumps.  Why?  Because for seven years there had
been no election:

    Sad melancholy ev’ry visage wears;
    What! no election come in seven long years!
    Of all our race of Mayors, shall Snow alone
    Be by Sir Richard’s dedication known?
    Our streets no more with tides of ale shall float!
    Nor cobblers feast three years upon one vote.

Some of this seems cryptic, but it is explained by the fact of Sir
Richard Steele having published, September 22nd, 1713, a quarto pamphlet
entitled _The Importance of Dunkirk considered_ . . . _in a letter to the
Bailiff of Stockbridge_, whose name was John Snow.  The number of voters
at Stockbridge was then about seventy, and its population chiefly
cobblers.  To say it was a corrupt borough is merely to state what might
be said of almost every one at that time; but it seems to have been
especially notable, even above its corrupt fellows, for a contemporary
chronicler is found writing: “It is a very wet town and the voters are
wet too.”  He then continues, as one deploring the depreciation of
securities, “The ordinary price of a vote is £60, but better times may
come.”  But when elections only came septennially, the wet voters who
subsisted three years upon one vote must have gone dry, poor fellows, an
unconscionable while.

Some ten miles north of Stockbridge, on the road past Andover, and
overlooking the valley of the Anton, is Weyhill, a Hardy landmark of
especial importance, for it is the point whence starts that fine tale,
_The Mayor of Casterbridge_, described in its sub-title as “The Life and
Death of a Man of Character.”  It is a pleasant country of soft riverain
features by which you who seek to make pilgrimage to this spot shall
fare, coming into the quiet, cheerful little market-town of Andover, and
thenceforward near by the villages which owe their curiously feminine
names to their baptismal river, the Anton.  There you shall find Abbot’s
Ann and Little Ann, and I daresay, if you seek long enough, Mary Ann
also.  Weyhill, a hamlet in the parish of Penton Mewsey, is a
place—although to look at it, you might not suspect so—of hoary
antiquity, and its Fair—still famous, and still the largest in
England—old enough to be the subject of comment in _Piers Plowman’s
Vision_, in the line:

    At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair.

Alas that such things should be! this old-time six-days’ annual market is
now reduced to four.  It is held between October 10th and 13th, and
divided into the Sheep, Horse, Hops, Cheese, Statute or Hiring, and
Pleasure Fairs.  On each of these days the three miles’ stretch of road
from Andover is thronged with innumerable wayfarers and made unutterably
dusty by the cabs and flys and the dense flocks of sheep and cattle on
their way to the Fair ground.

There are quaint survivals at Weyhill Fair.  An umbrella-seller may
still, with every recurrent year, be seen selling the most bulgeous and
antique umbrellas, some of them almost archaic enough to belong to the
days of Jonas Hanway, who introduced the use of such things in the
eighteenth century; and unheard-of village industries display their
produce to the astonished gaze.  Here, for example, you see an exhibit of
modern malt-shovels, together with the maker of them, the “W. Choules
from Penton” whose name is painted up over his unassuming corner; and
although the Londoner has probably never heard of, and certainly never
seen, malt-shovels, the making of them is obviously still a living
industry.

Greatly to the stranger’s surprise, Weyhill, although in fact situated
above the valley of the Anton, does not appear to be situated on a hill
at all.  The road to “Weydon Priors,” by which name it figures in _The
Mayor of Casterbridge_, is indeed, as the novelist sufficiently hints, of
no very marked features.  It is “a road neither straight nor crooked,
neither level nor hilly,” and at times other than Fair-time is as quiet a
country road—for a high road—as you shall meet; and, except for that one
week in the year, Weyhill is as a derelict village.  There, on a grassy
tableland, stand, deserted for fifty-one weeks out of every fifty-two,
the whitewashed booths and rows of sheds that annually for a brief space
do so strenuous a trade, and scarce a human being comes into view.  Even
now, just as in the beginning of the story, Weyhill does not grow:
“Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon.”

                         [Picture: Weyhill Fair]

It is on the last day of the old six-days’ Fair, in 1829, that the story
opens, with a man and woman—the woman carrying a child—walking along this
dusty road.  That they were man and wife was, according to the novelist’s
sardonic humour, plain to see, for they carried along with them a “stale
familiarity, like a nimbus.”  The man was the hay-trusser, Michael
Henchard, whose after rise to be Mayor of Casterbridge and whose final
fall are chronicled in the story.  This opening scene is merely in the
nature of a prologue, disclosing the itinerant hay-trusser seeking work,
coming to the Fair and there selling his wife for five guineas to the
only bidder, a sailor—the second chapter resuming the march of events
eighteen years later.




CHAPTER IV


                 STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE

RETURNING to Stockbridge, _en route_ for Salisbury, eight miles more of
roads of the same unchanging characteristics, but growing more
plentifully carpeted with crushed flints as we advance, bring us to
Wiltshire and to a junction with the Exeter Road from Andover at Lobcombe
Corner.  In the neighbourhood are “the Wallops,” as local parlance refers
to a group of three villages, Over and Nether Wallop, with the wayside
settlement of Little (or Middle) Wallop in between.  It is this
last-named to which Mr. Hardy refers when he tells how the ruined and
broken-hearted Mayor of Casterbridge, fleeing from the scene of his
vanished greatness and resuming his early occupation of hay-trusser,
became employed at a “pastoral farm near the old western highway. . . .
He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that,
situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually
nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless
spot only half as remote.”  Dorchester, otherwise Casterbridge, is in
fact just forty-nine and a half miles distant, down this old Exeter Road.

In less than another mile on our westward way the sight of a solitary
house in all this apparently uninhabited wilderness arouses speculations
in the pilgrim’s mind—speculations resolved on approach, when the sight
of the recently restored picture-sign of the “Pheasant,” reared up on its
posts on the short grass of the open down, opposite its door, proclaims
this to be the old coaching inn once famed as “Winterslow Hut.”  None
ever spoke of the inn in those days as the “Pheasant,” although that was
the sign of it, plainly to be seen; as “Winterslow Hut” it was always
known, and a more lonely, forbidding place of seclusion from the haunts
of man it would be difficult to find.  It was once, appropriately enough,
the retreat of a lonely, forbidding person—the self-selected place of
exile from society of Hazlitt, the essayist, who, parting from his wife
at the village of West Winterslow (whence the inn takes its name of
“Winterslow Hut”) two miles away, lived here from 1819 to 1828.  Here he
wrote the essays on “Persons one would wish to have seen,” and the much
less sociable essay, “On Living to One’s Self”—an art he practised here
to his own satisfaction and the cheerful resignation of the many persons
with whom he quarrelled.  And here he saw the Exeter Mail and the
stage-coaches go by, and must have found the place even lonelier, in the
intervals after their passing, than it seems now that the Road, as an
institution, is dead and the Rail conveys the traffic to and from
Salisbury and the west, some two miles distant, across country hidden
from view from this point beneath the swelling shoulders of the
unchanging downs.

Salisbury spire is soon seen, when the long drop into the valley of the
Wiltshire Avon, down Three Mile Hill, begins; its slender spire, the
tallest in England, thrusting its long needle-point 404 feet into the
blue, and oddly peering out from the swooping sides of the downs, long
before any suspicion of Sarum itself—as the milestones style it—has
occupied the mind of the literary pilgrim.

Salisbury, like some bland and contented elderly spinster, does not look
its age.  When you are told how Old Sarum was abandoned, New Sarum
founded, and everything recreated _ad hoc_ at the command of Bishop
Poore, impelled thereto by a vision, in the then customary way, you are
so impressed with what we are used to regard as such thoroughly
“American” proceedings that you forget, in the apparent modernity of such
a method, how very long ago all this was done.  This great change of site
took place about 1220, and sixty years later the great cathedral,
remarkable and indeed unique among all our cathedrals for being designed
and built, from the laying of the foundation stone to the roofing-in of
the building, in one—the Early English—style, was completed.  It was
actually a century later that the spire itself was finished.

Much of this seeming youthfulness of Salisbury is due to the regularity
of plan upon which the city is laid out, and to the comparative breadth
of its streets.  To that phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch,
whose like certainly could never have been met with outside the pages of
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, Salisbury seemed “a very desperate sort of place; an
exceedingly wild and dissipated city.”  Here we smile superior, although
it is true that in his short story, _On the Western Circuit_, Mr. Hardy
presents Melchester, as he names this fair city, as given over to blazing
orgies in the progress of Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting
merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than
they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he
should have been.  Granting the truth of this picture of Melchester Fair,
it is to be observed that this is but an interlude in a twelvemonth’s
programme of polished, decorous, and well-ordered urbanity.  Its
character is more truly portrayed in _Jude the Obscure_, where Sue
Bridehead having gone to the city, to enter the Training College in the
Close, her cousin Jude follows her.  He found it “a quiet and soothing
place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly
learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment.”  It was here
he obtained work at his trade of stonemason, labouring on the restoration
of the cathedral; here that Sue shocked his ecclesiastical and mediæval
bent, meeting his suggestion that they should sit for a talk in the
cathedral by the proposal that she would rather wait in the railway
station: “That’s the centre of town life now—the cathedral has had its
day!”  To his shocked interjection, “How modern you are!” she replied
defensively, “I am not modern, either.  I am more ancient than
mediævalism, if you only knew”; meaning thereby that she was enamoured of
classicism and the old pagans.

To Sue the cathedral was not unsympathetic merely by force of that
clear-cut regularity which impresses most beholders with a sense of a
splendid, but cold, perfection.  There are those who compare this great
fane with Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere:

    Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
    Dead perfection, no more;

but while those critics are critics only of design and carved stones, who
would welcome something in its regular features paralleled by a
tip-tilted nose in a human face, Sue was obviously preoccupied by the
sense that it, not alone among cathedrals, has outlived the devotional
needs that produced it, and is little more than a magnificent museum of
architectural antiquities.  That magnificence would be even more complete
and pronounced had not the egregious James Wyatt been let loose upon the
“restoration” of it, towards the close of the eighteenth century, when he
cast out and destroyed most of its internal adornments, and pulled down
and utterly obliterated the beautiful detached bell tower, coeval with
the cathedral itself, which stood, away from it, on the north side.

It is perhaps worthy of remark that there may be noticed in the cathedral
the tomb, with somewhat bombastic inscription, of Dr. D’Albigny
Turberville, the seventeenth-century oculist, who died, aged 85, in 1696.
The flagrant Latin, which tells us that his fame shall perish no sooner
than this marble, does not allow for human forgetfulness, nor for the
advances of science.

The Normal School in the Close, whence Sue escaped, after being confined
to her room as a punishment for her night’s escapade with Jude, is a
prominent building, described as “an ancient edifice of the fifteenth
century, once a palace . . . with mullioned and transomed windows, and a
courtyard in front shut in from the road by a wall.”

                      [Picture: Salisbury Cathedral]

From the ever-impending tragedy of Jude’s ambitions it is a relief to
turn to the pure comedy of Betty Dornell, the first Countess of Wessex,
in that collection of diverting short stories, _A Group of Noble Dames_.
Looking upon those two old inns, the “Red Lion” in the High Street and
the “White Hart,” we are reminded that it was to the first-named that
Betty resorted with that husband with whom, although married at an early
age, she had not lived.

“‘Twice we met by accident,’ pleaded Betty to her mother.  ‘Once at
Abbot’s Cernel and another time at the “Red Lion,” Melchester.’

“‘O, thou deceitful girl!’ cried Mrs. Dornell.  ‘An accident took you to
the “Red Lion” whilst I was staying at the “White Hart”!  I remember—you
came in at twelve o’clock at night and said you’d been to see the
cathedral by the light o’ the moon!’

“‘My ever-honoured mamma, so I had!  I only went to the “Red Lion” with
him afterwards.’”

Nine miles to the north of Melchester stands Stonehenge, reached after
their flight through the deserted midnight streets of the city by Tess
and Angel Clare, vainly endeavouring to elude justice after the murder of
the sham D’Urberville at Sandbourne.  The night was “as dark as a cave,”
and a stiff breeze blew as they came out upon the black solitudes of
Salisbury Plain.  For some miles they had proceeded thus, when “on a
sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front,
rising sheer from the grass.  They had almost struck themselves against
it.

“‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel.

“‘It hums,’ said she.  ‘Hearken!’

“The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the
note of some gigantic one-stringed harp.”  It was indeed Stonehenge, “a
very Temple of the Winds.”

And here, as the night wore away, and Tess lay sleeping on the Altar
Stone, and the great trilithons began to show up blackly against the
coming dawn, the figure of a man advancing towards them appeared rising
out of the hollows of the great plain.  At the same time Clare heard the
brush of feet behind him: they were surrounded.  Thoughts of resistance
came to him; but “‘It’s no use, sir,’ said the foremost plain-clothes
man: ‘There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is
reared.’”  And so they stood watching while Tess finished her sleep.

Stonehenge sadly requires such romantic passages as this to renew its
interest, for, truth to tell, the first glimpse of this mysterious
monument of prehistoric ages is wofully disappointing.  No use to strive
against that disappointment as you come up the long rises from Amesbury
under the midday sun and see its every time-worn cranny displayed
mercilessly in the impudent eye of day: the interval between anticipation
and realisation is too wide, and the apparent smallness and
insignificance of the great stone circles must, although unwillingly, be
allowed.  This comparative insignificance is, however, largely the effect
of their almost boundless environment of vast downs, tumid with the
attendant circles of prehistoric tumuli, each tumulus or barrow crowned
with its clump of trees, like the tufted plumes of a hearse.

                          [Picture: Stonehenge]

Mystery continues to shroud the origin of Stonehenge, which was probably
standing when the Romans first overran Britain, and seems by the most
reasoned theories to have really been a Temple of the Sun.  Its name is
only the comparatively modern one of “Stanenges,” or “the hanging
stones,” given by the Saxons, who discovered it with as much astonishment
as exhibited by any one of a later age, and so named it, not from any
reference to the capital punishment of _sus. per coll._, but from the
great lintel-stones that are laid flat upon the tall rude columns, and
may fancifully be said to hang in mid-air, at a height of twenty-five
feet.

Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a “monument to all time,” speak
not according to knowledge, for the poor old relic is becoming sadly
weatherworn and decrepit, and has aged rapidly of late years.  No good
has been wrought it by the fussy interferences and impertinences of
“scientific” men, who, taking advantage of an alleged necessity for
shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the soil and strove to wrest
its secret by the method of sifting the spadesful of earth and stone
chippings.  Then a last indignity befell it.  Sir Edward Antrobus, of
Amesbury, lord of the manor, claimed Stonehenge as his manorial property,
and, erecting a barbed-wire fence around it, levied a fee of a shilling a
head for admission through the turnstiles that click you through, for all
the world as though you were entering some Earl’s Court Exhibition.  The
impudence that has found it possible to do these things, in defiance of
undoubted public rights of way, bulks majestically—much larger than
Stonehenge itself, whose grey pile it indeed belittles and vulgarises.




CHAPTER V


                THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD

IT is thirty-eight and a half miles from Salisbury to Dorchester, the
“Casterbridge” of the novels, along the old coach-road to Exeter.
Speaking as an exploratory cyclist, I would ten times rather go the
reverse way, from west to east, for the gradients are all against the
westward traveller, and westerly winds are the prevailing airs during
summer and autumn.  It is, indeed, a terribly difficult road, exposed,
and very trying in its long rises.  One charming interlude there is,
three miles from Salisbury, at the beautifully situated little village of
Coombe Bissett, set down in the deep valley of an affluent of the
Wiltshire Avon; but it is heartbreaking work climbing out of it again, up
the inclines of Crowden Down.  At eight miles’ distance from Salisbury
the old Woodyates Inn, long since re-christened the “Shaftesbury Arms,”
stands in a lonely situation beside the road, looking regretful for
bygone coaching days.  Its old name, deriving from “wood-gates,”
indicated its position on the south-western marches of the wooded
district of Cranborne Chase.  When railways disestablished coaches and
the road resumed its solitude, the old inn became for a time the home of
William Day’s training establishment for racehorses.  He tells, in his
recollections, of the drinking habits of the old Wiltshire farmers in
general, and of two in particular, who used to call at Woodyates when on
their way to or from Salisbury.  They would talk, over the fire and their
glasses of grog, somewhat in this fashion of their drunken exploits when
riding home horseback: “Well, John, I fell off ten times.”  “Yes, Thomas,
and I fell off a dozen times: you see, I rode the old black horse, and he
always jerks me about so.”  It was said that there was scarcely a yard of
ground over the eight miles that these worthies had not fallen on to from
their horses.

                           [Picture: Pentridge]

At the distance of a mile from the coach-road at this point, where, by
the way, we leave Wilts and enter Dorset, is the Hardy landmark of
“Trantridge,” to be identified with the little village of Pentridge set
down on the map.  It was to Trantridge that Tess came early in her
career, from her home at Marnhull in the Vale of Blackmore, to take
service with Mrs. Stoke-D’Urberville of The <DW72>s, relict of Mr. Simon
Stoke, merchant or money-lender, who had unwarrantably assumed the name,
the crest, and arms of the knightly D’Urbervilles—dead and gone and
powerless to resent the affront.  It would be useless to seek The <DW72>s,
rising in all the glory of its new crimson brick “like a geranium bloom
against the subdued colours around”; but plain to see, not far away, is
the “soft azure landscape of the Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest
land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England, of undoubted
primæval date.”  It was in the Chase that the ruin of Tess was wrought by
Alec D’Urberville.

The exceedingly rustic village of Pentridge nestles under the lee of a
long, partly wooded hill, probably the “ridge” referred to in the
place-name.  In the little highly restored or rebuilt church with the
stone spirelet is now to be seen, since August, 1902, when it was
erected, the plain white marble tablet:

                               TO THE MEMORY OF
                               ROBERT BROWNING,

           of Woodyates, in this parish, who died Nov. 25th, 1746,
                     and is the first known forefather of
                          Robert Browning, the poet.

                  He was formerly footman and butler in the
                                Bankes family.

                    “All service ranks the same with God.”

                                                                 BROWNING.

                                _This Tablet_
            was erected by some of the poet’s friends and admirers
                                    1902.

Much reflected glory doubtless accrues to “the Bankes family” from this
tablet, which owes its being to the exertions of Dr. F. J. Furnivall.  It
seems that the poet’s ancestor, after severing his connection with the
Bankes, became landlord of the Woodyates Inn, and churchwarden here.

This entrance to Dorsetshire is not so favourable an one as that, for
example, from Somerset, by Templecombe and Stalbridge or Sherborne, where
Dorset is indeed like unto the Land of Promise, a land flowing with milk
and honey, where herds of cattle low musically in mead or byre, and the
earth is alluvial—rich, deep, and sticky.

Here is the more arid, elevated country of open down; chalky, and
producing only coarse grass, pine-trees, bracken, and furze—a
sheep-grazing, as opposed to a cattle-rearing, district.  Dorset is
indeed a greatly varied county in the character of its soils.  The
sheep-grazing districts may be said to be this of the north-east border,
and those other stretches of lofty, almost waterless chalk downs, running
due east and west, parallel with the coast, with a similarly lengthy, but
broader, stretch in a like direction, from where the downs rise from the
Stour at Sturminster Marshall, past Milton Abbas and Cerne Abbas, on to
Beaminster.  In between these are the valleys of the River Frome—the
“Vale of Great Dairies” of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, and the “Vale of
Little Dairies” in the same story, otherwise Blackmore Vale.  A glance at
the map will show the River Frome flowing in its “green trough of
sappiness and humidity” from the neighbourhood of Beaminster, past
Chilfroom, Frome Vanchurch, and Frampton, which most obviously take their
name from the stream, to Dorchester, Moreton, Wool, and Wareham, whence
it pours its enriching waters into Poole Harbour; and another glance will
discover the Vale of Little Dairies, or Blackmore, bounded by Blandford
and Minterne Magna, and the heights of High Stoy on the south, and by
Shaftesbury, Wincanton, and Sherborne on the north; including within its
compass Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton, together with a host of small
villages.  The natural outlet of this last district—which, despite the
name of “Little Dairies,” given to it in the pages of the novels, is a
larger area than that of the Frome valley, and of course produces in the
aggregation more—is the railway junction of Templecombe, which, beyond
being a mere junction, is also an exceedingly busy and bustling place for
the receipt of all this dairy produce of Blackmore.

Such are, roughly, the main agricultural divisions of Dorset, which is,
to the hard-working farmer who is his own bailiff, with his family to aid
in the dairy-work, still a county where ends may be made to meet, with a
considerable selvedge or overlapping to sweeten his industry.  Despite a
very general belief current in towns, there are still considerable
numbers of these families.  The farmer and his wife have largely grown
out of the rustic speech, and their sons and daughters—the daughters
especially, the adaptive dears!—have got culture for leisure moments, but
they are none the less practical for that.  A generation ago, perhaps,
things were not so pleasing, for the then would-be up-to-date attempted
the absurdity of aping the leisured classes, while seeking to carry on
farming and obtain a living by it.  Such as those came to grief, and were
rightly the butts of outside observers, as well as of moralists of their
own class.  A thorough-going farmer of that period, who saw the daughters
of his neighbour going on the way to their music-lesson, reported his
feelings and sayings as follows:

“While I and an’ my wife were out a-milken, they maidens went by, an’ I
zaid to her, ‘Where be they maidens a-gwoin’?’ an’ she zaid, ‘Oh! they be
a-gwoin’ to their music.’  An’ I zaid, ‘Oh! a-gwoin’ to their music at
milken-time!  That ’ull come to zom’ehat, that wull.’”  And it doubtless
did come to a pretty considerable deal, if—as a doctor might say—the
course of the disease was normal.

Resuming the main road, which for the distance of a mile beyond Woodyates
is identical with the old Roman road, the Via Iceniana, that ancient
relic of a past civilisation may presently be seen parting company from
the modern highway, and going off by itself, to the left, across the
downs, making for the great fortified hill of Badbury Rings.  It is known
locally as the Achling <DW18>, and is somewhat conspicuously elevated above
the bracken, the gorse, and heather of these wilds.

Now, passing a few scattered cottages, we come—in fifteen miles from
Coombe Bissett—to a village, the first on this lonely main road.  Tarrant
Hinton, this welcome village, stands on a sparkling little stream,
without doubt the “tarrant,” or torrent, whence it and a small sisterhood
of neighbouring settlements obtain a generic name.  There are Tarrant
Gunville, Tarrant Monkton, Tarrant Rawston, Tarrant Rushton, Tarrant
Keynston, and Tarrant Crawford; and then, as below the last-named place
the little stream falls into the Stour, there are no more Tarrants.

                           [Picture: Eastbury]

To Tarrant Gunville belongs Eastbury Park, a place of Hardyesque and
romantic aspect; but, so far, not made the vehicle of any of his stories.
It has, to be sure, a story of its own—a tale of vaulting ambition which
fell on t’other side.  Eastbury was built, like many another ponderous
and overgrown mansion of the eighteenth century, by Vanbrugh, to the
commission of George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who,
growing enormously rich by long-continued peculation, blossomed out as a
patron of the arts and a friend of literature.  But before his huge house
could be completed he was gathered to his fathers and to judgment upon
his illegitimate pickings, leaving all his wealth to his grandnephew,
George Bubb Dodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, who lavished £140,000 on
the completion of the works.  Here he too became a patron, and
entertained the literary men of his time until 1762, when, dying, the
property went to Earl Temple, who, unable to afford the expense of
maintaining the immense place, actually offered—and offered in vain—an
income of £200 a year to any one who would reside at Eastbury and keep it
in repair.  As this bait failed, the great house was dismantled and
demolished, piecemeal, in 1795, only one wing remaining to attest its
former grandeur.

But traces of that grandeur are not wanting, from the iron railings,
stone piers, and decorative kerbs, carved boldly with an acanthus-leaved
design, that conduct into the demesne, to the magnificent clumps of
beeches and other forest trees studding the sward of what was the park;
and that remaining wing itself, still disclosing in its arcade, or
loggia, something of Vanbrugh’s design.

Eastbury, of course, is haunted—so much is to be expected of such a
place; but those who have seen the headless coachman and his ghostly
four-in-hand issuing from the park gates, or returning, are growing
scarce, and times are become so sceptical that even they cannot obtain
credence.  So, with a sigh for the decay of belief, we will e’en on
through Pimperne down to Blandford, which good town, of fine dignified
classic architectural presence, the coach-road enters in a timid
back-doors manner, down a narrow byway.

Blandford is further dignified by that curious pedantic Latinity very
marked in many Dorsetshire place-names.  In this manner it is made to
figure as “Blandford Forum,” a rendering of “Blandford Market.”  In Mr.
Thomas Hardy’s pages it is “Shottsford Forum,” and so appears in his
story of _Barbara of the House of Grebe_, in _Far from the Madding
Crowd_, and again in _The Woodlanders_, wherein it is stated, from the
mouth of a rustic character, that “Shottsford is Shottsford still: you
can’t victual your carcass there unless you’ve got money, and you can’t
buy a cup of genuine there, whether or no”; this last a sad drawback from
the amenities of a delightful town.  But there is a very excellent pump,
and an historic, in the broad High Street, whereon, cast in enduring
iron, it may be read how a certain John Bastard, a “considerable sharer”
in the great calamity by which Blandford was burnt in 1731, “humbly
erected this monument, in grateful Acknowledgement of the Divine Mercy,
That has since raised this Town, Like the Phoenix from its Ashes, to its
present flourishing and beautiful State.”  That, it will be allowed, is
rather a fine, curly, and romantic way of putting it.  A rider to this
inscription goes on to say that in 1899 the Corporation of Blandford
converted the pump into a drinking-fountain, and that the Blandford
Waterworks Company, not halting in good deeds, gratuitously supplies the
water.

The pilgrim who, arriving in Blandford hot, dusty and thirsty, and
perhaps mindful of that alleged impossibility of buying a cup of genuine,
essays to drink from the fountain, is at first surprised at the keen
interest taken in his proceedings by a quickly collecting group of
urchins.  Their curiosity appears to be in the nature of surprise at the
sight of a grown man drinking water, but light is shed upon it when,
pressing hard the obstinate knob that releases the fount, the thing
suddenly gives way and squirts half a pint or so up his sleeve.  This is
a never-failing form of entertainment to the youth of Blandford, and a
cheap one.

Not once, but several times has Blandford been destroyed by fire.  It
owed these disasters to the old Dorsetshire fashion of thatched roofs,
and only in time, by dint of repeated happenings in this sort, learned
wisdom.  This light dawned at the time when the classic revival in
architecture was flourishing, and thus, as already hinted, Blandford’s
High Street is wholly of that character.  Classicism does not often make
for beauty in English towns, but here the general effect is admirable,
and although the stone of the fine church-tower—designed in the same
taste—is of a jaundiced greenish-yellow hue, it is a noble feature.

Blandford’s natives have sometimes won to a great deal more than local
fame; witness Alfred Stevens, the designer of the Wellington monument in
St. Paul’s Cathedral, who was born in 1817, in Salisbury Street, that
back-doors coach-road entrance into the town already mentioned.
Willowes, the unhappy husband of Barbara, of the House of Grebe, was a
descendant of one of the old families of glass-painters of Shottsford
mentioned in that story, and more particularly referred to by Aubrey, the
antiquary, who says: “Before the Reformation, I believe there was no
country or great town in England but had glasse painters.  Old Harding of
Blandford in Dorsetshire, where I went to schoole, was the only country
glasse painter that ever I knew.  Upon play daies I was wont to visit his
shop and furnaces.  He dyed about 1643, aged about 83 or more.”  That
craft has long since died out from the town.

                        [Picture: Blandford Forum]

A beautiful backward view of the town is obtained on leaving it, over the
Town Bridge that spans the sluggish, lily-grown Stour, at the entrance to
Lord Portman’s noble park of Bryanstone.  Here a dense overarching canopy
of trees gives a grateful shade on summer days and frames the distant
prospect whence the classic tower of the church grandly rises.  The
entrance-gates to the domain of Bryanstone are jealously kept locked and
guarded, but there be ways of circumventing this churlish exclusiveness
and of seeing the astonishingly beautiful scenery of the park, as the
present writer has by chance discovered for himself.  You, at the cost of
some effort in hill-climbing, take the defences in the rear, and entering
away back by the farmstead and workshops of the estate, come down by the
finest of the scenery to those selfsame locked gates at these outskirts
of Blandford, to observe and hear with some secret satisfaction the
expressed horror of the lodge-keeper, only too anxious to let you out and
be rid of you.

But, for the unenterprising, there is a sufficiently beautiful distant
view of the park and of the new mansion from the Town Bridge.  A former
Lord Portman in 1780 employed James Wyatt to build him a classic mansion
which remained until the rule of the present owner of the title, who
demolished and replaced it with the fine mansion designed by Norman Shaw,
R.A., and built in red brick and Portland stone.




CHAPTER VI


               THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER

FROM this point the old coach-road becomes astonishingly hilly, so that
mere words cannot accurately portray it, and recourse must be had to the
eloquent armoury of the printer’s case to set it forth in any truly
convincing manner.  The series of semicircular dumpling hills is not
adequately to be shadowed forth by the aid of mere brackets—we must
picture them thus:

                [Picture: Representation of Hills in Type]

and, to give some notion of the quality of the surface during the heats
of summer, let a glaring white surface five inches deep in dust and
powdered flint be imagined, the whole stirred up into a stifling halo of
floating particles by the frequent passage of a flock of sheep.  Such is
the Exeter Road between Blandford and Dorchester in the merry months of
summer.

Five miles of this bring us to the village of Winterborne Whitchurch,
anciently referred to as “Album Monasterium” or “Blaunch Minster,”
situated in the stony bottom where the little stream called the
Winterborne does not in summer flow across the road.  John Wesley,
grandfather of the more famous John, the founder of Methodism, was vicar
of this parish in 1658, and on the Restoration was dispossessed, when he
took to a life of itinerant preaching amid the hills and dales of
Dorsetshire, not altogether dissimilar from that of his celebrated
grandson.  Here, about 1540, was born George Turberville, the poet.  To
this succeeds, in less than another three miles, Milborne St. Andrew, on
the less dried up Mill Bourne.  This, the “Millpond St. Jude’s” alluded
to in _Far from the Madding Crowd_, is a pretty place, of an old-world
coaching interest, reflected from its partly thatched “Royal Oak” inn and
the post office, once the “White Hart,” with the imposing effigy of a
white hart still prominent on its cornice, in company with those of two
foxes and a row of miniature cannon.  Up along a byroad, past the
feathery poplars that lend so feminine an air of beauty to the village,
is the church, and then the Manor House Farm, once the residence of the
Mansell Pleydells, who since the building of Whatcombe House, near by
Winterborne Whitchurch, in 1758, have left this residence to farming.
The red-brick pillars of the entrance-gates remain—partly ruined and
standing foolishly, without a trace of the old carriage drive that once
went between them—on the grass, surmounted still with sculptured displays
of military trophies surrounding a cartouche bearing the lichened arms of
the Pleydells, including an inescutcheon of pretence showing that before
they allied themselves with a Mansell they married money with a Morton.
It is a fine house, full of character, with unusually—and somewhat
foreign-looking—high-pitched roof.  Grand old trees lead up to it, and in
the distance one perceives a manorial pigeon-house, against the skyline.
The old drive led round to the other side of the mansion, where it is
divided from the meadows by a moatlike cut in the Mill Bourne, now,
however, richer in mud than in water, and crossed by a brick bridge.  We
can picture Lady Constantine, the susceptible young and wealthy widow of
the defunct Sir Blount, stealing at night over this bridge, to visit
Swithin St. Cleeve, stargazing in his lonely tower on the hilltop.  In
the garden, with its sundial, are pretty old-world box-edged flower-beds
and shady arbours.  Foundations of many demolished buildings are
traceable in the meadows.

           [Picture: The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew]

The scene of _Two on a Tower_ is a selection from various places.  “The
tower,” Mr. Hardy writes to me, “had two or three originals—Horton,
Charborough, etc.”  Those other places are duly described in these pages,
but the “etc.” covers the curious brick obelisk built on the summit of
the earthwork-encircled hill near by this old manor-house of Milborne St.
Andrew, and called Weatherbury Castle.  Standing on this “fir-shrouded
hilltop,” one may see, for many miles around, summer conflagrations among
the furze on Bere Heath, the tall tower in Charborough Park, which, much
more than this obelisk, resembles Swithin’s observatory, and, near at
hand, below, this old manor-house, the “Welland House” of the story.
From this eyrie, too, you perceive the old Exeter Road swooping whitely
downhill, and hear the hum of threshing-machines, coming up, like the
drowsy buzz of insects, from the vale.

                      [Picture: Weatherbury Castle]

It is not difficult to detect sarcasm in the description of this hill.
It “was (according to some antiquaries) an old Roman camp—if it were not
(as others insisted) an old British castle, or (as the rest swore) an old
Saxon field of Witanagemote—with remains of an outer and an inner vallum,
a winding path leading up between their overlapping ends by an easy
ascent.”

                [Picture: The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle]

Not so easy, really—indeed, demanding a rather strenuous climb.  And when
you are on the crest of that ancient glacis (impregnable it might well
have been when men fought hand to hand) it is with some difficulty you
penetrate the dense woodland growing within this _ceinture_.  Little can
in these times be seen of the obelisk from without: only from one
particular view-point can you observe its ultimate inches and the metal
ball that caps it, rising mysteriously from amid the topmost branches of
the fir-trees.  Its situation is exactly described in the story: “The
gloom and solitude which prevailed round the base were remarkable.  The
sob of the environing trees” (how like, by the way, to that passage in
Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s _Ruddigore_, “the sob of the breeze is heard in the
trees”) “was here expressively manifest, and, moved by the light breeze,
their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted pendulums,
while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar’s sides, or occasionally
clicked in catching each other.  Below the level of their summits the
masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never pierced that
moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation.  Pads of moss grew in the joints
of the stonework, and here and there shade-loving insects had engraved on
the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning, but curious and
suggestive.”

[Picture: E.M.P. inscription on obelisk] The why or purpose of this
slight brick structure are lost.  The only clue, afforded by the
inscription on a stone tablet set in the lichened bricks, points to it
being the handiwork of a Pleydell.  It was, in fact, built by Edmund
Morton Pleydell, but his purpose, if indeed he had one beyond a singular
notion of ornament, has passed, with himself, beyond these voices; and
the neglected condition of the monument—if indeed it be a monument—fully
bears out the moral reflection in _Two on a Tower_.  “Here stood this
aspiring piece of masonry, erected as the most conspicuous and
ineffaceable reminder of a man that could be thought of; and yet the
whole aspect of the memorial betokened forgetfulness.  Probably not a
dozen people within the district knew the name of the person
commemorated, while perhaps not a soul remembered whether the column were
hollow or solid, whether with or without a tablet explaining its date and
purpose.”

Regaining the high road and passing uphill by where the Dewlish toll-gate
once stood, and by an up-and-down course infinitely varied as to
gradient, we come at length down to the valley of the Piddle, and to
Piddletown, the “Weatherbury” of _Far from the Madding Crowd_, where
Gabriel Oak, come down in the world by the agency of Fate and his foolish
young sheep-dog, took service with his distractingly elusive dear,
Bathsheba Everdene, the lady-farmer.  Weatherbury, as Mr. Hardy
regretfully tells us, is not the Weatherbury he once knew.  It has indeed
been very largely rebuilt, and the rather stern and prim limestone
cottages that stand prominently in one of its several streets do not
altogether prepossess one in favour of this village that is not quite a
townlet and yet may quite possibly resent the more rustic definition.
The “several” streets are, after all, rather roads, with rows of houses
and cottages less integrally than incidentally there, and the several are
perhaps reducible to a term less connotive of number; but they run in
unexpected directions and uncovenanted angles, and so make an imposing
show, comparable with the effect produced by six supers who, by judicious
stage-management in passing and repassing, can be made to represent an
army.  But the Piddle, running sparkling and clear through Piddletown,
redeems the conjoined effect of those streets and gives the place a final
and definitive _cachet_ of rurality, by no means belied by the very
large, though very rustic, church—happily still unrestored, and, with its
tall pews and fine Jacobean carved oak choir-gallery, a perfect picture
of an ancient Wessex place of worship.  Hardean village choirs and
Gabriel Oak’s bass voice take, if it be possible, an even greater air of
actuality to the pilgrim who enters here.

The interest of Piddletown church is added to by the fine and curious
bowl font, diapered in an unusual pattern, and by the tombs of the
Martins of Athelhampton, who lie mediævally recumbent in effigy in their
own chapel, quite unconcerned, although scored over with the initials of
the undistinguished, and although their old manor-house of Athelhampton,
near by, on the road to Bere Regis, has since the time they became
extinct passed through several alien hands.  Poor old fellows!  Their
somewhat threatening motto, under their old monkey crest, of “He who
looks at Martin’s ape Martin’s ape shall look at him!” has lost any point
it ever had.

                          [Picture: Piddletown]

A touching epitaph desires your prayers for two of the family:

    Here lyeth the body of Xpofer Martyn Esquyer,
    Sone and heyre unto Syr Willym Martyn, knyght,
    Pray for there Soules with harty desyre
    That bothe may be sure of Eternall lyght;
    Calling to Remembraunce that ev’ry wyhgt
    Most nedys dye, and therefor lett us pray
    As other for us may do Another day.

This church of Piddletown, or “Weatherbury,” is the scene of Sergeant
Troy’s belated remorse and of the acute misery of that incident where,
coming by the light of a lantern and planting flowers on Fanny Robin’s
grave, he sleeps in the porch while the rain-storm breaks and the
storm-water from the gurgoyles of the tower spouts furiously over the
spot.

“The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle’s jaws directed all its
vengeance into the grave.  The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion,
and boiled like chocolate.  The water accumulated and washed deeper down,
and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into the night. . . .  The
flowers so carefully planted by Fanny’s repentant lover began to move and
writhe in their bed.  The winter-violets turned slowly upside down, and
became a mere mat of mud.  Soon the snowdrops and other bulbs danced in
the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron.  Plants of the tufted
species were loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.”

The street beside the church retains a good deal of its quaint features
of thatch and plaster, with deep eaves where the house-martins build.  A
pretty corner including an old thatched house with architectonic windows
closely resembling those of a Queen Anne bureau, and supported on pillars
having a cousinship with classic art, is especially noticeable.

                 [Picture: A quaint corner in Piddletown]

If we wish to see the old mansion that served as model for Bathsheba’s
farm, we shall not find it in Piddletown, but must turn aside and proceed
up the valley of the Piddle, in the direction of Piddlehinton and
Piddletrenthide—usually termed “Longpiddle.”  Before reaching these, at
the distance of rather over a mile, we come to Lower Walterstone, where,
behind noble groups of beeches, horse-chestnuts, and sycamores growing on
raised grassy banks, it will be found, in the shape of a Jacobean mansion
eloquently portrayed by the novelist:

“By daylight, the bower of Oak’s new-found mistress, Bathsheba Everdene,
presented itself as a hoary building, of the Jacobean stage of Classic
Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion which told
at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the
manorial hall upon a small estate around it, now altogether effaced as a
distinct property, and merged in the vast tract of a non-resident
landlord which comprised several such modest demesnes.  Fluted pilasters,
worked from the solid stone, decorated its front, and above the roof
pairs of chimneys were here and there linked by an arch, some gables and
other unmanageable features still retaining traces of their Gothic
extraction.  Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions
upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or sengreen sprouted
from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings.  A gravel walk leading
from the door to the road in front was incrusted at the sides with more
moss—here it was a silver-green variety, the nut-brown of the gravel
being visible to the width of only a foot or two in the centre.  This
circumstance, and the generally sleepy air of the whole prospect here,
together with the animated and contrasting state of the reverse façade,
suggested to the imagination that, on the adaptation of the building for
farming purposes, the vital principle of the house had turned round
inside its body, to face the other way.”

The way from Piddletown to Dorchester, passing the hamlet singularly and
interestingly named “Troy Town,” which, although itself intrinsically
without visible interest, invites speculation, presently passes over
Yellowham Hill, clothed in luxuriant woods.  This spot, the “Yalbury
Hill” of Troy’s excruciatingly pitiful meeting with Fanny Robin, figures,
together with the woodlands—the “Yalbury Great Wood” of _Under the
Greenwood Tree_—in several others among the Wessex stories.  Coming to it
in old times, the coaches changed horses at the “Buck’s Head” inn, now
quite disestablished and forgot, save for the humorous description of it
to be found in the pages of _Far from the Madding Crowd_.  Unswervingly
the highway passes over its crest and down on the other side, the
wayfarer along it watched by bright-eyed squirrels and the other lesser
fauna of this dense covert, while he thinks himself unobserved.  It is a
lovely road, but you should see it and its encompassing woods in autumn,
when the October sunshine, with that characteristic golden sheen peculiar
to the time of year, falls between the rich red trunks of the firs on to
the golden-brown of the dried bracken; when the acorns are ripe on the
dwarf oaks and fall with startling little crashes into the sere leaves of
the undergrowth; when the nuts are ripe on the hazels and the
squirrels—too busy now to follow the wayfarer’s movements—are
industriously all day long gathering store of them over against winter.
Then Yellowham Woods are at their finest.

     [Picture: Lower Walterstone Farm: Original of Bathsheba’s farm]

Where the descent from this eminence reaches an intermediate level,
preparatory to diving again downwards, the road takes a curve through the
park-lands of Kingston House, a stately but cold-looking mansion of
stone, figuring in that first novel, _Desperate Remedies_, as “Knapwater
House.”  The bias of the architect, as he then was, is prominently
displayed in Mr. Hardy’s description of it: “The house was regularly and
substantially built of clean grey freestone throughout, in that plainer
fashion of Greek classicism which prevailed at the latter end of the last
century, when the copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic
variations in the Roman orders.  The main block approximated to a square
on the ground plan, having a projection in the centre of each side,
surmounted by a pediment.  From each angle of the north side ran a line
of buildings lower than the rest, turning inwards again at their farthest
end, and forming within them a spacious open court, within which
resounded an echo of astounding clearness.  These erections were in their
turn backed by ivy-covered ice-houses, laundries, and stables, the whole
mass of subsidiary buildings being half buried beneath close-set shrubs
and trees.”

Leaving aside, for the present, an exploration of Stinsford, down the
next turning, to come later to a particular and intimate discussion of
it, we proceed to Dorchester, whose houses, and those of its allied
suburb of Fordington, are now seen, crowning the ridge on which the old
county town stands.




CHAPTER VII


                                DORCHESTER

DORCHESTER, the “Casterbridge” of the novels, stands upon or, more
correctly, above, the River Frome, and from that circumstance derived its
ancient Roman name of Durnovaria, whose Latinity Mr. Hardy has exploited
in the name of “Durnover” he confers upon Fordington.  The Romans
themselves did by no means invent their name for the station they founded
here, but just adapted the title given by the native tribe of Durotriges
to their settlement.  Those natives, who were of Welsh stock, styled
their habitation by the sufficiently Welsh name of Dwrinwyr, which, like
all Cymric place-names, was descriptive and alluded to its watery
situation.

The approach to Dorchester has suffered in late years, in the pictorial
point of view, from the decay and destruction of many of those
magnificent old elms that once formed a noble introduction along this,
the “London Road”; but it is not wholly to be bankrupted of beauty, for,
although Dorchester may continue to grow, it is not in this direction
that its suburbs will be thrown out.  The flat water-meadows of the Frome
forbid building operations here, and in effect say, at the bridge
immediately below where Fordington on its ridge stands on the thitherward
bank of the stream—“thus far and no farther!”  From this approach,
looking to where Fordington’s houses die away on the left hand, and to
where the chalky downs begin to rise, you may obtain a distant view of
the novelist’s residence, a house he himself designed, standing beside
the Wareham Road near where an old turnpike-gate stood, and called from
it “Max Gate.”  Looking, however, straight ahead, the road into
Dorchester is seen becoming a street and going with inflexible Roman
directness through the town, with the ancient church tower of Fordington
slightly to the left, and the equally ancient church of St. Peter’s
immediately in front, in the centre of the town, where the two main
streets cross.  Attendant modern churches and chapels, and the Town Hall,
with spires, act as satellites.  To the right hand, rising bulky from the
huddled mass of houses, is a grey building which but a little experience
of touring in England identifies without need of inquiry as the gaol.

Dorchester, figuring as the “Casterbridge” of that mayor whose surprising
history is set forth in that powerful story, bulks large in the whole
series of Wessex novels—as how could it fail of doing, seeing that the
novelist himself was born at Upper Bockhampton, only three miles away?
In masterly fashion he has described its salient points, as they were
before modernity had come to obliterate them, or at least to take off the
sharp edge of their singularity.  He has expended much thought upon Roman
Dorchester, and speculated upon what manner of place it was fifteen
hundred years ago.  “Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street,
alley, and precinct.  It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed
dead men of Rome.  It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep
about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier
or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest
for a space of fifteen hundred years.”  Nay, even within the precincts of
his own garden, on the edge of the rotund upland that looks so wanly down
upon the railway, relics of the legionaries have been discovered.  Three
of those stout warriors were there found.  “Each body was fitted with,
one may almost say, perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the
head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other, the
tight-fitting situation being strongly suggestive of the chicken in the
egg-shell.”

More attuned to modern times is that description of Dorchester as it
appeared when Susan, Henchard’s wife, with Elizabeth-Jane, entered it
from the London Road that evening.  Wonderfully observed and true is that
passage where the light of the street lamps, glimmering through those
engirdling trees that were then, even more than now, the great feature of
the town, is made a snug and comforting contrast with the outside
country, seeming “strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering
its nearness to life.”  Then the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of
the people, as reflected in the character of the goods displayed in shop
windows, is neatly shown, in a list of those objects: the hay-rakes, the
seed-lips, butter-firkins, hoes and spades and mattocks; the
horse-embrocations, scythes, reaping-hooks, and hedger’s and ditcher’s
gloves, articles all of everyday requirement.

The “grizzled church” to which they came was St. Peter’s, whose tower
showed “how completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had
been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in the crevices
thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass, almost as far up as the
very battlements.”  Yes, and so one vividly remembers it; but restoration
has recently made away with all these evidences of age, and cleaned the
stonework and renewed and pointed it, greatly to the aid of the tower’s
structural stability, ’tis true, but the very death of picturesque
effect.  There is a pleasing thing here, at the foot of this tower, where
High East Street and High West Street join.  It is the bronze life-sized
statue, in his habit as he lived, of “Pa’son Barnes,” otherwise the
Reverend William Barnes, the Dorset poet, described by Thomas Hardy as he
is represented here—“an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak,
knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his
shoulders and a stout staff in his hand.”  This quaint figure, whose life
and thoughts and writings were racy of the soil whence he sprang—he was
born in the Vale of Blackmore—was for many years a quite inadequately
rewarded schoolmaster, and only late in life was given, first the living
of Whitcomb, and then that of Winterborne Came, near Dorchester.  His
poems in the Dorsetshire vernacular, long known and admired, were not
pecuniarily successful.  “What a mockery is life!” said he.  “They praise
me, and take away my bread!  They may be putting up a statue to me some
day, when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live.  I asked for
bread, and they gave me a stone!”

Prophetic indeed! for here is the statue, with beneath it the
inscription:

                                WILLIAM BARNES
                                  1801–1886

and the quotation from one of his own folk-poems:

    Zoo now I hope his kindly fëace
    Is gone to vind a better plëace,
    But still wi’ vo’k a’ left behind
    He’ll always be a kept in mind.

The mural monument of a sixteenth-century Thomas Hardy, within the
church, attracts attention.  The inscription states him to have been
“esquire” and of Melcombe Regis, and goes on to describe his benefactions
to the town and the gratitude of the “Baylives and Burgisses” therefor.
To “commend to posterity an example soe worthy of imitation,” they
erected this tablet.  He is said to be the common ancestor of Admiral Sir
Thomas Hardy, the friend and comrade of Nelson, and of Thomas Hardy, the
novelist.

Still from this tower of St. Peter’s sounds the curfew chime, with the
stroke of eight o’clock every evening, as described in the story; its
“peremptory clang” the signal for shop-shutting throughout the town.
“Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol,
another from the gable of an alms-house, with a preparative creak of
machinery more audible than the note of the bell.”

In High East Street stands, just as described, the principal inn—I
suppose in these times one should, for fear of disrespect say “hotel”—of
Dorchester, the “King’s Arms,” white-faced, with the selfsame “spacious
bow-window projected into the street over the main portico,” the whole
not too imposing for comfort, and not too homely for dignity.  It was a
coaching house in days gone by.  From a step above the pavement on the
opposite side of the street Susan and Elizabeth-Jane, amid the crowd,
witnessed the dinner given to the mayor, and through the archway Boldwood
carried Bathsheba, fainting at the news of her husband’s death.

Equally white-faced, but a good deal more picturesque, is the “White
Hart,” down at the end, or the beginning if you will, of the sloping
street, as you enter the town.  By it runs the Frome, and in its
courtyard on market-days may be seen such a concourse of carriers’ carts
as rarely witnessed nowadays.  Dorchester is a busy carrying centre, by
no means spoiled in that respect by railways, which yet fail to reach
many of its surrounding villages.

The brick bridge that here spans the Frome, and the stone bridge some
distance farther away, spanning a branch of the same stream out away in
the meads, have their parts in the _Mayor of Casterbridge_.  “These
bridges had speaking countenances.  Every projection in each was worn
down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from generations
of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year made restless
movements against these parapets, as they had stood there, meditating on
the aspect of affairs.  In the case of the more pliable bricks and
stones, even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the same mixed
mechanism.  The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint;
since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the
coping off and throw it down into the river, in reckless defiance of the
magistrates.  For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of
the town—those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in
crime.  Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their
meditations in preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so
clear.”  He goes on to tell how there was a marked difference in quality
between the frequenters of the near bridge of brick and the far one of
stone.  The more thoroughgoing failures and those with the most
threadbare characters, or with no characters at all, save bad ones,
preferred the near bridge: to reach it entailed less trouble, and it was
not for such as them to mind the glare of publicity.

“The _misérables_ who would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer
stamp.  They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is
called ‘out of a situation’ from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient
of the professional class—shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get
rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more
weary time between dinner and dark.”  These unfortunates gazed steadily
into the river, never turning to notice passers-by, and indeed shrinking
from observation.  And so day by day they looked and looked in the
stream, until at last their bodies were sometimes found in it.

                    [Picture: Ten Hatches, Dorchester]

When Henchard’s ruin was complete, he too began to frequent the stone
bridge, and would have ended in the same way, not at the bridge itself,
but over in the meadows where the many branches of the Frome are
regulated and controlled by a number of sluices known as Ten Hatches.
“To the east of Casterbridge lay moors and meadows, through which much
water flowed.  The wanderer in this direction, who should stand still for
a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these
waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones,
from near and far parts of the moor.  At a hole in a rotten weir they
executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone
breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic
cymballing; and at Durnover Weir they hissed.  The spot at which their
instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence
during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds.”

The ruined mayor, to whom, and not the cold, successful Donald Farfrae,
the reader’s sympathies go out, would have ended all his troubles here
with a plunge in the waters, had it not been for the ghastly floating
Skimmington effigy of himself he saw floating down the current as he was
about to drop in.

“Gray’s Bridge,” as the stone structure on the London Road is known, is
that toward which Bob Loveday, in the _Trumpet Major_, gazed anxiously,
awaiting the coach bearing his Matilda, and across it, of course, on
their way to Longpiddle, went those “Crusted Characters,” telling stories
in the carrier’s cart jogging along with them so comfortably from the
“White Hart.”

The fateful, almost sentient, character many natural objects are made to
assume in the march of Mr. Hardy’s tragic stories is expressly shown in
his description of the Roman amphitheatre of Maumbury, at the farther or
western extremity of Dorchester, beside the road to Weymouth.  He styles
it “the Ring, on the Budmouth Road,” and explains how “it was to
Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly
of the same magnitude.”  It is not, as might be gathered from this
passage, a building, like the Coliseum, but a vast amphitheatre formed by
earthworks.  Used by the Romans as the scene of their gladiatorial
displays, it has doubtless witnessed many an act of savage cruelty, but
is now a solitude.  A sinister place it has been always, for, when
executions were public affairs, the gallows stood within the old arena;
and until well into the eighteenth century the populace came to it in
thousands to witness the execution of felons where, before the dawn of
the Christian era, fighting men had struggled to the death: where
perhaps, in early Christian times, in the days of the Diocletian
persecution, Christians had been sacrificed.  It was here, in 1705, that
Mary Channing was executed, under the most fearful circumstances of
barbarity belonging to the penalties prescribed for _petit treason_.  The
crimes known by that name included several forms of rebellion against
authority, among them the murder of a husband by a wife.  A husband being
then, much more than now, in the eyes of the law in a position of
authority over his wife, to murder him was not merely murder—it was
_petit treason_ as well, and therefore deserving of exceptional
punishment.  Mary Brookes, married by the wish of her parents, against
her own inclination, to one Richard Channing of Dorchester, a grocer,
almost ruined him by her extravagance, and then poisoned him by giving
him white mercury, first in rice-milk, and twice afterwards in a glass of
wine.  At the Summer Assizes, 1704, she was found guilty and condemned to
death.  On March 21st, 1705, accordingly, she was strangled here, in this
arena, and then burned, the horrible spectacle being witnessed by ten
thousand persons.  She was but nineteen years of age.  This Golgotha was
disestablished in 1767, when the gallows was removed to the decent
solitudes of Bradford Down, a mile and a half along the Exeter Road, on
the way to Bridport.  It was to this spot that a mayor of Dorchester
desired to escort a distinguished traveller leaving the town, after being
presented with the customary address.  “May I be allowed to accompany
your Highness as far as the gallows?” he asked, greatly to the dismay of
that departing Serenity, to whom the allusion seemed more ill-omened than
really it was.  It is a tale told of many places and many mayors, and he
would be a clever commentator who should distinguish the real original.

The lone amphitheatre of Maumbury has thus, it will be seen, real
tragical associations fitting it for the novelist’s more sombre humours.
He tells how intrigues were there carried forward, how furtive and
sinister meetings happened within the rim of these ancient earthworks,
and how, although the patching up of long-standing feuds might be
attempted on this spot, seldom had it been the place of meeting of happy
lovers.  In this ring, then, the reconciliation of Susan and Henchard
took place, after eighteen years, and was but the prelude to miseries and
disasters.




CHAPTER VIII


                         DORCHESTER (_continued_)

HENCHARD’S house—“one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old
brick,” there are many such here—was in the neighbourhood of North
Street, and not far from that Corn Exchange where Bathsheba was wont, on
market days, to mingle with the burly farmers and corn-factors, like a
yacht among ironclads, displaying for inspection the sample wheat in her
outstretched palm.

Down here, too, is the gaol, whose mass is seen from the meads on
approaching the town.  It has been much altered, but the heavy stone
gateway, together with the flanking walls of red brick, is very much as
of old.  Happily, such things as are noticed in that gruesome short
story, _The Withered Arm_, are things only of dreadful memory.  At that
time the populace of Dorchester were accustomed to wait below in the
meadows, eager to witness the executioner, the criminals—murderers,
burglars, rick-firers, sheep and horse-stealers, even down to those
convicted of petty larceny—being capitally condemned and hanged as high
as, possibly indeed higher than, Haman, whose place of suspension is
notoriously and traditionally lofty.  Gertrude Lodge, coming here for the
cure of her withered arm by the agency of the dead man’s touch, observed,
as all could then not help observing, those “three rectangular lines
against the sky,” which indicated the coming execution and the morrow’s
exhibition, to be followed by the merry-makings of Hang Fair.  When she
enquired the hour of execution, she was told: “The same as usual—twelve
o’clock, or as soon after as the London mail-coach gets in.  We always
wait for that, in case of a reprieve.”

                        [Picture: Dorchester Gaol]

In Dorchester Gaol—we have no space here for those merely actual persons
of flesh and blood who have been incarcerated, or who have suffered in
it—those more real characters of fiction, Boldwood and Marston were
confined; and hence the Shottsford watchmaker of _The Three Strangers_,
lying under sentence of death, escaped along the downs to Higher
Crowstairs, where, while sheltering in the ingle-nook of the cottage, two
other strangers, one of them the hangman deputed to execute the demands
of the law upon him on the morrow, take shelter from the weather.

To follow this gloomy train a little longer, the veritable Hangman’s
Cottage, home of this erstwhile busy functionary, at a time when
Dorchester demanded the whole time and energies of a Jack Ketch, and not
a very occasional visit from one common to the whole kingdom, may be
seen, at the foot of Glydepath Lane, in a fine damp situation near the
river.  It is one of a tiny group of heavily thatched old rustic cottages
built of grouted flint and chalk, faced and patched with red brick, and
held together with iron ties, so that in their old age they shall not,
some night, altogether collapse and deposit their inhabitants among the
potatoes, the peas, and cabbages of their fertile gardens.  Dorchester
paid its hangman a regular salary, and in the intervals between his more
important business, he was under engagement to perform those minor
punishments of whipping and scourging, of putting in the stocks, and of
pillorying, by whose plentiful administration Old England was made the
“Merry England” of our forefathers.  Let not the reader, however, seek a
covert satire here.  It is not to be gainsaid that it was a “Merry
England,” for the times were so brutal that, in all such degrading and
pitiful spectacles as these, the populace took the keenest delight.
Sufficient for the day—! and those who made merry did not stop to
consider that they who were now spectators might soon very likely afford
in their own persons the same spectacle.

Miserable times!  Proof of them, do you need seek it, is to be found in
the Dorchester Museum, where the leaden weights, boldly inscribed
“MERCY,” are pointed out as the contribution, years ago, of an
exceptionally tender-hearted governor of the gaol to a more pitiful
method of ending the condemned man who was to die for his crime of arson.

               [Picture: The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester]

The man was of unusually light weight, and, as those were the times when
men really were slowly and painfully hanged and choked by degrees, before
criminals were given a drop and their necks broken, it was thought a
kindly thing on the part of this governor that he should have provided
these heavy weights, to attach to this particular victim’s feet and so
help to shorten his misery.

This museum it was that Lucetta, keen to get the girl out of the way,
suggested for Elizabeth Jane’s entertainment; with affected enthusiasm
and a good deal of veiled womanly sarcasm at the expense of antiquities,
describing how it contained “crowds of interesting things—skeletons,
teeth, old pots and pans, ancient boots and shoes, birds’ eggs—all
charmingly instructive.”

But enough of such things, let us to other quarters.

Looking on to the cheerful and prosperous South Street from the corner of
Durngate Street is the substantial “grey façade” of Lucetta’s house,
where lived Henchard’s lady-love, whose affections were so readily
transferable.  The lower portion of this, the “High Place Hall” of the
story, has suffered a transformation into business premises, but the
resounding alleyways of Durngate Street and neighbouring lanes are as
gloomy as those spots are described.  “At night the forms of passengers
were patterned by the lamps in black shadows upon the pale walls,” and so
they are still.

But the description of Lucetta’s house in those pages is a composite
picture; a good deal of it deriving from an old mansion in another part
of the town.  This will be found by taking a narrow thoroughfare leading
out of the north side of High West Street, and called, in different parts
of its course, Glydepath Lane and Glydepath Street.  In this quiet byway
is the early eighteenth-century mansion known as Colyton House, sometime
a town residence of the Churchill family, and so named from the little
Devonshire town of Colyton, near which is situated Ash, that old
dwelling, now a farmhouse, whence the historic Churchills sprang.

Readily to be seen, in a blank wall, is the long-filled-in archway, with
the dreadful keystone mask, alluded to in the pages of _The Mayor of
Casterbridge_.

                   [Picture: Colyton House, Dorchester]

“Originally the mask had exhibited a comic leer, as could still be
discerned; but generations of Casterbridge boys had thrown stones at the
mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the blows thereof had chipped off the
lips and jaws as if they had been eaten away by disease.”  Its appearance
is indeed of a ghastly leprous nature, infinitely shuddery.

At this end of the town, out upon the Charminster road is the great Roman
encampment of Poundbury, or, locally, “Pummery,” where Henchard spread
that feast, deserted by those for whom it was intended, in favour of the
rival entertainment in the West Walks, prepared by the hateful Farfrae,
that paragon of all the business and higher virtues, whom the reader
perversely, but not unnaturally, detests.  “Roman” it has been in this
last passage declared, but, in truth, its origin has been as widely
disputed as that of Weatherbury Castle, where the varying theories arouse
Mr. Hardy’s sarcasm so markedly.  It lies without the site of the Roman
walls of Durnovaria, and probably formed some advanced outpost or great
camp in the long years of the Roman occupation of Britain, before the
establishment of security and the growth of their towns.  Those Roman
walls are now for the most part gone and their sites were long ago
planted with avenues, now growing aged and past their prime, and ceased
to be that clean-cut barrier between _urbs_ and _rure_ they formed of
old, when Dorchester of pre-railway days had not grown too big for that
girdle the Romans had set about her: a girdle not too constrictive for
the needs of the Middle Age, nor even in the eighteenth century with any
suspicion of tight-lacing, but all too compressive soon after the coaches
had given way to trains, and steel rails and steam along them had sent up
the birthrate.  A notable passage in _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ tells
how there were not, quite a little while ago, any suburbs here, in the
modern sense, nor any gradual fusion of town and country.  “The farmer’s
boy could sit under his barleymow, and pitch a stone into the window of
the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances
standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a
sheep stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa,’ that floated in
at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”

But those bounds have in several places been leaped, and, in especial
where the South Walk runs, modern villas have redly replaced the golden
grain or the green pastures.  Changed manners and customs have brought
about this alteration, quite as much as increased population.  The four
old traditional streets of the town, together with their more immediate
offshoots, have been resigned more exclusively to business than of yore,
and made less a residence.  The butchers, the bakers, the
candlestick-makers, who would once have scorned to live anywhere else
than over “the shop,” will now not very often condescend to make their
homes in the upper stages of their “stores” or “establishments,” or by
what other pretty names modern finesse elects to describe shops and
counters and tills and such like things by which tradespeople become
rich.

And, by that same token, the business premises thus deserted for snug
suburban villas, are themselves changing.  One could never, in modern
times, have strictly called Dorchester generally picturesque, in the
prominent circumstances of those four main streets: repeated
conflagrations that destroyed most of the really old and interesting
houses forbade that, and replaced thatch and barge-boarded gables with
plain brick fronts, severe in unornamental rectangular windows, and
ending on the skyline with unimaginative straight copings.  But the
latest manifestations of these times, when they say business is a
struggle and all trades alike carried on less for the profit of the
purveyor, than for the good of the purchaser, are expensive carved stone
and brick frontages, with good artistic features.  As art in this country
only spells much expenditure of good money and as building operations are
always costly, it is a little difficult to square all these developments
with the talk of “hard times.”  South Street, in especial, is being
grandly transformed, and “Napper’s Mite,” the crouching row of
almshouses, built from the benefaction of the good Sir Robert Napper, in
1615, made to look additionally humble by newly risen tall buildings.
But the town authorities have not yet removed the old rusticated stone
obelisk that stands in Cornhill, in the centre of the town, where High
East and High West Streets, and North and South Streets meet.  It serves
the multum-in-parvo purposes of a pump, a lamp-standard, and a
leaning-stock for Dorchester’s weary or born-tired, and is moreover a
landmark.  But the two dumpy little houses at the corner, which were
properly dumpy and humble and—so to speak—knew their place, and abased
themselves in the presence of their betters—that is to say, in the
contiguity of St. Peter’s across the road—have been rebuilt, with the
result that their tall upstanding pretentiousness detracts not a little
from the height of that “grizzled tower.”

And so, turning to the left at this corner, we leave Dorchester for
Bridport, along High West Street, the quietest of all these
thoroughfares, and looking rather “out of it,” and somewhat glad of that
fact, in a dignified, exclusive way, typified by its aristocratic old
houses, and its old County Hall.  It is true there are a few shops in
High Street, but they are by no means pushful shops.  They never make
“alarming sacrifices,” nor sell off.  Indeed, were I not fearful of
offending susceptibility, I might declare a belief that they never sell
anything at all, and are kept by “grown-ups,” not grown tired of playing
at shops when they did so arrive at years supposed to be those of
discretion.  Here is a quiet shop—where they will doubtless sell you
something, if you really enter and firmly insist upon it—occupying one of
the few really old and picturesque houses in the main thoroughfare; it is
the house “by tradition” occupied by the infamous Judge Jeffreys, when
visiting Dorchester on the business of that special occasion, the Bloody
Assize, holden to try the unhappy wretches arraigned for their part in
Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685.  The old house bears an inscription to this
effect.  Over three hundred prisoners faced the judge at that awful time,
and two hundred and ninety received sentence of death.  Of these the
number actually executed was seventy-four, and, as the old gossip at the
“Three Mariners” tells, portions of their bodies were gibbeted in various
parts of the county, “different j’ints sent about the country like
butcher’s meat.”

And so we leave Dorchester and its, on the whole, grim memories, along an
avenue, fellow to that by which the town was entered.




CHAPTER IX


                                 SWANAGE

THE name of Swanage shares with that of Swansea, the honour of being,
perhaps, the most poetic that any seaside resort ever owned.  It is a
corruption of the Danish name of “Swanic,” or “Swanwich,” and there seems
to be no reason to doubt—although there exists a school of antiquarians
sceptical enough to doubt it—that the place was then, as its name
indicates, a place of swans.  Your modern antiquary, disgusted at the
childish legends once everywhere accepted as sober historical facts,
rushes to the other extreme, and, although a thing be obvious, will not
allow its obviousness, unless supported by documentary or other tangible
evidence.  He must needs disregard the self-evident, and delve deeply and
unavailingly in attempts to prove that “things are not what they seem.”

Conjectures that there was at that time a royal swannery here are based
upon the known fondness of royal personages for preserving that bird,
once thought a table delicacy, and upon the existence from ancient times
of the famous Abbotsbury swannery, along this same coast.  But it is
needless here to labour the point; and although the little stream, more
and more pollutedly with every year of the extension of modern Swanage,
still flows down into the sea under the name of the Swan Brook, the
argument supported by it in favour of the obvious origin of the
place-name shall be no further pursued.

But the surrounding quarries have for many centuries past given a very
different character to Swanage than that of a village with a marshy creek
inhabited by swans.  Few places ever proclaimed the industries by which
they lived more prominently than did this little port, until well within
recent recollection.  A colliery town no more insistently obtrudes the
circumstances by which it earns its livelihood than Swanage displayed
evidences of its cleanly trade and craft of stone-working and
stone-exporting.

The varieties of stone from the quarries to the rear of Swanage are among
the most famous building and decorative stones in the world; for here we
are at the gates of Isle of Purbeck, where, not only the oolitic
limestone of the same nature as “Portland stone” is quarried, but that
(to antiquaries at least) far more generally known material, “Purbeck
marble,” as well.  No ancient church or cathedral of any considerable
size or elaboration was considered complete without shafts and font and
other decorative features of Purbeck marble, sometimes polished, at other
times left in its native state; and thus, from very early times until the
beginning of the sixteenth century, when more strikingly  and
patterned foreign marbles began to find their way into England, Swanage
in particular, and Purbeck in general, enjoyed an amazing prosperity.

Swanage in Mr. Hardy’s pages is “Knollsea,” and is described in _The Hand
of Ethelberta_ as a village:—“Knollsea,” we learn, “was a seaside village
lying snug within two headlands, as between a finger and thumb.”  A very
true simile, as a glance on the map, upon the configuration of Swanage
Bay, will satisfy those curious in the exactness or otherwise of literary
images.  But time has very rapidly vitiated the justness of what
follows:—“Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a quarrier,
unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and had been a
quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half and had been
to sea.”

“The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same special sort as their
pursuits.  The quarrymen in white fustian understood practical geology,
the laws and accidents of dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the
ways of the world and mammon; the seafaring men, in Guernsey frocks, had
a clearer notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies
than of any inland town in their own country.  This, for them, consisted
of a busy portion, the Channel, where they lived and laboured, and a dull
portion, the vague unexplored miles of interior at the back of the ports,
which they seldom thought of.”

This charming picture of an out-of-the world place remained, very little
blurred by change, until well on into the ’80’s of the nineteenth
century, when it occurred to exploiting railway folk that the time was
ripe for the construction of a branch railway from Wareham.  With the
opening of that line the primitive houses, and the equally primitive
people who lived in them, suffered a change almost as sudden and complete
as though a harlequin had waved his wand over their heads.

There was indeed something exceptionally primitive in the Swanage people.
They were chiefly quarrymen, and like all quarry folk, mining the great
blocks of stone from mother earth, a strangely reserved and isolated
race.  A man who, felling timber, might conceivably remain all his life
mentally detached from his occupation, following it only mechanically,
could not long in these quarries, rich in the embalmed stoniness of
myriads of humble creatures living in the palæozoic age, remain
unaffected by his surroundings.  An imaginative man might, not inaptly,
conceive himself as a phenomenally gigantic giant working in some vast
petrified graveyard among the petrifactions of a world infinitely little;
and, as the dyer’s hand is subdued to the dye he works in, and—a less
classic allusion—as the photographer acquires a permanent stain from his
collodion, he could scarce escape the almost inevitable mental twist
resulting from the surroundings.

And as they were, and in some measure still are, individually peculiar,
so collectively they retain their exclusiveness.  Still, with every
recurrent Shrove Tuesday, their guild meets at Corfe, under the
presidency of warden and steward; and even in these days it is not open
for an outsider to become a Purbeck quarryman.  It is an industry only to
be followed by patrimony and by due admission into its membership in the
prescribed manner, which is that of appearing at the annual court with a
penny loaf in one hand, a pot of beer in the other, and a sum of six
shillings and eightpence in the pocket, ready to be duly paid down.

With all the changes that have overtaken Swanage, who knows nowadays,
save very old folk, that Swanage people are, or were, locally “Swanage
Turks”?  When—outside Swanage, of course—you asked why so named, you were
apt to be told “Tarks, we al’us carls ’em, ’cos they don’t know nawthen
about anything.”  The informant in this particular instance was a Poole
man.  None could possibly have brought this charge of comprehensive and
thorough-going ignorance against the natives of Poole, for that ancient
port was a sink of iniquity, and inhabited, if we are to believe the
history books—which there is no reason we should not do—by ruffians who
were by no means unspotted of the world, but had plumbed the depths of
every wickedness.  Since Swanage has become the terminus of a branch
railway and become a seaside resort, its “Turks” have acquired a very
considerable amount of worldly wisdom, and can argue and chop logic with
you, as well as the best.

To those who knew and loved old Swanage, the change that has come with
its tardy accessibility by rail is woeful, but to those who have not so
known and loved, I daresay it seems, by contrast with Bournemouth, a
place strangely undeveloped.  The trouble with the first-named is that
development has been all too rapid, and has utterly robbed Swanage of its
immemorial character as the port whence the famous Purbeck stone was
shipped.  Alas! pretentious houses of a tall and terrible ugliness now
stand in the middle of the bay, on the shore immediately in front of what
used merely by courtesy to be called “the town,” but is now actually
grown to that status.  The “bankers”—rows upon rows of stacked slabs of
Purbeck stone that used to form so striking a feature of the shore, and
were wont, to a stranger seeing them first on a moonlit night, to look so
grisly, as though this were some close-packed seashore cemetery—the
circumstance of facetious irony—the grown prosperity of Swanage has built
banks, where the Swanage tradesfolk doubtless deposit heavily from the
profits of their summer trading.

                    [Picture: The Old Church, Swanage]

In the distance, along the curving shore of Swanage Bay, there has arisen
with the development of the Durlstone estate, a grand hotel, and in the
town itself—the folly of it!—uninteresting modern commercial buildings
have replaced the quaint old cottages that, built as they were, in a
peculiarly local fashion, with great stone slabs and rude stone tiling,
had their like nowhere else.  Now, the rows of newly arisen streets are
such as have their counterparts in every town, and you can dine _à la
carte_ or _table-d’hôte_ at the many hotels and boarding-houses, as their
announcements boldly inform the visitor, quite as elaborately as in great
cities.  All, without doubt, very refined and up to date, but perhaps not
to all of us, who keep the simple and robustious appetites of our
beginnings, so pleasing a change from the time (of which Kingsley speaks)
when a simple glass of ale and a crust of bread and cheese at a rustic
inn was all one wished, and certainly all one could have got.

Of those times there are but little “islands,” so to speak, left in the
surging mass of modern brick and stone.  One of them is the ancient
church, whose tower is thought to be Saxon—the church where Ethelberta
Petherwin, in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, marries Lord Mountclere.
Another, tucked away behind the Town Hall, and only to be with some
difficulty discovered, is the old village lock-up.  No dread Bastille
this, but an affair resembling a stone tool-house, twelve feet by eight,
and lighted only by the holes in the decaying woodwork of its
nail-studded door.  It was built in 1803, “erected” as the old
inscription tells us, “for the prevention of Wickedness and Vice by the
Friends of Religion and Good Order.”  The inference to be drawn from the
small size of this place of incarceration is that the “Wickedness and
Vice” of Swanage were on a very insignificant scale.  Although Swanage
has grown so greatly, and now owns a very fine and large police-station,
it is not to be inferred that the delinquencies have increased in
proportion, but rather that officialism has made a larger growth, and
that Swanage, like poor old England in general, is over-governed.

Among other outstanding features of Swanage, conferred upon it by the
late Mr. Mowlem, of the London contracting firm of Mowlem and Burt, is
the Wellington Clock Tower, the Gothic pinnacled structure now
ornamenting the foreshore, in what were once the private gardens of “the
Grove.”  But “the Grove” has now, like many another seashore estate, been
cut up, and new villas now take the place of the older exclusiveness.

The Clock Tower, one of the many memorials to the great Duke of
Wellington, stood, until about 1860, on the south side of London Bridge,
but was removed when the roadway was widened at that point.  Once
removed, the good folk of Southwark were at a loss what to do with it,
and so solved their difficulty by presenting its stones to Mr. Mowlem,
the contractor.  They thought he had been saddled with a “white
elephant,” and chuckled accordingly; but they little knew their man.  He
considered the relic “just the thing” for his native town of Swanage, and
accepting it with the greatest alacrity, despatched it hither, and
presented it to his friend Mr. Docwra, of “the Grove.”  This poor old
monument to martial glory has suffered of late, for its pinnacle has been
blown down and replaced by a copper sheathing very like a dish-cover.




CHAPTER X


                         SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE

THAT pilgrim who, whether on foot or by cycle, shall elect to trace these
landmarks, will find the road out of Swanage to Corfe, by way of Langton
Matravers and Kingston a heart-breaking stretch of stony hills, whose
blinding glare under a summer sun is provocative of ophthalmia, and whose
severities of stone walling, in place of green hedges, recall the scenery
of Ireland.  Herston, too, the unlovely outskirt of Swanage, is not
encouraging.  But the world—it is a truism—is made up of all sorts, and
here, as elsewhere, rewards come after trials.

Langton Matravers, on the ridge-road, is, just as one might suppose from
the stony nature of Purbeck, a village of stone houses, and very grim and
unornamental ones too.  Nine hundred souls live here, and so long as the
“Langton freestone” won from its quarries is in good demand, are happy
enough, although subject to every extremity of weather.  The “Matravers”
in the place-name derives from the old manorial lords, the Maltravers
family, who dropped the “l” out of their name some time after one of
their race, deeply implicated in the barbarous murder of Edward II.,
proved himself a very “bad Travers” indeed, and so made his name
peculiarly descriptive.

Passing Gallows Gore Cottages—what a melodramatic address to own!—we come
to Kingston village, along just such a road, with just such a view as
that described in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, although, to be sure, she
went, on that donkey-ride to Corfe, by another and very roundabout route,
through Ulwell Gap, over Nine Barrow Down.  Ordinary folk would have gone
by the ordinary road; but then, you see, Ethelberta was a poetess, and
“unconventionality—almost eccentricity—was _de rigueur_” for such an one.
Hence also that unconventional, and uncomfortable, seat on the donkey’s
back.

From this point Corfe Castle is exquisitely seen, down below the ridge,
but situated on the course of the minor, but still mighty, backbone that
bisects the Isle.  From hence, too, the country may be seen spread out
like a map, “domains behind domains, parishes by the score, harbours,
fir-woods and little inland seas mixing curiously together.”  Dipping
down out of sight of all these distant Lands of Promise, among the richly
wooded lanes of Kingston, the glaring limestone road is exchanged for
shaded ways, where sunlight only filters through in patches of gold,
looking to the imaginative as though some giant had come this way and
dropped the contents of his money-bags.  Thatched cottages, tall elms,
and old-fashioned roadside gardens are the features of Kingston; but
above all these, geographically and in every other respect, is the great
and magnificent modern church built for Lord Eldon and completed in 1880,
after seven years’ work and a vast amount of money had been expended upon
it.  It was designed by Street—that same “obliterator of historic
records”—who at Fawley Magna earned Mr. Hardy’s satire; but here were no
records to obliterate.  Certain reminiscences of the architect’s early
studies of the early Gothic of the Rhine churches may be traced here, in
the exterior design of the apsidal chancel, strongly resembling that of
Fawley, but one would hesitate to apply the opprobrious term of
“German-Gothic” to this, as a whole.  Its intention is Early English, but
the general effect is rather of a Norman spirit informed with Early
English details; an effect greatly accentuated by the heaviness and bulk
of the central tower, intended by Lord Eldon to be a prominent landmark,
and fulfilling that intention by the sacrifice of proportion to the rest
of the building.  Cruciform plan, size, and general elaboration render
this a church particularly unfitted for so small and so rustic a village.
Had its needs been studied, rather than the ecclesiological tastes of the
third Lord Eldon, the little church built many years ago for the first
earl, the great lawyer-lord, by Repton, would have sufficed; although to
be sure it has all the faults of the first attempts at reviving Gothic.

The Earl of Eldon purchased the manor of Kingston and the residence of
Encombe from William Morton Pitt in 1807.  Here, in that little church
built by him, he lies, beside his “Bessie,” that Bessie Surtees with whom
he, then plain and penniless John Scott, eloped from the old house on
Sandhill, Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1772.  His house of Encombe, the
“Enkworth Court,” of _The Hand of Ethelberta_, lies deep down in the glen
of Encombe, approached by a long road gradually descending into the
cup-like crater by the only expedient of winding round it.  Think of all
the beautiful road scenery you have ever seen or heard of, and you will
not have seen or been told of anything more beautiful in its especial
kind of beauty than this sequestered road down into Lord Eldon’s retreat.
Jagged white cliffs here and there project themselves out of the steep
banks of grass and moss above the way, draped with a profusion of
small-leaved ground-ivy and a wealth of hart’s-tongue ferns, and trees
romantically shade the whole.  An obelisk erected by the great statesman,
on a bold bluff, to the memory of his brother, Lord Stowell, adds an
element of romance to the scene, and then, plunging into a final mass of
tangled woodland, the grey stone elevation of the house is seen,
ghostlike, fronting a gravel drive, in its silence and drawn blinds
looking less like the home of some fairy princess than the residence of a
misanthrope, who has retired beyond the reach of the world and drawn his
blinds, with the hope of persuading any who may possibly find their way
here that he is not at home.

                            [Picture: Encombe]

“Enkworth Court” was, we are told, “a house in which Pugin would have
torn his hair,” and Encombe certainly can possess no charms for amateurs
of Gothic.  Nor can it possibly delight students of the ancient Greek and
Roman orders, for its architecture has classic intentions without being
classical, and heaviness without dignity.  But its interior, if it
likewise does not appeal to a cultivated taste in matters connected with
the mother of all the arts, is exceptionally comfortable.  Here the old
Chancellor, over eighty years of age, spent most of his declining days.
“His sporting days were over; he had but little interest in gardening or
farming; and his only reading, beside the newspaper, was a chapter in the
Bible.  His mornings he spent in an elbow-chair by the fireside in his
study—called his shop—which was ornamented by portraits of his deceased
master, George III. and his living companion, Pincher, a poodle dog.”

From Kingston to Corfe Castle, the bourne of innumerable summer visitors,
is two miles.  The first glimpse of town and castle is one which clearly
shows how aptly the site of them obtained its original name of
Corvesgate, from the Anglo-Saxon _ceorfan_, to cut.  The site was so
named long before castle or town were erected here, and referred to the
passages cut or carved through the bold range of hills by the little
river Corfe and its tributaries.  Those clefts are clearly distinguished
from here and from the main road between Corfe and Swanage, and are
notched twice, so deeply into the stony range, that the eminence on which
the castle stands is less like a part of one continuous chain of hills
than an isolated conical hill neighboured by lengthy ridges.

On that islanded hill, shouldered by taller neighbours, the castle was
built, because at this point it so effectually guarded these passes from
the shores of Purbeck to the inland regions.  The position in these days
seems a singular one, for from the upper <DW72>s of those neighbours it is
possible to look down into the castle and observe its every detail, but
such things mattered little in days before artillery.

A first impression of Corfe, if it be summer, is an impression of
dazzling whiteness; resolved, on a nearer approach, into the pure white
of the road and of the occasional repairs and restorations of the
stone-built streets, the grey white of buildings past their first
novelty, and the dead greyness of the roofing slabs of stone.  There is
little colour in Corfe when June has gone.  The golden-green lichens and
houseleeks of spring have been sucked dry by the summer heats and turned
to withered rustiness, and even the grass of the pyramidical hill on
which the castle keep is reared has little more than an exhausted
sage-green hue.

“Corvsgate Castle,” as we find it styled in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, is
frequently the scene, at such a time of year, of meetings like that of
the “Imperial Association” in that story.  All that is to be known
respecting these ruins, “the meagre stumps remaining from flourishing
bygone centuries,” is the common property of all interested in historical
antiquities, but there is something, it may be supposed, in revisiting
the oft-visited and in retelling the old tale, which bids defiance to
_ennui_ and precludes satiety, even although the President’s address be a
paraphrase of the last archæological paper, and that the echo of its
predecessor, and so forth, in endless _diminuendo_:

    And smaller fleas have lesser fleas,
    And so _ad infinitum_.

“Carfe,” as any Wessex man of the soil will name it, just as horses are
‘harses’ and hornets become ‘harnets’ in his ancient and untutored
pronunciation, is, as already hinted, a place of stone buildings, where
brick, although not unknown, is remarkable.  Stone from foundation to
roof, and stone slabs of immense size for the roofs themselves.  In a
place where building-stone is and has been so readily found it is, of
course, in the nature of things to find the remains of a castle that must
have been exceptionally large and strong, and here they are, peering over
the rooftops of the town from whatever point of view you choose.  The
castle is as essential a feature in all views of the town as it is in
history; and rightly too, for had it not been for that fortress there
would have been no town.  It is a town by courtesy and ancient estate,
and a village by size; a village that does not grow and has so far
escaped the desecration of modern streets.  The market cross, recently
restored to perfection from a shattered stump, and the town hall both
declare it to have been a town, as does, or did, the existence of a
mayor, but such things have long become vanities.  The return of two
members to Parliament, a privilege Corfe enjoyed until reform put an end
to it in 1832, proved nothing, for Parliamentary representation was no
more fixed on the principle of comparative electorates than the
representation of Ireland is now in the House of Commons.

                         [Picture: Corfe Castle]

The temperance interest need by no means be shocked when it is said that
the most interesting feature of Corfe, next to the castle, is its inn.
The church does not count; for the body of it has been uninterestingly
rebuilt, and only the fine tower, of Perpendicular date, remains.  The
inns, however, combine picturesqueness with the solid British comforts of
old times and the less substantial amenities of the new.  Here, looking
upon the “Bankes Arms,” with its highly elaborate heraldic sign, you can
have no manner of doubt as to what family is still paramount in Corfe,
and I think, perhaps, that to shelter behind so gorgeous an achievement
even reflects a halo upon the guest; while if the “Greyhound” can confer
no such satisfaction, its unusual picturesqueness, with that charming
feature of a porch projecting over the pavement and owning a capacious
room poised above the comings and goings, the commerce and gossipings of
the people, can at least give a visitor the charm of what, although an
ancient feature of the place, is at least a novelty to him.

The three cylindrical stone columns of plethoric figure which support
this porch and its room are more generally useful than the architect who
placed them here, some two hundred and eighty years ago, probably ever
imagined they would be.  _He_ devised them for the support of his gazebo
above, but more than twenty generations of Wessex folk have found them
convenient for leaning-stocks, and the comfortable support they give has
further lengthened many a long argument which, had all contributing
parties stood supported only by their own two natural posts that carry
the bodily superstructure, would have been earlier concluded.  The
progress of an argument, discussion, narration, or negotiation under such
unequal conditions is to be watched with interest.  Time probably will
forbid one being followed from beginning to end; but to be a spectator of
one of these comedies from the middle onwards is sufficient.  The length
it has already been played may generally be pretty accurately estimated
by the state of weariness or impatience exhibited by that party to it who
is not supported by the pillar.  The “well, as I was saying” of the one
enjoying the leaning-stock, discloses, like the parson’s “secondly, Dear
brethren,” the fact that the discourse is well on the way, but the same
thing may be gathered by those out of earshot, in the manœuvres of the
less fortunate of the two, the one who is supporting his own bulk.  He
stands upright, hands behind his back, while swaying his walking stick;
then he leans his weight to one side upon it, first (if he be a stout
man, whom it behoves to exercise caution) carefully selecting a safe
crevice in the jointing of the pavement, as a bearing for the ferule of
his ash-plant; then, growing weary of this attitude, he repeats the
process on the other side, changing after a while to the expedient of a
sideways stress, halfway up the body, by straining the walking stick
horizontally against the wall.  Then, having exhausted all possible
movements, he takes a bulky silver watch from his pocket, and affects to
find time unexpectedly ahead of him; and when this resort is reached the
spectacle generally comes to a conclusion.

But it is time to follow Ethelberta into the castle:—

    “Ethelberta crossed the bridge over the moat, and rode under the
    first archway into the outer ward.  As she had expected, not a soul
    was here.  The arrow-slits, portcullis-grooves, and staircases met
    her eye as familiar friends, for in her childhood she had once paid a
    visit to the spot.  Ascending the green incline and through another
    arch into the second ward, she still pressed on, till at last the ass
    was unable to clamber an inch further.  Here she dismounted, and
    tying him to a stone which projected like a fang from a raw edge of
    wall, performed the remainder of the journey on foot.  Once among the
    towers above, she became so interested in the windy corridors,
    mildewed dungeons, and the tribe of daws peering invidiously upon her
    from overhead, that she forgot the flight of time.”

The ruins that Ethelberta and the “Imperial Association” had come to
inspect owe their heaped and toppling ruination to that last great armed
convulsion in our insular history, the Civil War, whose two greatest
personalities were Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell.  Until that time the
proud fortress had stood unharmed, as stalwart as when built in Norman
times.

The history of Corfe before those times is very obscure, and no one has
yet discovered whether the first recorded incident in it took place at a
mere hunting-lodge here or at the gates of a fortress.  That incident,
the first and most atrocious of all the atrocious deeds of blood wrought
at Corfe, was the murder of King Edward “the Martyr,” in A.D. 978, by his
stepmother, Queen Elfrida, anxious to secure the throne for her own son.
The boy—he was only in his nineteenth year—had drawn rein here, on his
return alone from hunting, and was drinking at the door from a goblet
handed him by Elfrida herself when she stabbed him to the heart.  His
horse, startled at the attack, darted away, dragging the body by the
stirrups, and thus, battered and lifeless, it was found.

Built, or rebuilt, in the time of the Conqueror, Corfe Castle was early
besieged, and in that passage gave a good account of itself and justified
its existence, for King Stephen failed to take it by force or to starve
the garrison out.  How long he may have been pleased to sit down before
it we do not know, for the approach of a relieving force caused him to
pack his baggage and be off.  Strong, however, as it was even then, it
was continually under enlargement in the reigns of Henry II., Henry III.,
and Edward I., and had a better right to the oft-used boast of being
impregnable than most other fortresses.




CHAPTER XI


                               CORFE CASTLE

LIKE some cruel ogre of folk-lore the Castle of Corfe has drunk deep of
blood.  Its strength kept prisoners safely guarded, as well as foes at
arm’s length, and many a despairing wretch has been hurried through the
now ruined gatehouse, to the muttered “God help him!” of some
compassionate warder.  Through the great open Outer Ward and steeply
uphill between the two gloomy circular drum-towers across the second
ward, and thence to the Dungeon Tower at the further left-hand corner of
the stronghold, they were taken and thrust into some vile place of little
ease, to be imprisoned for a lifetime, to be starved to death, or more
mercifully ended by the assassin’s dagger.  Twenty-four knights captured
in Brittany, in arms against King John, in aid of his nephew, Arthur,
were imprisoned here, in 1202, and twenty-two of them met death by
starvation in some foul underground hold.  Prince Arthur, as every one
knows, was blinded by orders of the ruthless king, and Arthur’s sister,
Eleanor, was thrown into captivity, first here and then at Bristol,
where, after forty years, she died.  Thus did monarchs dispose of rivals,
and those who aided them, in the “good old days,” and other monarchs, not
so ferocious, or not so well able to take care of themselves, stood in
danger of tasting the same fare, as in the case of Edward II. imprisoned
here and murdered in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle.  Sympathies go out
to the unhappy captives and victims, but a knowledge of these things
tells us that they would have done the same, had opportunity offered and
the positions been reversed.

This stronghold held many a humbler prisoner, among them those who had
offended in one or other of the easy ways of offence in this, the King’s
deer-forest of Purbeck; and many others immured for mere caprice.  The
place must have reeked with blood and been strewn with bones like a
hyæna’s lair.

                         [Picture: Corfe Castle]

So much for the domestic history of Corfe Castle.  Its last great
appearance in the history of the nation was during the civil wars of King
and Parliament, when it justified the design of its builders, and proved
the excellence of its defences by successfully withstanding two sieges;
falling in the second solely by treachery.  It had by that time passed
through many hands, and had come at last to the Bankes family, by whom it
is still owned.  It was only eight years before the first siege in this
war that the property had been acquired by the Lord Chief Justice of the
Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes, who purchased it from the widow of that
celebrated lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, the Coke of “Coke upon Littleton.”

                         [Picture: Corfe Castle]

When the civil war broke out, Sir John Bankes, called to the King’s side
at York, left his wife and children at their home of Kingston Lacy, near
Wimborne Minster, whence, for security from the covert sneers and petty
annoyances offered them by the once humbly subservient townsfolk, not
slow to note the trend of affairs, they removed in the autumn of 1642 to
Corfe Castle, where they spent the winter unmolested.

Although they thus sought shelter here, they probably had no idea of the
heights to which the tide of rebellion would rise, and could scarce have
anticipated being besieged; but the Parliamentary leaders in the district
had their eyes upon a fortress which, already obsolete and the subject of
antiquarian curiosity, could yet be made a place of strength, as the
sequel was presently to show.

The first attempt to gain possession of the castle was by a subterfuge,
ingenious and plausible enough.  The Mayor of Corfe had from time
immemorial held a stag hunt annually, on May Day, and it was thought
that, if on this occasion some additional parties of horse were to
attend, and to seize the stronghold under colour of paying a visit, the
thing would be done with ease.  So probably it would, but for the keen
feminine intuition of Lady Bankes, who closed the gates and mounted a
guard upon the entrance-towers, so that when those huntsmen came and
demanded surrender, scarcely in the manner of visitors, they were at once
denied admission, and effectually unmasked.  The revolutionary committee
sitting at Poole then considered it advisable to despatch a body of
sailors, who appeared before the castle, early one morning, to demand the
surrender of four small dismounted pieces of cannon with which it was
armed.  “But,” says the _Mercurius Rusticus_, a contemporary news-sheet,
“instead of delivering them, though at the time there were but five men
in the Castle, yet these five, assisted by the maid-servants, at their
ladies’ Command, mount these peeces on their carriages againe, and lading
one of them they gave fire, which small Thunder so affrighted the Sea-men
that they all quitted the place and ran away.”

Operations thus opened, Lady Bankes proved herself a ready and
resourceful general.  By beat of drum she summoned tenants and friends,
who, responding to the number of fifty, garrisoned the fortress for about
a week, when a scarcity of provisions, together with threatening letters,
and the entreaties of their wives, to whom home and children were more
than King or Parliament, or the Bankes family either, made them shamble
home again.  We should perhaps not be too ready to censure them.  Lady
Bankes, however, did not despair.  A born strategist, she perceived how
vitally necessary it was, above all else, to lay in a stock of
provisions; and to secure them, and time for her preparations she offered
in the meekest way to give up those cannon which, after all, although
they made the maximum of noise effected a minimum of harm.

The enemy, pacified by this offer, removed the guns and left the castle
alone for a while; thinking its defences weak enough.  But it was soon
thoroughly provisioned, supplied with ammunition, and garrisoned under
the command of one Captain Lawrence, and when the Roundheads of Poole
next turned their attention to Corfe, behold! it was bristling like a
porcupine with pikes and musquetoons and all those ancient
seventeenth-century engines of war, with which men were quaintly done to
death—when by some exceptional chance the marksmen earned their name and
hit anybody.

The middle of June had gone before the Parliamentary forces from Poole
made their appearance.  They numbered between two and three hundred horse
and foot, and brought two cannon, with which they played upon the castle
from the neighbouring hills, with little effect.  Then came an interlude,
ended by the appearance, on June 23rd, of Sir Walter Erle with between
five and six hundred men, to reinforce the besiegers.  They brought with
them a “Demy-Canon, a Culverin, and two Sacres,” and with these fired a
hail of small shot down into the castle upon those heights on either
hand.  The results were poor to insignificance, and it was then
determined to attempt a storming of the castle.  This grand advance, made
on June 26th, was begun by intimidating shouts that no quarter would be
granted, but the garrison were so little terrified by this fighting with
the mouth that, tired of waiting the enemy from the walls, they even
sallied out and slaughtered some of the foremost, who were approaching
cautiously under cover of strange engines named the “Sow” and the “Boar.”
The besiegers then mounted a cannon on the top of the church-tower,
“which,” we are told, “they, without fears of prophanation used,” and
breaking the organ, used the pipes of it for shot-cases.  The ammunition
included, among other strange missiles, lumps of lead torn off the roof
and rolled up.

All these things proving useless, a band of a hundred and fifty sailors
was sent by the Earl of Warwick, with large supplies of petards and
grenadoes, and a number of scaling ladders, and then all thought the
enterprise in a fair way of being ended.  The sailors, nothing loth, were
made drunk, the ladders were placed against the walls, and a sum of
twenty pounds was offered to the first man up.  With preparations so
generous as these a riotous scaling-party, carrying pikes and
hand-grenades, strove to mount the ladders, but were met by an avalanche
of hot cinders, stones, and things still more objectionable, hoarded up
by the garrison from those primitive sanitary contrivances called by
antiquaries “garderobes,” against such a contingency as this.  One sailor
has his clothes almost burnt off his back, another’s courage is dowsed
with a pail of slops, others are knocked over, bruised and battered, into
the dry moat, by a hundredweight of stone heaved over the battlements,
and long ladders full of escaladers, swarming up, on one another’s heels,
are flung backward with tremendous crashes by prokers from arrow-slits in
the bastioned walls.  Soldiers under the machicolated entrance towers
have had their steel morions crushed down upon their heads by heavy
weights dropped upon them, and are left gasping for breath and slowly
suffocating in that meat-tin kind of imprisonment; and a more than
ordinarily active besieger, who has made himself exceptionally prominent,
is suddenly flattened out by a heavy lump of lead.  “The knocks are too
hot,” as Shakespeare says, and the assailants are forced to retire, to
bury their dead, to tend one another’s hurts, and those most fortunate to
cleanse themselves.  That same night of August 4th, Sir Walter Erle,
hearing a rumour of the King’s forces approaching, hurriedly raised the
siege and retreated upon Poole, and not until February 1646 was Corfe
Castle again molested.

This time it was beset to more purpose.  Lady Bankes, now a widow, for
her husband had died in 1644, parted from his family, was at Corfe,
vigilant, keen-eyed, loyal, and more or less strictly blockaded between
Roundhead garrisons.  Wareham was in their possession, Poole, as ever, a
hotbed of disaffection, and Swanage watched by land and sea.  A gallant
deed performed at the opening of 1646 by one Cromwell, a youthful officer
strangely enough, considering his name, on the Royalist side, was of no
avail.  He with his troops burst through the enemy’s lines at Wareham and
on the way encountered the Parliamentary governor of that place, whom he
captured and brought to Corfe.  This was undertaken to afford Lady Bankes
an opportunity of escaping, if she wished, but she fortunately refused,
for on the way back the little party were captured.

The castle was then besieged by Colonel Bingham, and endured for
forty-eight days the rigours of a strict investment.  In the meanwhile,
Lawrence, the governor, deserted and at the same time released the
imprisoned governor of Wareham.  Every one knew the King’s cause here and
in the whole of the kingdom to be in desperate straits, and the knowledge
of fighting for a losing side unnerved all.  Seeing the inevitable course
of events, Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman, one of the defenders’ officers,
secretly opened negotiations with the enemy for the surrender, and,
succeeding in persuading the new governor, who had taken the post
deserted by Lawrence, that a reinforcement from Somersetshire was
expected, under that guise at dead of night admitted fifty Parliamentary
troops into the keep.  When morning dawned the garrison found themselves
betrayed; but, commanding as they did the lives of some thirty prisoners,
they were able to exact favourable terms of surrender.  And then, when
all the defenders marched out, kegs of gunpowder were laid in keep and
curtain-towers, down in dungeons and under roofs, and the match applied.
When the roar and smoke of the explosion had died away, the stern walls
that for five hundred years had frowned down upon the streets of Corfe
had gone up in ruin.

Not altogether destroyed, in the Biblical completeness of the fulfilled
prophecies of “not one stone upon another,” concerning Nineveh, and the
Cities of the Plain; for tall spires of cliff-like masonry still
represent the keep and gateway, and curtain-towers remain in recognisable
shapes, connected by riven jaws of masonry, so hard and so formless that
they are not easily to be distinguished from the rock in which their
foundations are set.  Here a tower may be seen, lifted up bodily by the
agency of gunpowder, and set down again at a distance, gently and as
fairly plumb as it was it its original position: there another has been
torn asunder, as one tears a sheet of paper, and a few steps away is
another, leaning at a much more acute angle than the Leaning Tower of
Pisa.  Everywhere, light is let into dungeons and battlements abased;
floors abolished and great empty stone fireplaces on what were second,
third and fourth floors turned to mouthpieces for the winds.  And yet,
although such havoc has been wrought, and although it is almost
impossible to identify the greater part of its chambers, Corfe Castle is
still a fine and an impressive ruin.  It is grand when seen from afar,
and not less grand when viewed near at hand, from the ravine in which
runs the road to Wareham.




CHAPTER XII


                                 WAREHAM

THAT is a straight and easy road which in four miles leads from Corfe to
Wareham, and a breezy and bracing road too, across heaths quite as
unspoilt as those of “Egdon,” but of a more cheerful and hopeful aspect.
_The Return of the Native_, whose scene is laid on the heaths to the
north-west, could not, with the same justness of description, have been
staged upon these, and from another circumstance, quite apart from this
heart-lifting breeziness, these heaths have little in common with their
brooding neighbours.  They are enlivened with the signs of a very ancient
and long-continued industry, for where the Romans discovered and dug in
the great deposits of china-clay found here the Dorsetshire labourer
still digs, and runs his truckloads on crazy tramways down to the quays
upon Poole Harbour at Goathorn.  Fragments of Roman pottery, made from
this clay, are still occasionally found here, but since that time the
clay has not been turned to extensive use on the spot where it is found,
but is shipped for Staffordshire and abroad.  Much of Poole’s prosperity
is due to the china-clay trade, carried on by the vessels of that port,
which receive it from barges crossing the harbour.  It was early used for
tobacco-pipes, and probably those of Sir Walter Raleigh’s first
experiments were made from the clay found here.  So far back as 1760 the
export of Purbeck china-clay had reached ten thousand tons annually.  It
has now risen to about sixty thousand.

This northern portion of the Isle of Purbeck is indeed of altogether
different character from the rugged stony southern half, beyond Corfe.
It is low-lying and heathy, and the roads are a complete change from the
blinding whiteness characterising those of Purbeck _Petræa_, as it may be
named.  Here, mended with ironstone, they are of a ruddy colour.

Leaving the clay-cutters and their terraced diggings behind, we come,
past the paltry hamlet of Stoborough, within sight of Wareham, entered
across a long causeway over the Frome marshes and over an ancient Gothic
bridge spanning the Frome itself.  Ahead is seen the tower of St. Mary’s,
one of the only two churches remaining of the original eight.  Five of
the others have been swept away, and the sixth is converted into a
school.  Wareham, it will be guessed, is not a mushroom place of
yesterday, but has a past and has seen many changes.

Wareham, “the oldest arnshuntest place in Do’set, where ye turn up housen
underneath yer ’tater-patch,” as described to the present historian by a
rustic, who might have been the original of Haymoss, in _Two on a Tower_,
is indeed of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that
attractive fact.  Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of
the compass, do not perhaps afford the best evidences of that age, for
they are broad and straight and lined with houses which, if not all
Georgian, are so largely in that style that they influence the general
character of the thoroughfares and give them an air of the eighteenth
century.  For this there is an excellent reason, found in the almost
complete destruction by fire of Wareham, on July 25th, 1762.

To the ordinary traveller—and certainly to the commercial
traveller—without a bias for history and antiquities, it is the dullest
town in Wessex.  Not decayed, like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void
and still, and how it, under this constant solitude and somnolence,
manages to retain its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle.

Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks; but while
Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has shrunk within
them, and one who, climbing those stupendous fortifications, looks down
upon the little town, sees gardens and orchards, pigsties and cowsheds
plentifully intermingled with the streets, on the spot where other and
vanished streets once stood.  That “once,” however, was so long ago that
the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and the mind
dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident in such things,
as upon the luxuriance of the gardens themselves and the prettiness of
the picture they produce, intermingled with the houses.

Wareham—“Anglebury” Mr. Hardy calls it—is, or was when the latest census
returns were published, a town of two thousand and three inhabitants.

                      [Picture: Approach to Wareham]

Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has lost more
than those odd three, thus coming within the fatal definition given
somewhere, by some one, of a village.

                     [Picture: The Walls of Wareham]

Things are in this way come to a parlous state, for this is the latest of
a good many modern strokes.  One, which hurt its pride not a little, was
when, in the redistribution of Parliamentary seats, it lost its
representation and became merged in a county division.  Another—but why
enumerate these undeserved whips and scorns?  In one respect Wareham
keeps an urban character.  It has two inns—the “Black Bear” and the “Red
Lion”—that call themselves hotels, and a score or so of minor houses
where, if you cannot obtain a desirable “cup of genuine,” why, “’tis a
sad thing and an oncivilised?”

It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to style
Wareham “Anglebury,” for that story is greatly concerned with the
settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the Kingdom
of Wessex.  Conveniently near the sea, within the innermost recesses of
Poole Harbour, and yet removed from the rage and havoc of the outer
elements, it lies on the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the
two rivers Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from
where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour.  In a nook such as this
you might think a town would have been secure, and that was the hope of
those who founded it here.  But, to render assurance doubly sure, those
original town-builders—who were probably much earlier than the invading
Saxons and are thought to have been some British tribe—heaped up and dug
out those famous “walls of Wareham,” which surround the town to this day,
and are not walls in the common acceptation of the term, but ditches so
deeply delved, and mounds so steeply piled that they are in some places
little more scalable than a forthright, plumb up and down, wall of brick
or masonry would be, and with an “angle of repose” sufficiently acute to
astonish any modern railway engineer.

Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earthworks, was a place of
strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the bloody
tangle of its long history.  Strong defences require determined attacks.
That history only opens with some clearness at the time of the Saxon
occupation, when the piratical Danes were beginning to harry the coast,
but it continues with accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays,
repeated until the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by
only a few dispirited defenders.  In A.D. 876 these Northmen captured the
place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them out.  Some
Saxon confidence then returned, but the old miseries were repeated when
Canute, not yet the pious Canute of his last years, sailed up the Frome
and not only destroyed this already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the
greater part of Wessex.

Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated place when
the Conqueror came; but it was made to hold up its head once more, and
the two mints it had owned in the time of Saxon Athelstan were
re-established.  The castle, whose name alone survives, in that of Castle
Hill, was then built, and, in the added strength it gave, was the source
of many troubles soon to come.  It was surprised and seized for the
Empress Maud in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four years later,
in the absence of its governor, the Earl of Gloucester, who returning,
recaptured the town after a three-weeks’ siege.  At length the treaty of
peace and tolerance between Stephen and Maud gave the townsfolk—those few
of them who had been courageous enough to remain, and fortunate enough to
survive—an opportunity of creeping out of the cellars, and of looking
around and reviewing their position.  “Hope springs eternal,” and these
remnants of the Wareham folk were in some measure justified of their
faith, for it was not until another half-century had passed that the town
was again besieged and taken.  That event was an incident in the
contention between King John and his Barons, and a feature of it was the
destruction of the castle, never afterwards rebuilt.

                            [Picture: Wareham]

That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could possibly
have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and personal warfares, for
it rendered Wareham a place of little account in the calculations of
mediæval partisans; and then it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the
Civil War of Crown and Parliament, when old times came again, in the
bewildering circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament
against the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined
and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the property of
their friends before they could recover it, and then stormed and
surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse of History herself
ceases to keep tally.  Few people looked on: most took an active part,
and the rector himself, “a stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good
things,” was wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times.  The
obvious criticism here is that they must have been short sentences.  The
Parliamentary commander, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was for punishing the
“dreadful malignancy shown towards the cause of righteousness” by the
Wareham people, and advised that the place be “plucked down and made no
town”; but this course was not adopted.

Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many horrid deeds.
In that castle whose site alone remains, Robert de Belesme was starved to
death in 1114, and on those walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit
and prophet, one Peter of Pomfret, who had prophesied that the King
should lose his crown, was hanged and quartered in 1213, after having
been fed, in the manner of the prophet Micaiah, with the bread of
affliction, and the water of affliction, in the gruesome dungeons of
Corfe.  For King John, the Ahab of our history, had a way of his own with
seers of visions and prophesiers of disaster; and his way, it will be
allowed, very effectually discouraged prying into futurity.

Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called “Bloody
Bank,” three poor fellows who had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion
were hanged, portions of their bodies being afterwards exposed, with
ghastly barbarity, in different parts of the town.

Following the long broad street from where the town is entered across the
Frome, the “Black Bear” is passed, prominent with its porch and the great
chained effigy of the black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the
roof of it.  Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a
terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered tablet,
handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we now come to the
northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to the banks of the Piddle,
may, looking backwards, see those old defences, the so-styled “walls,”
heaped up with magnificent emphasis.

They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and although it is
a drama long since played, and the curtain rung down upon the last act,
two hundred and fifty years ago, this scenery of it can still eloquently
recall its dragonadoes and blood-boltered episodes.




CHAPTER XIII


WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS

LEAVING Wareham by West Street, where there is a “Pure Drop” inn, perhaps
suggesting the sign of the public where John Durbeyfield boozed, at
far-away Marlott, a valley road leads by East Stoke to the remains of
Bindon Abbey.

The ruins of Bindon Abbey are few and formless, standing in tree-grown
and unkempt grounds, where a black and green stagnant moat surrounds a
curious circular mound.  Those who demolished Bindon Abbey did their work
thoroughly, for little is left of it save the bases of columns and the
foundations of walls, in which archæological societies see darkly the
ground plan of the old Cistercian monastery.  A few stone slabs and
coffins remain, among them a stone with the indent of a vanished
life-sized brass to an abbot.  The inscription survives, in bold
Lombardic characters—

                    ABBAS RICARDUS DE MANERS HIC TUMULATUR
                       APPŒNAS TARDUS DEUS HUNC SALVANS
                                   TUEATUR.

Close by is the stone sarcophagus in which Angel Clare, sleep-walking
from Woolbridge House (which is represented in the story as being much
nearer to this spot than it really is), laid Tess.  Near the ruin, beside
the Frome, is Bindon Abbey Mill, where Angel Clare proposed to learn
milling.

[Picture: The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon Abbey] Here that thing not greatly
in accord with monastic remains and hallowed vestiges of the olden
times—a railway station—comes within sight and hearing at the end of Wool
village.  Old and new, quiet repose and the bustling conduct of business,
mingle strangely here, for within sight of Wool railway station, and
within hearing of the clashing of the heavy consignments of milk-churns,
driven up to it, to be placed on the rail and sent to qualify the tea of
London’s great populations, stands the great, mellowed, Elizabethan, red
brick grange or mansion known as Woolbridge House, romantically placed on
the borders of the rushy river Frome.  The property at one time belonged
to the neighbouring Abbey of Bindon, from which it came to Sir Thomas
Poynings, and then to John Turberville.  Garrisoned as a strategic point
during the Civil Wars, its history since that period is an obscure and
stagnant one.  Long since passed from Turberville hands, it now belongs
to the Erle-Drax family of Charborough Park and Holnest.  The air of
bodeful tragedy that naturally enwraps the place and has made many a
passenger in the passing trains exclaim at sight of it, “what a fitting
home for a story!” has at last been justified in its selection by the
novelist as the scene of Tess’s confession to her husband.  It was here
the newly married pair were to have spent their honeymoon.  “They drove
by the level road along the valley, to a distance of a few miles, and,
reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the left, and over
the great Elizabethan bridge, which gives the place half its name.
Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged lodgings,
whose external features are so well known to all travellers through the
Frome Valley; once portion of a fine manorial residence, and the property
and seat of a D’Urberville, but since its partial demolition, a
farm-house.”

It is not altogether remarkable that Clare found the “mouldy old
habitation” somewhat depressing to his dear one; and she was altogether
startled and frightened at “those horrid women,” whose portraits are
actually, as in the pages of the novel they are said to be, on the walls
of the staircase: “two life-size portraits on panels built into the
masonry.  As all visitors are aware, these paintings represent women of
middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once
seen can never be forgotten.  The long pointed features, narrow eye, and
smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook
nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the
point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.”  They
are indeed unprepossessing dames.  One is growing indistinguishable, but
the other still wickedly leers at you, glancing from the tail of her eye,
as though challenging admiration.  A painted round or oval decorative
frame surrounds these Turberville portraits, for such they are, and so
they were explained to be to Clare, who uneasily recognised their
likeness in an exaggerated form, to his own darling.  All the old
D’Urberville vices of lawless cunning, mediæval ferocity, and callous
heartlessness are reflected in those sinister portraits, which seemed to
him to hold up a distorting mirror to the woman he had married, and
certainly proved themselves of her kin.

                       [Picture: Woolbridge House]

A farm-house the place remains, the ground-floor rooms stone-flagged and
chilly to modern notions, the fireplaces vast and cavernous as they are
wont to be in such old houses.  It is perhaps more romantic seen in the
middle distance than when made the subject of closer study.  But it is of
course the home of a ghost story, and a very fine and aristocratic
ghost-story too, made the subject of an allusion in _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_.  It seems that in that very long ago, generally referred
to in fairy stories as “once upon a time,” there was a Turberville whose
unholy passions so broke all bounds of restraint that he murdered a guest
while the two of them were riding in the Turberville family coach.  But
as the guest was himself one of the family, it were a more judicial
thing, perhaps, to divide the blame.  This incident in the annals of a
race who very improperly often figured as sheriffs and such-like
guardians of law and order, took place on the road between Wool and Bere,
and we are asked to believe that there are those who have heard the
wheels of the blood-stained family coach traversing this route.  One or
two are said to have seen it, but _they_ are persons proved to own some
mixture of that blood, for to none other is this pleasing spectacle of a
black midnight coach and demon horses vouchsafed.  But stay!  Not so
pleasing after all, this proof of ancestry, for to them it is a warning
of impending disaster and dissolution.

               [Picture: Woolbridge House: Entrance Front]

That is a terribly dusty road which, in six miles, leads from Woolbridge
to Bere Regis, across the heaths: in some summers—_experto crede_—so
astonishingly deep in dust that it is not only impossible to ride a
bicycle over it, but scarce possible to walk.  But this heath road is as
variable as the moods of a woman.  It will be of this complexion at one
time, and at another entirely different.  It is perhaps only when this
desirable difference rules that one appreciates the scenery it passes
through; scenery wholly of buff sand, purple heather, furze, and bracken,
whose colours are by distance blended into that rich purple brown termed,
in _The Return of the Native_, “swart.”  For this is the district of that
gloomy tale, perhaps at once the most powerful and painful in its tragic
intensity of all the Wessex novels, and one in which the element of
scenery adds most strikingly to the unfolding of futilities and
disasters.  “Bere Heath” it is, according to the chartographers of the
Ordnance Survey, but to ourselves who are on literary pilgrimage bent, it
is Egdon Heath whose “swart abrupt <DW72>s” are here seen on every side,
now rising into natural hillocks masquerading solemnly as sepulchral
tumuli, now dipping into hollows where the rainwater collects in marshy
pools and keeps green the croziers and fully-opened fronds of the bracken
much longer than the parched growths, at the crests of these rises; and
again spreading out into little scrubby plains.

Mr. Hardy, who has translated the reticent solemnity of Egdon Heath into
such poignant romance, has said how pleasant it is to think or dream that
some spot in these extensive wilds may be the heath of Lear, that
traditionary King of Wessex whose sorrows Shakespeare has made the
subject of tragedy; and he has himself, in _The Return of the Native_,
made these heaths the stage whereon a tragedy is enacted that itself bids
fair to become a classic little less classical than the works of
Shakespeare.  True it is that his tragedy is in the rustic kind, and none
of the characters in it far above the homespun sort, but the stricken
worm feels as great a pang as when a giant dies, and the woes of Mrs.
Yeobright, of Clym, and of Eustacia and Damon Wildeve are none the less
thrilling than those of that

    “. . . very foolish fond old man
    Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,”

whose wanderings are the theme of Shakespeare’s muse.

                   [Picture: Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath]

_The Return of the Native_ is a story of days as well as nights, of fair
weather and foul, of sunshine and darkness, but it is in essence the
story of a darkened stage.  The description of Egdon in the opening
chapter is the keynote of a mournful fugue:—

    “The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to
    evening: it could in like manner <DW44> the dawn, sadden noon,
    anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify
    the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

    “In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll
    into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste
    began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not
    been there at such a time.  It could best be felt when it could not
    clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this
    and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then, and only then,
    did it tell its true tale.  The spot was, indeed, a near relation of
    night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate
    together could be perceived in its shades and the scene.  The sombre
    stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening
    gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the
    heavens precipitated it.”

An artist who should come to Egdon, intent upon studying its
colour-scheme, would be nonplussed by the more than usual fickleness and
instability of its daylight hues.  Shrouded in the black repose of night,
its tone is a thing of some permanence, but under the effects of sunshine
he finds it now purple, now raw sienna, shading off into Prout’s Brown,
and again rising to glints and fleeting stripes of rich golden yellow.
It would be the despair of one who worked in the slow analytic manner of
a Birket Foster, but the joy of an impressionist like a Whistler.

                     [Picture: Chamberlain’s Bridge]

The extremely rich and beautiful colouring of Wool and Bere Heaths
deepens with the setting of the sun to a velvety blackness and gives to
the fir-crowned hills melodramatic and tragical significances.  Such an
one is Gallows Hill, where the road goes in a hollow formed by the
massive shoulders of the tree-studded height.  Here, the gossips say,
with the incertitude of rustic indifference, a man hanged himself, or was
hanged.  When or why he committed what we have the authority of
conventional old-time journalism for calling “the rash deed,” does not—in
the same language—“transpire.”  But certainly he selected a romantic spot
for ending, for from the ragged crest, underneath one of those “clumps
and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched tops are like battlemented
towers crowning black-fronted castles of enchantment,” the moorland,
under the different local names of Hyde Heath, Decoy Heath, and Gore
Heath, but all one to the eye, goes stretching away some ten miles, to
Poole Harbour, seen from this view-point, on moonlit nights, glancing
like a mirror in a field of black velvet.

                     [Picture: Rye Hill, Bere Regis]

A juicy interlude to the summer dryness of these wastes is that dip in
the road where one comes to the river Piddle at Chamberlain’s Bridge, a
battered old red brick pont that, by the aid of the quietly gliding
stream and the dark, boding mass of fir-crowned Mat Hill in the
background, makes a memorable picture.  Only when Bere Regis comes within
sight are the solitudes of Egdon left behind.  Steeply down goes the way
into the village, down Rye Hill, past the remarkably picturesque old
thatched cottage illustrated here, perched on its steep roadside bank,
and so at last on to the level where Bere Church is glimpsed, standing
four-square and handsome in advance of the long street, backed by dense
clumps of that tree, the fir, which has so strong an affection for these
sandy heaths.  Here then is the introduction to the
“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill” of the Wessex novels, the “half-dead townlet .
. . the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered the
D’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there for full five hundred
years.”




CHAPTER XIV


                                BERE REGIS

THIS “blinking little place,” and now perhaps a not even blinking, but
fast asleep village, was at one time a market-town, and, more than that,
as its latinised name would imply, a royal residence.  Kingsbere, said to
mean “Kingsbury”—that is to say, “King’s place” or building—really
obtained its name in very different fashion.  It was plain “Bere,” long
before the Saxon monarchs came to this spot and caused the latter-day
confusion among antiquaries of the British “bere,” meaning an underwood,
a scrub, copse, bramble, or thorn-bed, with the Anglo-Saxon “byrig.”  We
have but to look upon the surroundings of Bere Regis even at this day, a
thousand years later, to see how truly descriptive that British name
really was.  It was of old a place greatly favoured by royalty, from that
remote age when Elfrida murdered her stepson, Edward the King and Martyr,
at Corfe Castle, and thrashed her own son Ethelred here with a large wax
candle, for reproaching her with the deed.  Those events happened in A.D.
978, and it is therefore not in any way surprising that no traces of the
ferocious Queen Elfrida’s residence have survived.  Ethelred, we are
told, hated wax candles ever after that severe thrashing, and doubtless
hated Bere as well; but it was more than ever a royal resort in the later
times of King John, who visited it on several occasions in the course of
his troubled reign.  Thenceforward, however, the favours of monarchs
ceased, and it came to depend upon the good will of the Abbots of Tarent
Abbey and that of the Turbervilles, who between them became owners of the
manor.

The village street of Bere is bleak and barren.  It is a street of rustic
cottages of battered red brick, or a compost of mud, chopped straw, and
lime, called “cob,” built on a brick base, often plastered, almost all of
them thatched: some with new thatch, some with thatch middle-aged, others
yet with thatch ancient and decaying, forming a rich and fertile bed for
weeds and ox-eyed daisies and “bloody warriors,” as the local Dorsetshire
name is for the rich red wall-flowers.  Sometimes the old thatch has been
stripped before the new was placed: more often it has not, and the merest
casual observer can, as he passes, easily become a critic of the
thoroughness or otherwise with which the thatcher’s work has been
performed, not only by sight of the different shades belonging to old and
new, but by the varying thicknesses with which the roofs are seen to be
covered.  Here an upstairs window looks out immediately, open-eyed, upon
the sunlight; there another peers blinkingly forth, as behind beetling
eyebrows, from half a yard’s depth of straw and reed, shading off from a
coal-black substratum to a coffee- layer, and thence to the amber
top-coating of the latest addition.  Warm in winter, cool in summer, is
the testimony of cottagers towards thatch; and earwiggy always, thinks
the stranger under such roofs, as he observes quaint lepidoptera
ensconced comfortably in his bed.  Picturesque it certainly is, expensive
too, although it may not generally be thought so; but it is more enduring
than cheap slates or tiles, and, according to many who should know, if
indeed their prejudices do not warp their statements, cheaper in the long
run.

                          [Picture: Bere Regis]

It is, in fine, not easy to come to a definitive pronouncement on the
merits or demerits, the comparative cheapness or costliness, of rival
roofing materials.  The cost of the materials themselves, payments for
laying them, and the astonishing difference between the enduring
qualities of thatch well and thatch indifferently laid forbid certitude.
But all modern local authorities are opposed to thatch, chiefly on the
score of its liability to fire.  All the many and extensive fires of
Dorsetshire have been caused by ignited thatch; or else, caused in other
ways, have been spread and magnified by it.  Yet, here again your rustic
will stoutly defend the ancient roofing, and declare that while such a
roof is slowly smouldering, and before it bursts into a blaze, he can
dowse it with a pail of water.  No doubt, but that water, from a well
perhaps two hundred feet deep, and that ladder from some neighbour
half-a-mile away, are sometimes not to be brought to bear with the
required celerity.

This, let it be fervently said, is not an attack upon thatch: it is but
the presentation of pros and cons, and is no argument in favour of that
last word in utilitarian hideousness, corrugated galvanized iron, under
whose shelter you freeze in winter and fry in summer.

Meanwhile, here are ruined cottages in the long street of Bere, whose
condition has been brought about by just such causes, and whose
continuation in that state is due, not to a redundancy of dwellings, but
because the Lady of the Manor at Charborough, despising the insignificant
rents here, will not trouble about, or go to the expense of, rebuilding.

Hence the gaps in the long row, like teeth missing from a jaw.

Not a little hard-featured and stern at first sight, owing to the entire
absence of the softening feature of gardens upon the road, this long
street of Bere has yet a certain self-reliant strong-charactered aspect
that brings respect.  It has, too, the most interesting and beautiful
church, rich in historical, and richer in literary, associations.

                          [Picture: Bere Regis]

Bere Regis in its decay is a storehouse of old Dorset speech and customs.
To its cottagers vegetables are “gearden-tackle,” sugar—at least, the
moist variety—is “zand,” and garden-flowers all have quaint outlandish
names.  The rustic folk have a keen, if homely philosophy.  “Ef ’twarnt
for the belly,” said one to the present writer, in allusion to cost of
living, “back ’ud wear gold.”  “Bere,” said another—an ‘outlandish’
person he, who had only been settled in the village a decade or so and
accordingly was only regarded as a stranger, and so indeed regarded
himself—“Bere, a poor dra’lattin twankyten pleace, ten mile from
anywheer, God help it!” which is so very nearly true that, if you consult
the map you will find that Dorchester is ten miles distant, Corfe Castle
twelve, Wimborne twelve, Blandford eight, and Wareham, the nearest town,
seven miles away.

“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” as Mr. Hardy elects to rechristen Bere Regis,
owes the ultimate limb of that compound name to Woodbury Hill, a lofty
elevation rising like an exaggerated down, but partly clothed with trees,
on the outskirts of Bere Regis.  The novelist describes this scene of an
ancient annual fair, now much shrunken from its olden import, rather as
it was than as it is.  “Greenhill was the Nijni Novgorod of South Wessex;
and the busiest, merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number was
the day of the sheep-fair.  This yearly gathering was upon the summit of
a hill, which retained in good preservation the remains of an ancient
earthwork, consisting of a huge rampart and entrenchment of an oval form,
encircling the top of the hill, though somewhat broken down here and
there.  To each of the two openings, on opposite sides, a winding road
ascended, and the level green space of twenty or thirty acres enclosed by
the bank was the site of the fair.  A few permanent erections dotted the
spot, but the majority of the visitors patronised canvas alone for
resting and feeding under during the time of their sojourn here.”

The place looks interesting, viewed from beneath whence two
forlorn-looking houses are seen perched on the very ridge of the windy
height.  But it is always best to remain below, and so to keep romantic
illusions; and here is no exception.  Climbing to the summit, those two
houses are increased to fifteen or seventeen red-brick, storm-beaten
cottages, some thatched, others slated, mostly uninhabited; all
commonplace.  The fair is still held in September, beginning on the 18th,
the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Formerly it lasted a week, and,
at the rate of a hundred pounds a day in tolls to the Lord of the Manor,
brought that fortunate person an annual “unearned increment” as the
Radicals would call it, of £700.  Nowadays those tolls are very much of a
negligible quantity.

Here it was, during the sheep fair, that Troy, supposed to have long
before been drowned in Lulworth Cove, but living and masquerading as Mr.
Francis, the Great Cosmopolitan Roughrider, enacted the part of Dick
Turpin in the canvas-covered show, and, looking through a hole in the
tent, unobserved himself, observed Bathsheba, who had thought him dead.

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

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

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

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

                [Picture: Bere Regis: Interior of Church]

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

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

                 [Picture: Pew ends in Bere Regis Church]

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

                         _Ostium sepulchri antiquae_
                            _Famillae Turberville_
                               _24 Junij 1710_

                         (_The door of the sepulchre_
                           _of the ancient family_
                           _of the Turbervilles_).

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

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

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

              [Picture: Bere Regis: the Turberville Window]

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

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




CHAPTER XV


                      THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY

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

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

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

                 [Picture: Stinsford Church. (Mellstock)]

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

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

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

Or, as Mr. Hardy, in _Friends Beyond_, says of his own creations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                  [Picture: Birthplace of Thomas Hardy]

The cottage stands—its front almost hid from sight in the dense growths
of its old garden and by the <DW72> of the downs—at the extreme upper end
of Upper Bockhampton, on the edge of the wild, called, with a fine
freedom of choice, Bockhampton or Piddletown Heath, and Thorneycombe or
Ilsington Woods.  You enter its garden up steep, rustic steps, and find
its low-ceiled rooms stone-flagged and criss-crossed with beams.  At the
back, its walls, with small latticed windows, look sheer upon a lane
leading into the heart of the woodland; where, so little are strangers
expected or desired that the tree-trunks bear notice-boards detailing
what shall be done to those who trespass.  Branches of these enshrining
trees touch the thatched roof and scrape the walls, and the voices of the
wind and of the woodlands reverberate from them; and when the sun goes
down, the nocturnal orchestra of owls and nightingales strikes up.  It is
an ideal spot for the birth of one whose genius and bent are largely in
the interpretation of nature; but it must not be forgotten that the
chances are always against the observation and appreciation of scenes
amidst which a child has been born and reared, and that only exceptional
receptivity can throw off the usual effect of staleness and lack of
interest in things usual and accustomed.  It is thus in the nature of
things that the townsman generally takes a keener interest in the country
than those native to it, and the dweller in the mushroom cities of
commerce finds more in a cathedral city than many of those living within
the shadow of the Minster ever suspect.  This is to say, parabolically,
what we all know, that the nature of the seer is an exceptional nature,
and rises superior to the dulling effects of use and wont: unaccountable
as the winds that blow, and not to be analysed or predicated by any
literary meteorological department.

                  [Picture: Birthplace of Thomas Hardy]

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

       [Picture: The “Duck” Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn]

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

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

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

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

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

The soil at the back of the house is better, which indeed it could well
be without being even then particularly good.  It <DW72>s towards the
river, at what is described in the book as “Shadwater Weir,” where the
drowned bodies of Wildeve and Eustacia were found:

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

                           [Picture: Tincleton]

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

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

    “This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday.  Its
    condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary
    wilderness—‘Bruaria.’  Then follows the length and breadth in
    leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent
    of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the
    area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished.
    ‘Turbaria Bruaria’—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters
    relating to the district.  ‘Overgrown with heth and mosse,’ says
    Leland of the same dark sweep of country.”

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

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

                      [Picture: An Egdon Farmstead]

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

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

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

                        [Picture: A Farm on Egdon]

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

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




CHAPTER XVI


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                         [Picture: Cross-in-Hand]

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

                           [Picture: Batcombe]

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

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

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

                 [Picture: Tomb of “Conjuring Minterne”]

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

          [Picture: Family tree of Thomas Horner of Mells] {174}

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

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

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

                         [Picture: Melbury House]

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

                         Near this stone is interred
                         Stephen, Earl of Ilchester,
                             who died at Melbury
                    Sept. 26, A.D. MDCCLXXVI., aged LXXII.
              He was the eighth son of Sir Stephen Fox, knight.
            He married Elizabeth, only daughter of Thomas Horner,
                of Mells, in the county of Somerset, esquire,
                       heiress-general to the family of
               Strangways of Melbury, in the county of Dorset,
                 by whom he had Henry Thomas, his eldest son,
                            now Earl of Ilchester
                   (who succeeds him in honours and estate)
                          and a numerous offspring.
                   As a small token of her great affection
                  to the best of husbands, fathers, friends,
                his disconsolate widow inscribes this marble,

                            Sacred to his memory.

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

At the other extremity of the park is the small and secluded village of
Melbury Osmund, the “Little Hintock” of _The Woodlanders_, “one of those
sequestered spots outside the gates of the world, where may usually be
found more meditation than action, and more listlessness than
meditation.”  It lies among vast hills and profound hollows, whose huge
convexities and corresponding concavities render this a district to be
more comfortably ridden by the horseman than walked, and one to be
explored by the cyclist only with great and exhausting labour.

By perspiring perseverance, however, Yeovil and Somerset, or, speaking by
the card, “Ivell” and “Outer Wessex” may be reached at last, by way of
the strangely-entitled village of Ryme Intrinsica, whose name, so spelled
on the map, is, with considerable incertitude both as to spelling and
meaning, said to be properly written “Entrenseca” or “Entrensicca.”
Local theories, disregarding altogether the inexplicable “Ryme,” and
expending themselves upon the preposterous Latinity of the second part of
the name, have come to some sort of agreement that it denotes a dry place
on a ridge placed between two watered vales; and those curious enough to
look for it on a large-scale map will perceive readily enough that,
whatever the comparative dryness of the ridge it does occupy, it is
certainly so flanked by the low-lying lands in which flow two tributaries
of the river Yeo.

Hutchins, the county historian, on the other hand, gives a wholly
different explanation of the name.  Spelling the “Intrinseca” with an
“e,” instead of the final “i,” he says it is so called, Ryme Intrinseca,
or “In Ryme,” in contradistinction to an outlying portion of the old
manor, away down in the parish of Long Bredy, and styled Ryme
Extrinsecus, or “Out Ryme.”

At any rate, Ryme Intrinsica looks scarcely the place to be dolled out in
so classical a style.  It is too Saxon, too rustic and homespun in all
its circumstances of thatch, rickyards, dairies, and pigsties; and its
little church is not in any way corroborative of this dignity.

Yeovil, whose name has so bucolic a sound that it would seem to be, above
all other places, the home most suitable for yeomen, is the “Ivell” of
the Wessex novels, but finds only scattered allusions in them, and
touches far from intimate.  Cope, the curate, who in the story _For
Conscience’ Sake_ married the conscience-smitten Millborne’s daughter
when at last the father effaced himself, was curate at Ivell; and it was
at the “Castle” inn of the same town that the brothers Halborough called
for their drunken father, in the harrowing embarrassments of _A Tragedy
of two Ambitions_, but those are the nearest approaches to be discovered.




CHAPTER XVII


                                SHERBORNE

MUCH remains in pleasant Sherborne to tell of that time when it was a
cathedral city, and when, after it had lost that high dignity, it was of
scarce less importance as the home of a powerful Abbey.  It was the
pleasing, well-watered and sheltered situation, in the vale where the
little Yeo or Ivel runs—the stream which, passing through Yeovil, gives
that town its name—that first attracted the religious in A.D. 705, the
time of that now misty and vague monarch, King Ina.  The Yeo had not yet
obtained that name, and was merely spoken of in descriptive and
admiratory phrase as the _Seir burne_, an Anglo-Saxon description for a
bright and clear brook which has crystallised here and at several other
places in the country, into a place-name.  Even in the City of London
there is a Sherborne Lane, where no stream now flows, the successor,
however, of a pleasant lane, where in Anglo-Saxon times a tributary of
the Wall Brook flowed.

Not every one was satisfied with this choice for a cathedral site.
William of Malmesbury wrote of it as “pleasant neither by multitudes of
inhabitants, nor beauty of position.”  But beauty is a matter of
individual taste.  “Wonderful, almost shameful,” he continued, “was it,
that a bishop’s see should have remained here for so many years.”  For
three hundred and three years it so remained, the bishop’s seat being
removed only in 1078, when Old Sarum, a much more inconvenient site,
sterile, cramped and waterless—a place that to the Saxons was Searobyrig,
the dry city—was selected, only itself to be abandoned in less than
another hundred and fifty years.  In the meanwhile no fewer than
twenty-seven bishops ruled in succession at Sherborne and passed into the
Great Beyond, leaving for the most part, very little evidence of their
existence.  Notable exceptions, however, were Adhelm, an early translator
of the Scriptures, and Asser, whose biography of his friend and patron,
Alfred the Great, is a monument to himself as well as to his subject.  In
the choir-aisles of the existing Abbey-church are sundry relics of those
prelates, in the shape of ancient tombs with battered effigies, as near a
likeness to them as possible for the sculptors to produce; and in the
retro-choir are pointed out the spots where Kings Ethelbald and
Ethelbert, brothers and predecessors of King Alfred, lie.

After an interval of uncertainty following the removal of the bishopric
in 1078 to Old Sarum, the cathedral here was in 1139 made a Benedictine
Abbey and rebuilt by Roger, Bishop of Sarum, who although he might not
again remove the cathedral back to Sherborne, seems to have loved the
place, and certainly lavished much care and labour upon it.

Bishop Roger was a man of energy and determination.  Starting in life as
a poor Norman monk, he owed his first important preferment to a curious
circumstance.  None could gabble through a mass more speedily than he,
and he raced through a service before Henry I. so quickly, while the king
was anxious to be off a-hunting, that the gratified monarch put him on
the broad high road to advancement, along whose course Roger travelled
far.  But, if all had liked him as little as did the censorious William
of Malmesbury, his journeys would have been short.  To that chronicler he
was “unscrupulous, fierce and avaricious,” not content to keep his own,
but eager to grab the goods of others.  “Was there anything contiguous to
his property which might be advantageous to him, he would directly extort
it, either by entreaty or purchase, or, if that failed, by force.”  It
must have been well, therefore, to arrange terms with this masterful
personage while he was in the negotiating way, lest he took what he
wanted, without so much as a “by-your-leave.”  The great Norman structure
he erected has largely survived, not only in its ground plan, but in the
essential circumstances of its walling, for although it is outwardly a
building in the Perpendicular phase of Gothic, dating from the second
half of the fifteenth century, that magnificently-elaborated external
show of nave and presbytery is but a later and more enriched surface,
daringly grafted upon the stern and solemn Norman walls of over three
hundred years’ earlier date.

The history of the great Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne very clearly
retells the old tale of Bury St. Edmunds, of Norwich, and of many another
great monastic centre, by which you see that these rich and powerful
settlements of the religious were not generally at peace with the outside
worldlings.  The causes of quarrel were many.  In some places the
monastery was a harsh and exacting landlord; in others the imposts and
hindrances placed upon the markets, whose tolls in many instances were
the property of the Church, aroused bitter enmity and constant strife;
and in yet more cases the maintenance of forests and game for the sport
of the Lords Abbots gave rise to trouble.  Poachers we have had always
with us, and even in those times when to kill the stag in the Chases was
a crime adjudged worthy death or mutilation, men for sport or sustenance
illegally slew the game.  “What shall he have who killed the deer?”  Why,
an ear cut off or a nose slit, at the very least of it.

Here at Sherborne the bitterest quarrel arose from other causes.  It
seems that the parish church was situated at the west end of the Abbey,
separated from it only by a door which the monks, exclusives always, had
sought gradually to narrow, with a view of eventually blocking it up
altogether.  A question nearly allied with this was whether the children
of the townsfolk should be baptised in the Abbey or in the parish church,
and the disputes at last grew so raw that the Sherborne burgesses, very
wrothy and spiteful, took to ringing their church-bells so long and so
loudly that on account of the clamour, the monastic offices could not be
carried on.  In 1437 the points at issue were by common consent laid
before the Bishop of Salisbury, who, siding with his own cloth, made an
award in favour of the Abbey.  Regarding this decision as an injustice,
the townsfolk refused to abide by it; but there were evidently two
parties in the town, for one faction, headed by a stalwart butcher, broke
into the parish church with some of the monks and reduced the font to
fragments.  Things then, naturally grew worse, until, as Leland puts it,
“The variance grew to a plain sedition, until a priest of the town church
of All Hallows shot a shaft with fire into the top of that part of the
Abbey Church of St. Mary that divided the east part that the monks used
from that the townsmen used; and this partition happening at the time to
be thatched in, the roof was set on fire, and consequently the whole
church, the lead and bells melted, was defaced.”

The Choir was so seriously injured that it was taken down and rebuilt,
but the rest was repaired, and still in some parts shows traces, in the
reddened patches on the beautiful golden-yellow Ham Hill sandstone of the
internal walls, of the conflagration.

The townsfolk were made to contribute heavily to the cost of repair and
rebuilding; works resulting in a more lovely interior, both in form and
colour, than owned by any other considerable church in the west.  A
commonplace person, one no connoisseur of churches, if asked to convey a
general sense of their interiors by the medium of temperature would reply
that they were cold, for coldness is the effect most often
produced—irrespective of the degrees registered by the thermometer—by
their stonework; but here, though the mercury shrink down from the tube
into close proximity with the bulb, provocative in most places of
shivers, even the most matter-of-fact, irresponsive to the call of
soaring arches, painted windows and delicately poised fretted roof to
“lift up your hearts, O Zion!” feel a grateful sensation of warmth
pervading them, apparently radiating from these walls of richly hued
stone, whose natural colouring seems to fully furnish the place and
render it indifferent to the rigours of the season.  It is a colour
compact of all the beautiful hues of this country of a rich and bountiful
Nature: of honey, of apples and pears golden and russet, of autumn
leaves, and of cider and October ale, with a glint of the sun through it
all.  It gives a beautiful and cheerful tone, quick to purge melancholy
and to make the devout happier in their hallelujahs than when in the
cold, if chaste, companionship of Portland stone, the mild cream purity
of the oolite of Bath, the Gregorian richness of the building stone of
Mansfield, or the solemn satisfaction engendered by the deep red
sandstone of Devon.

The exquisite fan-vaulting of Sherborne Abbey, the finest example of that
supremest effort of the last stage of Gothic art, has no superior
elsewhere.  That of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster, and that in St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor, are on a larger scale, and more daring, but,
although generally cited as representative, are not so truly artistic.

The old Pack-Monday fair, still an annual institution at Sherborne, is a
two days’ market, originating with the completion of the repairs and the
vaulting of the nave, under Abbot Peter de Ramsam, or Rampisham, in 1504.
Tradition has it that, the last stone well and truly laid and the great
church at last again in order, the masons and their kind were paid off
and bidden depart by midnight on the Sunday after Old Michaelmas Day.
Accordingly, Pack-Monday fair is opened every year at the stroke of
midnight on the Sunday succeeding October 10th, to the accompaniment of a
din of horn-blowing and the uncouth banging of tin cans.

Much of the beauty of the Abbey interior is due to the loving care of the
restoration executed by the Digbys of Sherborne Castle, between 1848 and
1858, at a cost of over £32,000.  The church of All Hallows at the west
end, which caused all the trouble, was demolished after the dissolution
of the monastery, when the Abbey was sold to the town for use as a parish
church and All Hallows itself thereby became a redundancy.  Its situation
and its ground-plan can still be traced on the paths and lawns and on the
ragged walls and makeshift patchwork that serve as West Front to the
Abbey.

An ancestor of the restoring Digbys is commemorated by a pretentious
mountain of marble in the south transept, with an epitaph, written by a
bishop, setting forth with much antithetical rhodomontade his many
virtues of activities and renunciations:

“Here Lyes John, Lord Digby, Baron Digby of Sherborne and Earl of
Briftol.  Titles to which ye merit of his Grandfather firft gave luftre
And which he himfelf laid down unfully’d.  He was naturally enclined to
avoid the Hurry of a publick Life, Yet carefull to keep up the port of
his Quality.  Was willing to be at eafe, but fcorned obfcurity.  And
therefore never made his retirement a pretence to draw Himfelf within a
narrower compafs, or to fhun fuch expence As Charity, Hospitality and his
Honour call’d for.  His Religion was that which by LAW is Eftablisfhed,
and the Conduct of his life fhew’d the power of it in his Heart.  His
distinction from others never made him forget himfelf or them.  He was
kind and obliging to his Neighbours, generous and condefcending to his
inferiours, and juft to all Mankind.  Nor had the temptations of honour
and pleafure in this world Strength enough to withdraw his Eyes from that
great Object of his hope, which we reafonably affure ourfelves he now
enjoys.

                               MDCICVIII.”

                    [Picture: Sherborne Abbey Church]

The surroundings of the Abbey closely resemble cathedral precincts, and
lead the well-informed stranger to remember that Sherborne cherishes
hopes of some day being again erected into the head of a bishop’s see,
when that talked-of formation of a new diocese, carved out of the great
territorial domains of Salisbury and of Bath and Wells, shall be an
accomplished fact.

The usual and properest way of coming to the Abbey, after you have
glimpsed the fine picture it makes looking down Long Street, is past the
Conduit—usually called the Monks’ Conduit—standing on the pavement of
Cheap Street, and through a time-worn archway and a narrow alley of small
shops and old houses.  The Conduit, built about 1360, an open octangular
building greatly resembling a market-cross, was originally in the centre
of the cloister-garth, to the north of the Abbey, on a part of the site
now occupied by the admirable Grammar School, founded by Edward VI. from
the spoils of the dissolved monastery, and grown in these days to be one
of the foremost schools of the country.

Cheap Street, the principal thoroughfare of Sherborne, is, like similar
business streets in other West Country towns, composed of houses of many
periods and all sizes.  It is built generally of that sunny Ham Hill
ferruginous sandstone, quarried for many years at Stoke-sub-Hamdon, six
miles to the northwest of Yeovil.  That fine old hostelry, the “New Inn,”
now swept away, was built of it.  This vanished house was the original of
the “Earl of Wessex,” in _The Woodlanders_, in whose yard Giles
Winterborne is observed by his old sweetheart from the balcony, while he
is engaged with the business of cider-making:

“The chief hotel at Sherton Abbas was the “Earl of Wessex”—a large
stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch under which vehicles were driven by
stooping coachmen to back premises of wonderful commodiousness.  The
windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only
commanded a view of the opposite houses.”

The castle, some distance outside the town to east, adjoining the village
of Castleton, was originally the combined palace and fortress of the
Bishops of Sherborne.  The remaining fragments, on their woody knoll
overlooking the Yeo, in what is now Sherborne Park, are those of the
stout keep built by that ambitious, and unscrupulous Bishop Roger, of
Henry I.’s time.  Despite the curse, called down by the equally ferocious
and saintly Osmund, upon any who should dare to alienate the castle from
the bishops of Sherborne, it was wrested from them on several occasions,
perhaps sometimes in direct unbelieving challenge to that _quis
separabit_; at others, certainly, because, in the fashion of the times,
the bishops had taken part in the political troubles, the pitched battles
and weary sieges of contending factions, and, having the ill-luck to side
with the defeated party, suffered with them in body and estate.  For over
two hundred years, from 1139 to 1355, it was thus alienated, and Osmund’s
curse slept.  Those who owned the castle were not executed, or
imprisoned, or made to suffer beyond the usual mediæval average, perhaps
because it took no account of developments arising from mitred follies
and errors of judgment.  At last, having been Crown property for many
generations, the stronghold and its surrounding lands were granted to
Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from whom, after a futile proposal had been
made to fight him for it, in gage of single combat—a fourteenth-century
example of Kingsley’s “muscular Christianity”—it was purchased by the
bishop for 2,500 marks; a cheap lot.  Whether the earl, in Etonian
phrase, “funked it,” imagining the bishop’s steel would be fellow to “the
sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” and as invincible, who shall say?  At
any rate, Bishop Wyvil, this strenuous champion, who feared neither the
ordeal of the sword nor of the purse, entered into the gates of his
predecessors of old time, and died here, after a residence of twenty
years.  The brass to his memory, in the north-east transept of Salisbury
Cathedral, displays a representation of Sherborne Castle, with a figure
of the bishop’s champion armed with a battle axe, by which it will be
seen that it was not scandalously, in his own proper person, that the
bishop was prepared to fight, but by a deputy, skilled in arms, and
supported by the ghostly terrors of that ancient curse.

And so, in the possession of the bishops of Salisbury who, to all intents
and purposes, and within the meaning of old Oswald, were successors and
representatives of the Bishops of Sherborne, the castle remained until
1540, when, in the dissolution of religious houses, it was seized and
afterwards granted to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset.  Then the
curse seems to have come into its own again, for Somerset ended, where
many other good and true were cut off, on Tower Hill.  Although
subsequently restored to the bishop of Salisbury, it was again alienated
by Bishop Cotton to Sir Walter Raleigh, as payment for favours and
promotion received when that hero and courtier was in the enjoyment of
royal smiles.  Raleigh, as every one knows, ended tragically, after
long-drawn misery, in 1618, on the same spot where Somerset had suffered
sixty years earlier.  And well, the superstitious may think, was it that
by legal quirks and quibbles James I. succeeded in chousing Raleigh’s son
out of his inheritance, for the ill-omened possession continued to work
disaster.  James bestowed it upon his favourite, the despicable Robert
Carl, Earl of Somerset, who, convicted of being accessory to the murder
of Sir Thomas Overbury, was condemned to die, but was reprieved, and
finally released by the timid James, to die obscurely in 1645.  Something
of a blundering curse, this, one may think, to miss scoring a “bull” on
so admirable and easy a mark.

The king then conveyed the property to Digby, Earl of Bristol, the “Earl
of Severn” of the slight story of _Anna_, _Lady Baxby_, in _A Group of
Noble Dames_.  When the Civil War broke out, Sherborne Castle was
garrisoned for the king by the Marquis of Hertford, and early besieged by
the Earl of Bedford, on behalf of the Parliament.  It happened here—as so
often it did in their internecine strife—that there were relatives
engaged on either side in this siege.  The Earl of Bristol’s son, George,
Lord Digby, was married to the Lady Anne Russell, sister of the Earl of
Bedford.  She it was, the “Anna, Lady Baxby,” of the story, who rode out
secretly to her brother, and told him that if he were determined to
reduce the castle, he “should find his sister’s bones buried in the
ruins.”  But the investment continued until, finding himself weaker than
he had supposed, the marquis offered to surrender on terms.  If they were
not accepted he proposed, with the Lady Anne’s consent, and indeed at her
wish, to station her on the battlements, and let the enemy’s marksmen do
their worst.  The Earl of Bedford was not proof against this, and it is
said, raising the siege, retired.

But this plan would not always work.  Three years later, in 1645, when
Sir Lewis Dives, the Earl of Bristol’s stepson, was in command, a greater
than the Earl of Bedford appeared before Sherborne Castle, and summoned
it to surrender.  This was Sir Thomas Fairfax, flushed with his
successes, and making a clean sweep of the garrisons in the west of
England.  For sixteen days, his forces sat down in front of the castle,
which then surrendered, with its garrison of fifty-five gentlemen and six
hundred soldiers.  With that surrender came the final ruin, for the
castle was “slighted,” or destroyed by gunpowder, its contents and the
spoils of “the lodge,” sold to the people of Sherborne.  This “Lodge” was
the mansion which even then had been built near by, the castle already
proving too inconvenient for the ideas of those times.  It is the
so-called “Castle” of to-day, still the seat of Digbys, collateral and
commoner descendants of the old owners.  Sir Walter Raleigh built the
centre portion of it in 1594, as his arms and the sculptured figures
show, and Digbys the later wings.  Their crest, the singular one of an
ostrich holding a horse-shoe in its beak, is prominent over the entrance
to the courtyard.  In the park is still shown a stone seat, said to be
that on which Sir Walter Raleigh was resting and smoking his first pipe
of tobacco, when his pipe was dowsed and he drenched, by the pail of
water thrown over him by his faithful retainer, who, not unnaturally, as
tobacco was then a thing unknown, imagined his master to be on fire, and,
in the expressive words of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s reports, “well
alight.”

The Lodge, now the “Castle,” was a halting-place of the Prince of Orange
on his triumphal march from Tor Bay, in 1688.  He slept here a night, and
from a printing-press in the house was issued his address to the people
of England.




CHAPTER XVIII


                  SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH

IT is twenty-six miles from stately Sherborne, the “Sherton Abbas” of
_The Woodlanders_, to where Weymouth sits enthroned on the margin of her
circular Bay, and, always supposing that no strong southerly gale is
blowing, there is for the cyclist no easier route in all the Hardy
Country.  Bating the steep rise out of Sherborne and out of the Vale of
Blackmore to the chalk uplands at Minterne Magna, it is a route of
favourable gradients, with one interval of dead level.

The river Yeo is a small stream, but its valley is deep and wide, as he
who, leaving Sherborne, climbs the hills which shut in that valley, shall
find.  But a reward comes with the easy descent to the long, scattered
street of rustic cottages at Long Burton, whence the way lies across a
dead level to where, six miles distant from this point, rise the bastions
of the mid-Dorset heights, seen distinctly from here: Dogbury, with his
convex clump of cresting trees, like a blue-black wig, High Stoy, where
the ridge runs bare, with Nettlecomb Tout and Bulbarrow in the hazy
distance.

It is a straight, and a marshy and low-lying, as well as a flat road to
Holnest, where, beside the road, is Holnest Lodge, belonging to the
Erle-Drax family, and one of the seats of that eccentric person, the late
J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, of Charborough Park, long a member of
Parliament for Wareham, and one of the last of the squires.  The old time
squires were laws to themselves, and like none others.  The product of
generations of other many-acred squires of great port-drinking
propensities and unbounded local influence, whom all the lickings
administered at Eton did not suffice to bring to a proper sense of their
intrinsic unimportance, apart from the accidental circumstance that they
were the lords of their manors, “old Squire Drax,” as the rustics call
him now that he is dead, might from his high-handed ways have formed an
excellent model for a dramatist building up a melodrama of the old style.
He was “the Squire” to the very _n_th degree, with so extraordinary an
idea of his own importance that here, on the lawn fronting Holnest Lodge,
he caused to be erected in his own lifetime a memorial to himself.  An
inspection of the approach to that residence will convince any one not
only that he was very rich, but very mad as well.  The sweeping drive is
bordered at intervals with statues: Circes, Floras, Ceres, Dianas, and
other classical deities, shining whitely and conspicuously against the
grass, and leading the eye up to the central point where, on a tall
imposing column, guarded by crouching lions, stands the bronze,
frock-coated statue of Squire Drax himself.  It is all very like a kind
of higher-class Rosherville, and exceedingly curious.

                          [Picture: Long Burton]

One has not progressed far along the dead-level road before another
evidence of the Drax swelled head comes in sight.  It is a huge building
in the Byzantine style, highly elaborated, and decorated in a costly way
with polished stones.  Its purpose puzzling at first, it is seen on
closer approach to stand in a churchyard and to be a mausoleum.  Away
back from it stands in perspective the little church of Holnest, scarce
larger than this gorgeous place prepared by the squire for his rest, and
looking really smaller.  The rustics dot the i’s and cross the t’s of his
eccentricity, telling how he had his coffin made in his lifetime and his
funeral rehearsed in front of the house.  The more superstitious declare
that the mausoleum was built so strongly and substantially in order to
foil a certain personage whose desire is rather for the souls than for
the bodies of his own; and, to support their dark beliefs, narrate how,
canvassing for votes during the progress of an election the squire
declared he had always been a Member of Parliament, would always be, and
would rather go to the Pit with the initials of M.P. attached to his name
than to Heaven without them.  Unfortunately, these wonder-mongers halt a
little short of the completeness desired by dramatic requirements, and do
not proceed to tell us how the election was secured by the agency of a
gentlemanly stranger of persuasive manners and club-feet, who, upon the
declaration of the poll mysteriously disappeared amid a strong smell of
Tandstickör matches.

                  [Picture: Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum]

Advancing, we come at Middlemarsh into the country of _The Woodlanders_,
where dense woodlands now begin to cover the levels.  The long ridge of
the downs ahead now grows stern, steep, and threatening.  To the left
hand an isolated protuberance, covered with trees, the oddly named
Dungeon Hill, rises, disclosing from its flanks peeps into the Vale of
Blackmore, where the explorer can, with promptitude and thorough
efficacy, lose himself.  Believe one who has been along the sometimes
devious and sometimes straight, but always lonely, roads of these levels.
There, down beyond Dungeon Hill and Pulham, on a road flat as the
alliterative flounder and empty as a City church, stands at King’s Stag
Bridge across the river Lidden an inn with the sign of the White Hart and
a verse alluding to the origin of the name of “Vale of White Hart” given
to this part of the greater Vale of Blackmore—

    “When Julius Cæsar Reigned here, I was but then a little Deer.
    When Julius Cæsar Reigned King, around my Neck he put this Ring.
    Whoever doth me overtake, Oh! spare my life, for Cæsar’s sake.”

            [Picture: Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore]

The classic historian of Dorsetshire tells us something of the story thus
darkly reflected.  According to his account, corrected in details from
other sources, it seems that King Henry III. hunting in what was then a
forest, rounded up, among several other deer, a particularly beautiful
white hart, whose life he spared for future hunting.  Somewhat later, Sir
John de la Lynde, Bailiff of Blackmore Forest, a neighbouring gentleman
of ancient descent and local importance, out hunting with a party, roused
the same animal, and, less pitiful than the king, killed it at the end of
a long pursuit, at the spot ever after called King’s Stag Bridge.  The
king, highly offended, not only punished Sir John de la Lynde and his
companions with imprisonment and heavy fines, but taxed their lands
severely and permanently, so that for many later generations the fine of
White Hart Silver continued to be paid into the Exchequer.  Another
historian, the quaint and amusing Fuller, in giving his version, states
that the whole county was laid under contribution.  “Myself,” he says
whimsically “hath paid a share for the sauce who never tasted the meat.”
It is stated that “White Hart Silver” was levied until the reign of Henry
VII.

The road, passing a signpost weirdly directing to “Giant’s Head,” ascends
a steep hill, perhaps the ‘Rubdon Hill’ of _The Woodlanders_, and the
Lyon’s Gate Hill of actual fact, down which, into the vale on that
autumnal day went Fitzpiers, the infatuated surgeon—a Dorsetshire
Tannhäuser, thinking of the Venus who had bewitched him, and careless of
the beauty of the season—when “the earth was now at the supreme moment of
her bounty.  In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and
blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts
lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers for
the market.”  Steeply upward continues the hill, to the ridge of the
mid-Dorset heights, whence Blackmore Vale, of which it is very truly said
that “an unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather, is apt to
engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways,” is
seen spreading out like an unrolled map.

“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are
never brown, and the springs never dry,” is bounded on the south by the
bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill,
Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down.  There
“in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more
delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this
height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads
overspreading the paler green of the grass.  The atmosphere beneath is
languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle
distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the
deepest ultramarine.  Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight
exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling
minor hills and dales within the major.  Such is the Vale of Blackmore.”

The village of Minterne Magna that, with its fine trees and the seat of
Lord Digby, has so handsome a presence, is the “Great Hintock” of _The
Woodlanders_.  Poor loyal-hearted Giles Winterbourne, “a good man, who
did good things,” was buried here, beside that ivy-covered church-tower
overlooking the road, and now bearing the inscription

                               “LE TEMPS PASSE
                                L’AMITIE RESTE
                                     1888
                             IN MEMORIAM  H.R.D.”

They laid him to rest “on the top of that hill looking down into the
Vale,” to whose villages he had, as autumn came round, been wont to
descend with his portable cider-mill and press; and Grace rejoined her
husband, and the world went on as usual.  Only Marty South remembered him
and treasured his memory.

At Minterne Magna, otherwise “Great Hintock,” according to a rustic
character, “you do see the world and life,” whereas, at Little Hintock,
to be identified with Melbury Osmund, away down at Evershot, “’tis such a
small place that you’d need a candle and lantern to find it, if ye don’t
know where ’tis.”

But, at the same time, outside the pages of novels Minterne Magna is not
a place of stir and movement, and is great only in name.

From just before Minterne Magna there is a left-hand turning which
affords an alternative route to Dorchester, avoiding Cerne Abbas, and
going exposedly over the haggard downs.  The two routes are locally known
as the overhill and the underhill roads.  The first-named is now little
travelled, and its old house of entertainment, the Revels inn, a thing of
the past.  This, “the forsaken coach-road running in an almost meridional
line from Bristol to the south shore of England,” is the route of the
escaped prisoner and the scene of “Higher Crowstairs” in the intense
story of _The Three Strangers_.  On that route you see better than
anywhere else, those “calcareous downs” described by the novelist, where
“the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give
an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges
low and splashed, the atmosphere colourless.”  It is, by the same token,
of an exhausting dryness in summer, and in winter only to be undertaken
by the most robust.

By the ‘underhill’ road on the other hand, the ten miles from Minterne to
Dorchester are chiefly on a gentle descent.  Presently, therefore, one
reaches Cerne Abbas, the “Abbot’s Cernel” of _Tess_ and other stories,
situated in a fine widening of the valley through which the river Cerne
flows, with the gaunt bare shoulders of the great chalk downs receding
far enough to lose something of their asperity, and to gain in distance
all the atmosphere and softened outlines of an impressionistic picture.
From the south, half a mile beyond the decayed town of Cerne, a very
beautiful view of this nature opens out, by the roadside.  There the fine
tower of the church stands out against the sage-green coloration of the
hills, and with the luxuriant trees and the nestling farms of the valley,
presents by force of contrast with the bare uplands a striking picture of
comfort, prosperity, and hospitality, not perhaps warranted in every one
of those respects by a closer acquaintance.  For Cerne is a place very
hardly treated by heartless circumstance.

Many centuries ago, in A.D. 987 to be exact, a Benedictine Abbey was
founded here by Ethelmar, Earl of Devon and Cornwall, upon the site of a
hermitage established by Ædwold, brother of that East Anglican saint,
Edmund the King and Martyr.  It does not appear what became of the
hermit, whether those who established the abbey bought him out, or threw
him out; but it certainly seems to demand enquiry, the more especially
that hermits and abbots, pious founders and holy monks were not
altogether so unbusinesslike in their worldly affairs as the uninstructed
might imagine.  The hermit probably received due compensation for
disturbance and went off somewhere else.  However that may be, the abbey
grew and flourished.  Canute certainly despoiled it, but more than made
amends, by large gifts and endowments of other people’s property, when he
had been brought to see the error of his ways and that
plundering—plundering the property of the church, at least—was wrong.
And so the business of the abbey progressed through the centuries, to the
daily accompaniment of the monks chanting “their wonderful piff-and-paff”
as the librettist of _The Golden Legend_ makes the devil say of it.

In 1471 Henry VI.’s Queen, Margaret of Anjou, striving desperately, brave
heart, on her son’s behalf, fled for shelter here, up the road from
Weymouth, where she had landed from France; but, indeed, little else of
history belongs to this sometime rich and splendid abbey in the heart of
the hills.  It afforded shelter and protection to the townlet of Cerne
that had sprung up outside its precincts; and great therefore was the
dismay when ruin overtook it in the time of Henry VIII.  The abbey
disestablished, the town of course also suffered.  How greatly we do not
know; but it plucked up courage again and refused to die, and when
England was still that exceedingly uncomfortable England of coaching
times, flourished in a modest way on the needs of travellers for succour
and shelter on the exhausting journeys that are so romantic to read of in
Christmas numbers, but were the terror of those who could not possibly
stop at home.

                          [Picture: Cerne Abbas]

And at last the coaches ceased and railways came to the country in
general, but not to Cerne.  It is still, to-day, remote from railways and
is thus hit several severe, separate, and distinct blows by Fate, which,
when travellers no longer needed its shelter, took away its chief reason
for existence, refused it the reinvigorating boon of a railway, and then,
in the general depression of agriculture, has dealt a final and
staggering buffet.  Cerne is dead.  There is (assuming for the moment
positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of deadness) no deader
townlet in England, and it has all the interest, and commands all the
respect due to the departed.  _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_, and if there
were hard things to be said of Cerne, they should not here be uttered.
But there are no such things for utterance.  It has all the romance of
the bygone that appeals to the artist, and I love to dwell upon and in
it.  It is a place where commercialism has, or should have, no part, and
therefore, when I pass a noble-looking farmhouse and a somewhat stately
landlady comes out with a key, asking me—with an eye upon the perquisite
of the fee exacted—if I would like to see the Abbey Gatehouse, I refuse;
earning thereby the keen contempt shown on her expressive face.  Soulless
Goth, to wander about Cerne and not see the Gatehouse!  Ah! my dear lady,
your contempt is misplaced.  I love these things better than you imagine,
but I hate commercialism—and in such unexpected places—the more.  The
abbey ruins, wholly summed up in that Gatehouse, are at the extremity of
this dead town, but there is a fine parish church in the centre of its
streets.  A noble, highly decorated tower is that belonging to it, one of
the finest productions of the Perpendicular period, with bold gargoyles,
whose gaping mouths are for the most part stopped with birds’ nests.
Decay and ruin squat next door, in the shape of one of Cerne’s wrecked
and unroofed houses, so long in that condition as to have become a
terrace on which wild flowers luxuriantly grow and display themselves to
passing admiration.  It will be observed that there are shops—or things
in the specious and illusory shape of shops—in this town of Yester-year.
They indeed were so once, but the shopkeepers have long ceased from their
shopkeeping.  The windows, perhaps retained over against that time when
Cerne shall be resurrected—for Fortune’s wheel still spins, and will come
full circle some day—are meanwhile excellent for displaying geraniums.

                  [Picture: The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey]

[Picture: The Cerne Giant] Prominent in most views of Cerne Abbas is that
weird figure of a man on the hillside which gives an alternative name to
Trendle or Giant’s Hill.  The “Giant of Cerne” is a big fellow, well
deserving his name, for he is 180 feet high.  No one knows who cut him on
the chalk of the hillside, but local tradition has long told how the
figure commemorated the destruction of a giant who, feasting on the sheep
of Blackmore, laid himself down here, in the sleep of repletion, and was
then, like another Gulliver, pinioned where he lay by the enraged
peasantry, who killed him and immediately traced his dimensions for the
information of posterity.  The prominence of his ribs, however, says
little for the result of his feeding.

A more instructed opinion is that the figure represents Heil, a god of
the pagan Saxons, and that it was cut before A.D. 600.  Fearful legends
belong to it: tales of horror narrating how the border enclosing the
effigy is the ground plan of a stout wicker-work cage in which the pagan
priests imprisoned many victims, whom they offered up as burnt sacrifices
to their god.

Looked upon with awe and wonder by the peasantry of old, who cleaned him
once every seven years, the Giant is now regarded by them with
indifference and left alone, and it is only the stranger who finds
himself obsessed with a strange awe as he gazes upon this mystic relic of
a prehistoric age.  His minatory and uncouth appearance—for the relation
of his head to his body is that of a pea to a melon—perhaps even more
than his size, impresses the beholder.  It should be said that he is
merely traced in outline on the turf, in lines two feet broad and one
foot deep, and not laid bare, a huge white shape, to the sky.  The club
he wields is 120 feet long, and from seven to twenty-four feet broad.




CHAPTER XIX


                  SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
                              (_continued_)

PAST Nether Cerne and Godmanstone, the road leads, consistently straight
and on a down gradient, to Charminster, where, in consonance with the
place-name, a minster-like church stands.  It is rich in monuments of the
Trenchards—bearing their motto, _Nosce Teipsum_, Know Thyself—of the
neighbouring historic mansion of Wolveton, one of whom—a Sir Thomas—built
the tower, in or about the year 1500, as duly attested on the building
itself, which displays his cypher of two T’s.

Wolveton, standing in the rich level water-meadows where the rivers Cerne
and Frome come to a confluence, is, as the Man of Family narrates in the
story of _The Lady Penelope_, in _A Group of Noble Dames_, “an ivied
manor-house, flanked by battlemented towers, and more than usually
distinguished by the size of its mullioned windows.  Though still of good
capacity, the building is much reduced from its original grand
proportions; it has, moreover, been shorn of the fair estate which once
appertained to its lord, with the exception of a few acres of park-land
immediately around the mansion.  This was formerly the seat of the
ancient and knightly Drenghards, or Drenkhards, now extinct in the male
line, whose name, according to the local chronicles, was interpreted to
mean _Strenuus Miles_, _vel Potator_, though certain members of the
family were averse to the latter signification, and a duel was fought by
one of them on that account, as is well known.”

                          [Picture: Cerne Abbas]

The Lady Penelope, who jestingly promised to marry all three of her
lovers in turn, and by that jest earned such misery when Fate ordained
that her words should come true, was an actual living character.  A
daughter of Lord Darcy, she in turn married George Trenchard, Sir John
Gage, and Sir William Hervey.  As the story truly tells, the Drenghards,
or rather Trenchards, are extinct in the male line.

Passing by Poundbury, the “Pummery” of Dorset speech, we enter
Dorchester, already described at considerable length, and, passing down
South Street and by the Amphitheatre, of gloomy associations, come out
upon the Weymouth—or, as Mr. Hardy would say the “Budmouth”—road.

                        [Picture: Wolveton House]

For the distance of close upon a mile this Roman road, the chief means of
communication between their seaport station of Clavinium, near Weymouth,
and their inland town of Durnovaria, runs on the level, bordered by the
fine full-grown elms of one of Dorchester’s many avenues.  Then it sets
out with a grim straightness to climb to the summit of that geological
spine, the Ridgeway, which places so stubborn an obstacle on these nine
miles of road that many a faint-hearted pilgrim from Dorchester fails to
reach Weymouth, and many another from Weymouth gives up the task at less
than half-way.

Climbing here, the vast mass of Maiden Castle rises on the right,
conferring a solemnity upon the scene, due not so much to the bulk given
it by nature as to the amazing ditches, mounds, scarps, and counterscarps
terraced along its mighty bosom by—ay, by whom?  Many peoples had a hand
in the making of this great fortification.  The British Durotriges are
said to have styled it “Mai-Dun,” the “Castle of the great Hill,” and to
have established their capital here; and at a later date the Romans
camped upon it and must have cursed the Imperialism which brought them
here to wilt and wither in face of the bitter blasts of an inclement
land.

It was the Dunium of Ptolemy, and has been the wonder of many ages, not
easily able to understand by what enormous expenditure of effort all
these great mounds were heaped up and what enemies they feared who delved
the ditches so deeply and ramped the ridges so steeply and so high.

Maiden Castle is still occupied, although the last defender left it
perhaps a thousand years ago; for as the curious traveller to these
prehistoric earthworks climbs exhaustedly up the steep rises, over the
short grass, he may see the rabbits mounting guard by thousands against
the skyline, or fleeing panic-stricken, in admirable open order, showing
myriads of white flags formed by their tails as they go loping away over
the field.

           [Picture: Weymouth and Portland, from the Ridgeway]

As one progresses, more and more slowly with the acuter gradient, up the
roadway, the church-tower of Winterborne Monkton, among its encircling
barns, ricks, and cow-byres, comes into view, the observer’s eye on a
higher level than the rooftop.  Village there is none, and the clergyman
who on Sundays conducts services here must do so—between the peals of the
organ, and in midst of the quieter-spoken passages of morning and evening
prayers—to the commentatory lowing of cattle or the grunts of pigs,
sounding like the observations of grudging critics.  There was once a
saint who, like a broody hen that will nurse strange things, preached to
the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field, and the spiritual
shepherd of Winterborne Monkton not infrequently has among his
congregation a barn owl, and a cheerful concourse of sparrows in the
roof, much given to brawling in church.

Roman directness was all very well, but later races found it much too
trying for their horses, and thus we find, nearing the summit, that the
straight ancient road across the ridgeway has long been abandoned, except
by the telegraph-poles, for a cutting through the crest and an S curve
down the southern and much steeper side.  This expedient certainly eases
both ascent and descent, but it does not suffice to render the way less
than extremely fatiguing to climb and nerve-shaking to descend.

As a view-point it has remarkable features, for the whole expanse of
Portland Roads, the Isle of Portland, and the site on which Weymouth and
Melcombe Regis are built are exposed to gaze, very much as though the
spectator looking down upon them were bending in an examination of some
modelled map of physical geography.  White spires at Weymouth and equally
white groups of houses at Portland gain striking effects from backgrounds
of grey rock or the dark green of trees, massed by distance to the
likeness of dense forests; and the mile-lengths of harbour walls and
breakwaters, punctuated with forts, out in the roadstead are shrunken by
distance to the likeness of a cast seine-net supported by cork floats.
On a ridge inland a row of circular ricks with peaked roofs showing
against the sea looks absurdly like beehives, and down there in the
middle distance is the curving line of embankment where the railway from
Dorchester goes, after piercing the hill on which we stand by the
Bincombe Tunnel.

                    [Picture: The Wishing Well, Upwey]

Descending the hill, we come to the valley of the Wey.  The older part of
the village of Upwey marks the source of that little stream to the right,
and the newer part, with the village of Broadwey, are scarcely to be
distinguished from one another, ahead.  The original Upwey, the Upwey of
the “Wishing Well,” lies under the flanks of a great down, where, if you
climb and climb and continue climbing, you will presently discover the
poppy-like scarlet buildings of the Weymouth waterworks.  But there is no
need to seek them while the Wishing Well, nearer to hand, calls.

The “Wishing Well” is a pretty spot, overhung with trees and still a
place resorted to by tourists, who either shamefacedly, with an implied
half-belief in its virtues, drink its waters, or else with the quip and
jest of unbelief, defer the slaking of their thirst until the nearest inn
is reached, where liquors more palatable to the sophisticated taste—or
what Mr. Hardy’s rustics would term “a cup of genuine”—are obtainable.
Once the haunt of gipsies, who used the well as a convenient pitch, and,
when you crossed their palms with silver in the approved style,
prophesied fulfilment of the nicest things you could possibly wish
yourself—and a good many other things that would never occur to you at
all—it is now quite unexploited, save perhaps by a little village girl,
who, with a glass tumbler, will save the devotee from stooping on hands
and knees and lapping up the magic water, like a dog.  The gipsies have
been all frightened away by the Vagrants Act, and no great loss to the
community in general.  The inquisitive stranger, curious to know whether
the villagers themselves resort to their famous Fount of Heart’s Desire,
receives a rude shock when he is told by one of them that, “Bless ’ee,
there baint a varden’s wuth o’ good in ’en, at arl.  Mebbe ’tis good ver
a whist (a stye) but all them ’ere magicky tales be done away wi’.”  The
Age of Faith is dead.

And so into Weymouth, down a road lined with long rows of suburbs.
Radipole is come to this complexion at last, and its spa is, like a
service rendered and a benefit conferred, a thing clean forgot.




CHAPTER XX


                                 WEYMOUTH

WELL, then, here, reaching a Modern church with a tall spire, surrounded
by suburban villas, is the beginning of Weymouth.  The sea in these miles
has dropped gradually down, out of sight as the road comes to the level,
and at this point you might, to all intents and purposes, be at North
Kensington, which the spot greatly resembles.  But turning sharply with
the road to the right the derogatory illusion is at once dispelled, for
the sea is out there, sparkling, to the left; and, in the perfect segment
of a circle, the Esplanade of Weymouth goes sweeping round to the
harbour, with the Nothe Point fort above, and, away out in the distance,
that towering knob of limestone, the Isle of Portland.  It is a
stimulating view, and has generally other and even more stimulating
constituents than those of nature, for Weymouth and Portland are places
of arms, and the ships of the Navy are usually represented by a squadron
of cruisers well in shore, with a brace or two of battleships coming,
going, or anchored easily in sight, and numbers of those ugly, imp-like
craft, torpedo-boats, flying hither and thither.

Weymouth styles itself—or others style it—“the Naples of England,” but no
one has ever yet found Naples returning the compliment and calling itself
“the Weymouth of Italy.”  There is really no reason why Weymouth, instead
of seeking some fanciful resemblance based solely, it may be supposed on
the configuration of its widely curving bay, should not stand or fall by
the sufficing attractions of its own charming self.  For one thing, it
would be impossible to persuade the public that Weymouth owns a Vesuvius
somewhere away in its _hinterland_, and, although the country is rich in
Roman camps, no antiquary has yet discovered a Pompeii midway between
Melcombe Regis and Dorchester.

The town is still in essentials the Weymouth of George III., the
“Budmouth” of Thomas Hardy.  They are, it is true, the battleships of
Edward VII. wallowing out there, like fat pigs, where of yore the wooden
men-o’-war swam the waters like swans; but the houses at least, that face
the Esplanade in one almost unbroken row, each one like its neighbour and
all absolutely innocent either of taste or pretension, are
characteristically Georgian.  Taken individually and examined, one might
go greater lengths, and say such a house was more than insipid and
commonplace—was, indeed, downright ugly—but in a long curving row the
effect is a comprehensive one of dignified restraint.  At any rate, they
are constructed of good honest dull red brick, and not plastered and made
to look like stone.  This bluff honesty in these days of shams and of
restless, worried-looking designs, when every new building must have its
own ready-made picturesqueness, and this total absence of anything and
everything that by remotest chance could be thought an ornament, is
grateful.

We speak of this as “Weymouth,” but it is rather, to speak by the card,
Melcombe Regis, and although the interests of both this and of Weymouth
proper, on the other side of the narrow neck of harbour, are now pooled,
it was once a sign of ignorance and a certain offence not to carefully
distinguish between the two.  Their rivalries and jealousies were of old
so bitter that the river-mouth and harbour, long since bridged to make a
continuous street, was like a stream set between two alien states.  The
passage was then “by a bote and a rope bent over ye haven, so yt in ye
fery bote they use no ores.”

These disputes and contentions had risen almost to the condition of a
smouldering petty local warfare in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when
means were taken to put an end to it.  Thus in 1571 they were compelled
to unite, and in the familiar phrase of fairy tales have “lived happily
ever after.”  Says Camden: “These stood both some time proudlie upon
their owne severall priviledges, and were in emulation one of the other,
but now, tho’ (God turne it to the good of both!) many, they are, by
authoritie of Parliament, incorporated into one bodie, conjoyned by late
by a bridge, and growne very much greater and goodlier in buildings and
by sea adventures than heretofore.”

But things widely different from trade have in later times made the
fortune of the conjoined towns of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis.  I suppose
the one or the other of them was bound in the course of time to be
“discovered” as a bathing-resort, but it is to George III. that Weymouth
owes a deep debt of gratitude.  His son had already “discovered”
Brighthelmstone, or rather, had placed the seal of his approval upon Dr.
Russel’s earlier discovery of it; and likewise Weymouth was already on
the road to recognition when George III. came here first, in 1789.
Thirty years or so earlier, when people had begun as a strange new
experience, to bathe, the sands of Weymouth—or to adopt an attitude of
strict correctitude, the sands of Melcombe Regis—were on the way to
appreciation.  Then greater folks lending their august patronage where
that of meaner people had little weight, the place was resorted to by the
famous Ralph Allen of Bath, for whom in 1763 the first bathing-machine
was constructed, and by a stream of visitors gradually ascending in the
social scale.  The place long found favour with the Duke of Gloucester,
by whose recommendation the king was induced to make a visit and then a
lengthy stay, placing the apex at last upon this imposing pyramid of good
fortune.  It was no fleeting glimpse of royal favour thus accorded, for
with the coming of summer the king for many years resided here at
Gloucester Lodge, the mansion facing the sea built by his brother the
Duke of Gloucester, and now the staid and grave Gloucester Hotel.
Weymouth basked happily in the splendours of that time.  They were
splendours of the respectable domestic sort generally associated with
that homely monarch, who bathed from his machine in full view of his
loyal lieges and then went home to boiled mutton and turnips.  He made
sober holiday on the Dorset coast while his graceless son was on the
coast of Sussex rearing a fantastical palace and playing pranks fully
matching it in extravagance of design and purse.

Weymouth’s return for all these favours is still to be seen, in the
bronze group erected by the townsfolk in 1809, to celebrate the generally
joyful occasion of his Jubilee, to perpetuate the especial gratitude of
the people for favours received, and in hopes of more to come.

Weymouth very closely reflects the prosperity of that great era, in the
Georgian streets, the quaintly bowed windows of private houses and the
now old-world shop-fronts, many of them exquisite examples of the
restrained taste and aptitude for just proportion in design
characteristic of that age, and only now beginning to be appreciated at
their true worth.  It was the age of the Adams brothers, of Chippendale
and Sheraton; an age rightly come to be regarded in our time as classic
in all things in the domain of architecture and decoration.  In its
unaltered purlieus Weymouth is thus singularly like the older parts of
Brighton, but now richer in vestiges of the Georgian period than the
larger and more changeful town.

That, doubtless, was a period of inflated prices in Weymouth.  King,
queen, and princesses, fashionables and many soldiers sent up the ideas
of tradesfolk just as the sun expands the mercury of a thermometer.
Uncle Benjy, in _The Trumpet Major_, found Budmouth a place where money
flew away doubly as quick as it did when the famous Scot visited London
and “hadna’ been there a day when bang went saxpence.”  At Budmouth in
the time of Farmer George, it was a “shilling for this and a shilling for
that; if you only eat one egg or even a poor windfall of an apple, you’ve
got to pay; and a bunch o’ radishes is a halfpenny, and a quart o’ cider
a good tuppence three-farthings at lowest reckoning.  Nothing without
paying!”  Ay! but if prices were no higher than these, ’twas no such
ruinous place, after all.  Poor Uncle Benjy!

                       [Picture: Weymouth Harbour]

The most striking differences in physical geography between the
constituent parts of Weymouth are that Melcombe Regis, here on the shore
is flat as a pancake, and Weymouth, there on t’other side of the harbour,
is as hilly as a house-roof.  You could have no greater dissimilarity
than that between the prudish formality which stands for the Melcombe
front and the heaped-up terraces of houses of every description at
Weymouth, which has no front at all; unless indeed the lowest tier of
houses skirting the harbour and its quays, and looking into the back
alleys and quays of Melcombe may so be styled.  In those old days, to
which Weymouth dates back, no seaside town could afford so assailable a
luxury as a “front,” and the older quarters of nearly all such are
generally found, as here, folded away under the lee of a bluff, or thinly
lining the shores of an estuarial harbour.  Here the Nothe Point, with
its fort mounted with heavy guns, is the rocky bluff behind which the old
town cowered from elemental and human foes, and that estuary, both by
reason of its narrow entrance, and those great forts of the Nothe and
Portland, has never been one sought by an enemy’s ship.

The harbour is not uninteresting: what harbour ever is?  The comings and
goings of ships have their own romance, and bring rumours of all kinds of
outer worlds and strange peoples.  You look across from the quays of
Weymouth to the quays of Melcombe, and there, beside the walls and the
old warehouses, lie the ships from many home and foreign ports, their
names duly to be read under their counters.  Whence they individually
come, I do not greatly care to know.  This one may only have come from
the Channel Islands with a consignment of early potatoes: and, on the
other hand, it may have won home again after who knows what romantic
doings at the Equator or within the Arctic Zone.  It may have brought
treasure-trove, or on the other hand be merely carrying ordinary
commercial freights, at so low a figure that the owners are dissatisfied
and the skipper gloomy.  It is well, you see, to leave a little margin
for fancy when the good ship has come to port once more and within sight
and the easiest reach of those two great features of a Christian and a
civilised land: the Church and the Public House.

In these days the town is recovering at last from the undeserved neglect
into which it fell after the illness and death of George III. and from
later disasters and indifferences; and, what with improved railway
travelling, and the added interest it obtains from being selected as the
site of a new great national harbour where more than ever the ships of
the Navy will come and go, has a great future before it.




CHAPTER XXI


                           THE ISLE OF PORTLAND

TO the generality of untravelled folk, Portland is nothing but a quarry
and a prison.  It is both and more.  It is, for one additional thing, a
fortress, in these times grown to a considerable strength, and, for
another, is a singular outlying corner of England tethered to the
mainland only by that seemingly precarious stretch of pebbles, the Chesil
Beach.  As Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of _The Trumpet Major_, so
Portland, the “Isle of Slingers,” as Mr. Hardy calls it, is especially,
though not with absolute exclusiveness, the district of _The Well
Beloved_.

There is a choice of ways to Portland.  You may go by the high road—and a
very steep up and down road it is, too—past Wyke, or may proceed by the
crumbling clifflets past Sandsfoot Castle, one of those blockhouse
coastward fortresses stretching from Deal and Sandown Castles, in Kent,
along the whole of the south coast, to this point, whose building we owe
to the panic that possessed the nation in the time of Henry VIII.: one of
those periodic fears of a French invasion that from time to time have
troubled the powers that be.  Two of the long series were placed in this
neighbourhood; the so-styled “Portland Castle” at the base of the Isle of
Portland itself, and this craggy ruin of Sandsfoot, roofless and rough
and more cliff-like than the cliffs themselves, at the mainland extremity
of this sheltered inlet, wherein, in days of yore, an enemy might
conceivably have effected a lodgment.  For the defence of this fort, when
new-builded in the Eighth Harry’s time, there were to be provided “the
nombre of xv hable footmen, well furneyshed for the warres, as
appertayneth,” together with some “harchers” duly furnished, or “harmed”
as the summons might have put it, with their “bows and harrowes.”  Alas!
poor overworked letter H!

                       [Picture: Sandsfoot Castle]

It is here, in the story of _The Well Beloved_, that Jocelyn Pierston,
the weirdly constituted hero of that fantastic romance, elects to bid
farewell to Avice Caro, and past it Anne Garland went on her way to
Portland Bill, “along the coast road to Portland.”  When she had reached
the waters of the Fleet, crossed now by a bridge, she had to ferry over,
and from thence to walk that causeway road whose mile-and-three-quarters
of flatness, bounded sideways by the expressionless blue of the summer
sky and the equally vacant vastnesses of the yellow pebbles of the Chesil
Beach, seems to foot-passengers an image of eternity.  It is but a flat
road, less than two miles long, but the Isle ahead seems to keep as far
off as ever, and the way is so bald of incident that a sea-poppy growing
amid the pebbles is a change for the eye, a piece of driftwood a
landmark, and a chance boat or capstan a monument.

But even the Chesil Beach has an end, and at last one reaches Portland
and Fortune’s Well, referred to in that story of the Portlanders as “the
Street of Wells.”  The well—a wishing well of the good, or the bad, old
sort, where you wished for your heart’s desire, and perhaps obtained the
boon in the course of a lifetime—by striving and labouring for it—is
behind that substantial inn, the Portland Arms, and it is a cynical
commentary upon this and all such legends of faëry that, while the
Portlanders in general, and the people of Fortune’s Well in particular,
can one and all direct you to the inn, if so be you are bat-like enough
not to perceive it for yourself, very few of them know anything at all of
the magic spring, of where it is, or that the place took its name from
the existence of such a thing.

One circumstance, above all other curious and interesting circumstances
of this so-called “Isle” of Portland, is calculated to impress the
stranger with astonishment.  Its giant forts; its great convict
establishment, “the retreat, at their country’s expense, of geniuses from
a distance,” the odd nexus of almost interminable pebble beach that
tethers it to the mainland and makes the name of “Isle” a misnomer, are
all fitting things for amazement; but no one previously uninformed on the
point is at all likely to have any conception of its numerous villages
and hamlets and the large populations inhabiting this grim, forbidding,
“solid and single block of limestone four miles long.”  Eleven thousand
souls live and move and have their being on what the uninstructed, gazing
across the Roads from Weymouth, might be excused for thinking a
penitential rock, reserved for forts and garrison artillery, and for
convicts and those whose business it is to keep them in order.  The
number of small villages or hamlets is itself in the nature of a
surprise.  Entering upon this happily styled “Gibraltar of Wessex,” there
is in the foreground, by the railway-station, Chesilton; succeeded by
Fortune’s Well, Castleton to the left, Portland to the right, and, away
ahead up to the summit of a stupendous climb on to the great elevated,
treeless and parched stony plateau of the Isle, Reforne.  Beyond the
prison and the prison quarries, come Easton, Wakeham, Weston, and
Southwell; all stony and hard-featured and like nothing else but each
other.  To-day an exploration of the Isle is easy, for a railway runs
from Weymouth along the beach to Chesilton, and another, skirting the
cliffs, takes you out almost to the famous Bill itself; but otherwise,
all the circumstances of the place still fully show how the Portlanders
came to be that oddly different race from the mainlanders they are shown
to be in the pages of _The Well Beloved_, and in the writings of
innumerable authors.

Portland was to the ancients the Isle of Vindilis, the “Vindelia” of
Richard of Cirencester; and Roman roads are surviving on it to this day,
notwithstanding the blasting and quarrying activities of this vast bed of
building-stone, whence much of the material for Sir Christopher Wren’s
City of London churches came, and despite the business of fortification
that has abolished many merely antiquarian interests.  You, indeed,
cannot get away from stone, here on Portland; physically, in historic
allusions, and in matters of present-day business.  The story of the Isle
begins with it, with those ancient inhabitants, the _Baleares_, slingers
of stones, who made excellent defence of their unfertile home with the
inexhaustible natural ammunition; and quarrying is now, after the passing
of many centuries, its one industry.  It is to be supposed, without any
extravagance of assumption, that the Portlanders of to-day are the
descendants of those ancient Baleares, and, certainly until quite recent
times, they maintained the aloofness and marked individuality to be
expected from such an ancestry.  To them the mainlanders were foreigners,
or, as themselves would say, “kimberlins”; a flighty, mercurial and none
too scrupulous people, calling themselves Englishmen, who lived on the
adjacent island of Great Britain and were only to be dealt with
cautiously, and then solely on matters of business connected with the
selling of stone, or maybe of fish, caught in Deadman’s Bay.  For the
true Portlanders, like their home, are grey and unsmiling, and reflect
their surroundings, even as do those inhabitants of more sheltered and
fertile places; and still, although things be in these later days of
railway communication and a kind of quick-change and “general-post” all
over the country somewhat altered, a stranger, who by force of
circumstances—pleasure is out of the question—comes to live here, will
find himself as uncongenial as oil is to water.

The outlook of the old Portlanders upon strangers was justified to them,
in a way, when the great prison was built and the gangs of convicts began
to be a feature of the Isle.  _They_, who thus by force of circumstances
over which they had no control, took up a hard-working and frugal
existence upon the Isle, were specimens of the “kimberlins”; and the
prejudices, if not quite the ignorance, of the islanders saw in them
representative specimens of all “Outlanders.”

When you come toilsomely uphill from Fortune’s Well, out upon the stony
plateau that is Portland, you presently become conscious of the
contiguity of that great convict establishment, in the appearance of
notice-boards, warning all and sundry of the penalties awaiting those who
aid prisoners to escape.  Such an offence, you learn, “shall be treated
as a felony, not subject to any bail or mainprize” (whatever that may
be).  But any “free person” finding money, letters, or clothing, or
anything that may be supposed to have been left to facilitate the escape
of prisoners shall be rewarded, unless such person shall be proved to
have entered into collusion, etc., etc., and so forth.

What, however, one especially desires to call attention to is the
delicious expression, “free person.”  Obviously, to the official minds
ruling Portland “free persons” owe their freedom, not to any virtues they
possess, but to their luck in not being found out.  One, being a “free
person,” has, therefore, after reading this notice, an uneasy suspicion
that freedom is, in the eye of those authorities, a wholly undeserved
accident, and that if every one—saving, of course, officials—had their
deserts, they would be cutting and hauling stone out yonder, with the
gangs in those yellow jackets and knickerbockers plentifully decorated
with a pleasing design in broad arrows.

Being merely a “free person,” without prejudice in one’s favour in the
eyes of the armed warders who abound here, it behoves one to walk
circumspectly on Portland.

A great deal might be said of the Convict Prison and its quarries.  It is
another “sermon in stones,” quite as effective as the sermons preached by
those other stones referred to in the lines

    . . . books in the running brooks,
    Sermons in stones, and good in everything,

and the text, I take it, is the amended and horribly sophisticated one:
“Thou shalt not steal—or, if you must, do it outside the cognisance of
the criminal laws!”

But this only in passing.  Literary landmarks have fortunately, no points
of contact with burglars, fraudulent trustees, and swindling promoters of
companies.  We will make for Pennsylvania Castle, very slightly disguised
in _The Well Beloved_ as “Sylvania Castle,” the residence of Jocelyn
Pierston in that story.  Coming to it, past the cottage of Avice, down
that street innocent of vegetation, the thickets of trees surrounding the
Castle (which is not a castle, but only a castellated mansion built in
1800 by Wyatt, in true Wyattesque fashion, for the then Governor of the
Isle) are seen, closing in the view.  A tree is something more than a
tree on stony, wind-swept Portland.  Any tree here is a landmark, and a
grove of trees a feature; and thus, in the thickets and cliffside
undergrowths of “Sylvania Castle,” that justify the name and give the lie
to any who may in more than general terms declare Portland to be
treeless, the boskage is therefore more than usually gracious.

                     [Picture: Bow and Arrow Castle]

Many incidents in the elfish career of Pierston are made to happen here.
The first Avice was courted by him in the churchyard down below, where a
landslip has swept away the little church that gave to Church Hope Cove
its name, and Avice the third eloped with another—that Another who with
that capital A lurks between the pages of every novel, and behind the
scenes in most plays—down the steep lane that runs beneath the archways
of “Rufus’,” or Bow and Arrow, Castle on to the rocks beside the raging
sea.

By lengthy cliff-top ways we leave this spot and make for Portland Bill,
whence Anne Garland tearfully watched the topsails and then the
topgallants, and at last the admiral’s flag of the _Victory_ drop down
towards, and into, the watery distance.  Offshore is the Shambles
lightship that gave a refuge to the fleeing Avice and Leverre.

This “wild, herbless, weatherworn promontory,” called Portland Bill, with
its two lighthouses looking down upon shoals and rapid currents of
extraordinary danger to mariners, obtains its name from the beak-like end
of the Isle which “stretches out like the head of a bird into the English
Channel.”  Other, and more fanciful and wonder-loving accounts would have
us believe that it derives from this being the site of propitiatory Baal
fires in far-off pagan times; and, if we like to carry on the fancy, we
may draw comparisons between the fires of the shivering superstitious
terrors of those old heathens, and the beneficent warning gleams
maintained here in modern times by the Trinity House, for the benefit of
“they that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great
waters.”

Completing the circuit of Portland, the return to Fortune’s Well and
Chesilton is made chiefly along high ground disclosing a comprehensive
and beautiful view of the whole westward sweep of the Dorset coast, where
the many miles of the Chesil Beach at last lose themselves in hazy
distance, and the heights of Stonebarrow and Golden Cap, between Bridport
and Lyme Regis, pierce the skies.




CHAPTER XXII


                   WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER

TO leave Weymouth by this route is to obtain some initial impressions of
a very striking character: impressions, not slight or fleeting, of
hilliness and of Weymouth’s modern growth.  A specious and illusory flat
quayside stretch of road, by the well-known swan-haunted Backwater, ends
all too soon, and the road goes at a grievous inclination up through what
was once the village, now the suburb, and a very packed and populous
suburb, too, of East Chickerell.  To this succeeds the Chickerell of the
West; and so, in and out and round about, and up and down—but chiefly
up—at last to Portisham, the first place of any Hardyean interest.

Portisham, under the bold hills that rise to the commanding height of
Blackdown—locally “Black’on,” just as the name of the village is
shortened to “Po’sham”—rising eight hundred and seventeen feet above the
sea, is notable to us both from fiction and in facts.  It appears in _The
Trumpet Major_ as the village to which Bob Loveday comes to seek service
under Admiral Hardy, and although the brave but sentimentally flighty Bob
be a character of fiction, the admiral is that very real historical
personage, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson’s friend and
comrade-in-arms, who was born here, in the house still pointed out, in
1769, and to whose memory the conspicuous monument on Blackdown is
erected.  The house is the first on the left, at the cross-roads as you
make for the village.  In the garden belonging to it, on the opposite
side of the road may still be seen a sundial, bearing the inscription:

                             JOSEPH HARDY, ESQ.,
                       Kingston Russell.  Lat. 50° 45′
                                     1767
                                 Fugio fuge.

                           [Picture: Portisham]

It is a lovely perspective along the road approaching Portisham,
disclosing a long avenue of poplars and ashes, with the village church
and some scattered farmsteads in the vale, and the tremendous sides of
the rolling down, covered in patches with furze, filling in the
background.  The beautiful old church has, happily, been left very much
to itself, with the lichen-stains of age and other marks of time not yet
scraped off.  A strange epitaph in the churchyard provokes curiosity:

    “William Weare lies here in dust,
    As thou and I and all men must.
    Once plundered by Sabean force,
    Some cald it war but others worse.
    With confidence he pleads his cavse,
    And Kings to be above those laws.
    September’s eygth day died hee
    When neare the date of 63
          Anno domini 1670.”

Those Sabines appear from the internal evidence of the epitaph to have
been the Roundhead party, and “rebellion,” or perhaps “robbery,” to have
been the worse thing than war some called it.  The allusion is probably
to some raid in which cows and sheep were carried off by the Puritans and
were grudged them by the loyal Weare, who seems, in the passage where he
claims “Kings to be above those laws,” to have cheerfully borne some
other foray on the Royalists’ behalf.

                  [Picture: The road out of Abbotsbury]

Two miles from Portisham is the large village of Abbotsbury, not itself
the scene of any of the Wessex romances, but intrinsically a very
interesting place, remarkable for a hilltop chapel of St. Catherine
anciently serving as a seamark, and for the remains of the Abbey; few,
and chiefly worked into farmsteads and cottages, but including a great
stone barn of the fifteenth century, as long as a cathedral, and very
cathedral-like in its plan.

The great barn of _Far from the Madding Crowd_, scene of the
sheep-shearing, is really a description of the monastic barn of
Abbotsbury, which, as in the story, resembles a church with transepts.
“It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish,
but vied with it in antiquity. . . .  The vast porches at the sides,
lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest with corn in the
sheaf, were spanned by heavy pointed arches of stone, broadly and boldly
cut, whose very simplicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent in
erections where more ornament has been attempted.  The dusky, filmed
chestnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves, and diagonals
was far nobler in design, because more wealthy in material, than
nine-tenths of those in our modern churches.  Along each side wall was a
range of striding buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between
them, which were perforated by lancet openings, combining in their
proportions the precise requirements, both of beauty and ventilation.
One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the
church or the castle akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which
had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was
still applied.”

                   [Picture: Sheep-shearing in Wessex]

Out of Abbotsbury, and down amid the waters of the West Fleet, is the
famous Swannery, where, amid reedy lakes and marshes, some thousands of
swans have from ancient times had a home.  Once belonging to the Church,
in the persons of the old abbots of the Benedictine abbey of Abbotsbury,
the swans are now the property of the Earl of Ilchester, descendant of
the “First Countess of Wessex,” Betty Dornell, whose romance is set forth
in _A Group of Noble Dames_.  Though long passed from the hands of any
religious establishment, the ownership of the swans still points with the
trifling alteration in the position of an apostrophe, to the fact that
“the earth is the Lords’ and the fulness thereof.”

Eight miles of cliff-top roads, with magnificent views to the left over
sea and coast, and other views equally magnificent inland, to the right,
lead in staggering drops and rises past Swyre and Puncknowle down to
Burton Bradstock, and thence to the “unheard-of harbour” of West Bay.

West Bay, and Bridport town itself, are scenes in _Fellow Townsmen_,
where they are called “Port Bredy,” from the little river, the Brit or
Bredy, which here flows into the sea.  West Bay is one of the oddest
places on an odd and original coast.  A mile and a half away from
Bridport town, which is content to hide, sheltering away from the
sea-breezes, it has always been about to become great, either as a
commercial harbour or a seaside resort, or both, but has ended in not
achieving greatness of any kind.  No one who enjoys the sight of a quiet
and picturesque place will sorrow at that.

Picturesque it is in a wholly accidental and unstudied way.  It owns a
little harbour, with quays and an inn or two, and shipping that, daring
greatly, has to be warped in between the narrow timbered pier-heads,
where a furious sea is for ever banging in from the unsheltered bay; and
away at one side it is shut in from the outside coast by some
saucy-looking cliffs of golden yellow sandstone, whose odd effect is due
to their being the remaining part of a symmetrically rounded down.  The
seaward part has been shorn off, with the odd result that the rest looks
like the quarter of some gigantic Dutch cheese of pantomime.  It is an
eloquent, stimulating, not unpleasing loneliness that characterises the
shore of West Bay.  A few old thatched houses, halting midway between an
inland and a coastwise picturesqueness, and so only succeeding in being
broken-heartedly nondescript, start out of wastes of tiny shingle, and
are backed at a discreet distance by a long row of modern houses, whose
architect is so often on their account professionally spoken of as a
genius, that it becomes a duty to state, however convenient to the
residents in them their plan may be, that their appearance in the view is
the one pictorial drawback to West Bay.

The microscopic shingle—for shingle it is—of West Bay has for centuries
been the enemy of the place and has practically strangled it.  There are
heaped up wastes of it everywhere, and every visitor involuntarily
carries some of it away, as a sample, about his person, in his shoes or
his hair, or in his pockets.  The more of it removed in this, or indeed
in any other manner, the better pleased will West Bay be, for it comes,
unasked, into the houses; you have it for breakfast, lunch, tea, and
supper, as an unsolicited garnish to the viands, and when at last you
seek repose between the sheets, there it is again.  These wastes are part
of that natural phenomenon of the Dorset coast, the Chesil Beach, which
runs eighteen miles from this point along the perfectly unbroken shores
of the Bay to Chesilton and Portland.  The “Chesil” is just the “Pebble”
beach: that old word for pebbles being found elsewhere in Dorsetshire,
and at Chislehurst, among other places.  A pecularity of it is that by
insensible degrees it grows coarser as it proceeds in a south-easterly
direction, ending as very large pebbles at Portland.  The fishermen of
this lonely coast, landing on dark nights, with nothing else to guide
them as to their whereabouts, can always readily settle the point by
handling this shingle, and by use can tell within a mile of the
particular spot.

                      [Picture: West Bay, Bridport]

The story of West Bay’s struggle against this insidious enemy is an old
one.  In 1722 the Bridport authorities procured an Act of Parliament
empowering them to restore and rebuild the haven and port, the piers and
landing-places, in order to bring the town to that ancient and
flourishing state whence it had declined.  The preamble stated that by
reason of a great sickness and other accidents, the wealthy inhabitants
had been swept away and the haven choked.  But although the Legislature
had given authority for the work to be done, it did not indicate whence
the funds were to be obtained, and so it was not until 1742 that the
pier, authorised twenty years before, was built, nor was it until another
fourteen years had waned that the pier and harbour were enlarged.  Mr.
Hardy in _Fellow Townsmen_ thus describes West Bay: “A gap appeared in
the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of the
opening rose a vertical cliff,  a burning orange by the sunlight,
the companion cliff on the right side being livid in shade.  Between
these cliffs, like the Libyan Bay which sheltered the shipwrecked
Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly a beginning made by Nature herself
of a perfect harbour, which appealed to the passer-by as only requiring a
little human industry to finish it and make it famous, the ground on each
side, as far back as the daisied <DW72>s that bounded the interior valley,
being a mere layer of blown sand.  But the Port-Bredy burgesses a mile
inland had, in the course of ten centuries, responded many times to that
mute appeal, with the result that the tides had invariably choked up
their works with sand and shingle as soon as completed.  There were but
few houses here: a rough pier, a few boats, some stores, an inn, a
residence or two, a ketch unloading in the harbour, were the chief
features of the settlement.”

The harbour road, along whose mile and a half, the domestically unhappy
Barnet went to see his Lucy at various intervals of time, leads into the
corporate town of Bridport, which, after long remaining, as far as the
casual eye of the stranger may perceive, little affected by the
circumstance of being on a railway, is now developing a something in the
nature of a suburb, greatly to the dismay of neighbouring residents who,
residing here because of its isolation on a branch railway that brings
few passengers, and to landward of a harbour that has no commerce, now
can glimpse at the end of a vista of years some prospect of the ancient
peace of Bridport being genteelly disturbed.

Bridport was, in those days when it remained a busy place, a town keenly
interested in the flax, hemp, twine, and rope industries; and rope and
twine walks, where the old methods are even yet in use, are still
features of its less prominent lanes and alleys, but the unobservant and
the incurious, who to be sure form the majority of travellers, might
pass, and do pass, through Bridport, without thinking it any other than a
quiet market town, dependent solely upon surrounding agricultural needs
and weekly village shopping.

When hemp was grown in the neighbourhood of Bridport, in those bustling
days when the manufacturers of the town supplied the King’s Navy with
ropes, and criminals were suspended by this staple article of the town,
the expression “stabbed with a Bridport dagger,” was a pretty, or at
least a symbolical, way of saying that a man had been hanged.  It was a
figure of speech that quite escaped that matter-of-fact antiquary,
Leland, when in the time of Henry VIII. he came to Bridport and stolidly
noted down: “At Bridport be made good daggers.”

One is disposed to sympathise with Leland in that egregious error of his,
for which he and his memory have been laughed at for more than three
hundred and fifty years.  How his shade must writhe at the shame of it!
He was, doubtless, tired and bored, for some reason or another, when he
reached Bridport, and to his undoing, took things on trust.  And
nowadays, every one who writes the very leastest scrap on Bridport has
his fling at the poor old fellow; and I—conscience tells me—insincerely
do the same, under a miserably inadequate cloak of pretended sympathy!

              [Picture: High Street and Town Hall, Bridport]

Barnet, whose baulked love is the theme of _Fellow Townsmen_, was
descended from the hemp and rope-merchants of Bridport, as the story, in
several allusions, tells us.

South Street, leading from the Harbour Road into the right and left
course of the main street, contains most of the very few buildings of any
great age.  Among them is the little Gothic, gabled building now a
workmen’s club, but once the “Castle” inn.  Here, too, is the church,
ancient enough, but restored in 1860, when the two bays were added to the
nave; probably the incident referred to by Mr. Hardy: “The church had had
such a tremendous practical joke played upon it by some facetious
restorer or other as to be scarce recognisable by its dearest old
friends.”

There is, in this otherwise rather bald interior of Bridport church, a
curious mural tablet to the “Memory of Edward Coker, Gent.  Second son of
Capt. Robert Coker of Mapowder, Slayne at the Bull Inn, in Bridpurt.
June the 14th Añ. Dõ. 1685, by one Venner, who was a Officer under the
late Dvke of Mvnmovth in that Rebellion.”

The Bull inn stands yet in the main street, but modernised.  It is the
original of the “Black Bull” in _Fellow Townsmen_.

Six miles due north of Bridport lies the little town of Beaminster, the
“hill-surrounded little town” of which Angel Clare’s father was vicar.
“Sweet Be’mi’ster” says Barnes:

    “Sweet Be’mi’ster, that bist abound
    By green and woody hills all round,”

and in truth those hills that surround it are set about this quiet
agricultural town in a manner that fairly astounds the traveller.  No
railway reaches “Emminster,” as it is named in _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_, and, looking upon those mighty natural turrets and domes
that beset it, the traveller is of opinion that no railway ever will.
Nearing Beaminster at cockshut time, when the birds have all gone to bed,
when the sky is hot in the west with the burnished copper of the
after-glow, and a cold blue and green, with pale stars appearing, fills
the eastern firmament, the scenery is something awesome and approaching
an Alpine sublimity.  Then the twilight streets of this quiet place in
the basin-like hollow begin to take an hospitable look, and the tall red
stone tower of the church, that looks so nobly aloof in day, assumes a
welcoming paternal benignancy.  It is a toilsome winning to Beaminster,
but, when won, worth the trouble of it.




CHAPTER XXIII


                        WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE

YOU cannot go far from Weymouth without a good deal of hill-climbing, but
the longest stretch of level in this district, where levels are the
exception and hills the rule, is by this route.  It is not so very long,
even then, for when you have passed the curving Esplanade and Lodmoor
Marsh, and come to the foot of Jordan Hill, thought to have been the site
of the Roman “Clavinium,” it is only two and a half miles.  Preston
stands on the top of a further hill, and is a place of great resort for
brake-parties not greatly interested in literature.  Turning to the left
out of its street, opposite the Ship inn, we come to the pretty
village—or hamlet, for no church is visible—of Sutton Poyntz, the
“Overcombe” of _The Trumpet Major_.  Its thatched stone cottages,
charming tree-shaded stream and mill-pond, and old barns, all under the
looming shadow of the downs, vividly recall the old-fashioned ways and
talk, and the pleasant romance of Mr. Hardy’s only semi-historical novel;
and you need not see, if you do not wish, the flagrant Vandalism of the
Weymouth waterworks, hard by, and can if you will, turn your back upon
the inn that will be interesting and picturesque some day, but now, rawly
new, is an outrage upon, and a thing altogether out of key with, these
old rustic surroundings.

     [Picture: Sutton Poyntz: The “Overcombe” of “The Trumpet Major”]

Squawking ducks, hurrying across the dusty road and flouncing noisily
into the clearly running stream, rooks cawing contentedly from their
windy see-saw in the topmost branches of tall trees; and tired horses
coming stolidly home from plough are the chief features of this
“Overcombe,” where John Loveday had his mill, and his sons John and Bob,
and Anne Garland and Matilda, and all the lovable, the hateful, or the
merely contemptible characters in that sympathetic tale came and went.
The mill—I am afraid it is not _the_ mill, but one of somewhat later
date—still grinds corn, and you can see it, bulking very largely between
the trees, “the smooth millpond, over-full, and intruding into the hedge
and into the road,” as mill-ponds will do, even in these later days of
strict local government.  But the days of European wars are gone.  It is
a hundred years since the last call of brave, tender, loyal John Loveday,
the Trumpet Major, was silenced on a bloody battlefield in Spain, and
well on toward the same tale of years since the press gangs, fellows to
that which searched Overcombe Mill for Bob Loveday, impressed likely
fellows for service on His Majesty’s ships:—the characters of _The
Trumpet Major_ belong wholly to a bygone age.

To the same age belonged the characters in _The Melancholy Hussar of the
German Legion_, a short story associated with Bincombe, a tiny village it
requires no little exertion to reach; but you may win this way to it as
easily—or at any rate, not more laboriously—than by any other route.  It
stands up among the downs, and in what Dorset folk would call an
“outspan”—that is to say a remote hollow, recess or shelf amid them,
where their sides are so steep that they give the appearance of some
theatrical “back-cloth” to a romantic scene.

“Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged
since those eventful days.  A plough has never disturbed the turf, and
the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now.  Here stood the camp;
here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the
cavalry, and spots where the midden heaps lay are still to be observed.
At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid
hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and
thistles, the old trumpet and bugle-calls, the rattle of the halters; to
help seeing rows of spectral tents and the _impedimenta_ of the soldiery.
From within the canvases come guttural syllables of foreign tongues, and
broken songs of the fatherland; for they were mainly regiments of the
King’s German Legion that slept round the tent-poles hereabout at that
time.”

                           [Picture: Bincombe]

The story associated with this out-of-the-way place is one in its chief
lines true to facts, for in an unmarked grave within the little
churchyard, lie two young German soldiers, shot for desertion from the
York Hussars, as quoted at the end of the story from the register:

“Matth: Tina (Corpl.) in His Majesty’s Regiment of York Hussars, and shot
for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years.  Born in the
town of Sarrbruk, Germany.”

“Christop Bless, belonging to His Majesty’s Regiment of York Hussars, who
was shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years.  Born
at Lothaargen, Alsatia.”

Returning from Bincombe and down again through Sutton Poyntz to Preston,
we come to Osmington, with views down along on the right to Ringstead
Bay; but, avoiding for the present the coast, strike inland, to Poxwell,
the “Oxwell Hall” of _The Trumpet Major_.  It is really three miles from
“Overcombe,” and therefore not the close neighbour to the Lovedays it is
made to be, for the purposes of the novel.  The church stands beside of
the road, the old manor-house, now a farmstead, the home of “Uncle
Benjy,” miserly Squire Derriman, close by.  In old days, back in 1634,
when it was built, this curiously walled-in residence with its outer
porter’s lodge, the physical and visible sign of an ever-present distrust
of strangers, was a seat of the Henning family.  That lodge still stands,
obsolete as an _avant-garde_ and gazebo for the timely spying out of
unwelcome visitors, but very admirable for a summer-house, if the farmer
had leisure for such things.  But as he has not, but must continually
“plough and sow, and reap and mow,” or see that others do so, the lodge
is in every way a derelict.  The farmer could perhaps add some testimony
of his own respecting all those “romantic excellencies and practical
drawbacks,” mentioned in the story, and existing in fact; but, farmers
having a bent towards practicality, although they discuss, rather than
practise it, it is to be supposed that he would place a stress upon the
drawbacks, to the neglect of the romance.

                         [Picture: Poxwell Manor]

Pursuing the road onwards from Poxwell, we come, in a mile and a half, to
the cross-roads at “Warm’ell Cross,” leading on the left to Dorchester,
on the right to Wareham, and straight ahead across the remotenesses of
“Egdon Heath,” to Moreton station.  Here we turn to the right, and so
miss the village of Warmwell, whence the cross roads take their name.  It
is not by any means, to the ordinary traveller, a remarkable crossing of
the roads, but it has associations for the pilgrim stored with the
literary lore of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the story of _The
Distracted Preacher_, that Mr. Stockdale, the Wesleyan minister of Nether
Mynton, by the aid of their voices, crying “Hoi—hoi—hoi!  Help, help!”
discovered Will Latimer and the exciseman tied to the trees by the
smuggler friends of his Lizzie.  Turning here to the right, Owermoigne
itself—the “Nether Mynton” of that tale of smuggled spirits and religious
scruples—is reached in another mile; the church and its tiny village of
thatched rusticity standing shyly, as such a smuggler’s haunt should do,
off the broad high road and down a little stumbly and rutty lane.  The
body of the church has been rebuilt since Lizzie Newberry and her friends
stored “the stuff” in the tower and the churchyard, but that churchyard
remains the same, as also does the tower from whose battlements the “free
traders” spied upon the excisemen, searching for those hidden tubs.

From this road there is a better distant view of the great equestrian
effigy of George III., cut in the chalky southern <DW72>s of the downs,
than from any other point.  He looks impressive, in the ghostly sort,
seen across the bare <DW72>s, where perhaps an occasional farmstead or
barton, or a row of wheat-ricks, accentuates the solitude and at the same
time gives scale to the chalky effigies of His Majesty and that very
elegant horse of his, showing how very large this horse and rider really
are.  The gallant Trumpet Major told about the making of this memorial,
as he and Anne Garland walked among the flowering peas, and described
what this “huge picture of the king on horseback in the earth of the
hill” was to be like: “The King’s head is to be as big as our mill-pond,
and his body as big as this garden; he and the horse will cover more than
an acre.”

And here he is to this day, very spirited and martial, with his cocked
hat and marshal’s baton.

 [Picture: Owermoigne: The Smugglers’ Haunt in “The Distracted Preacher”]

It is, however, a weariful business to arrive in the neighbourhood of
him, for those chalk downs are just as inhospitable in the sun as they
are in the storms of winter, the only difference lying between being
fried on their shelterless sides when the thermometer registers ninety
degrees, or frozen when the mercury sinks towards zero.

Some two miles of highway along the verge of Egdon Heath bring us to a
right-hand turning, leading past Winfrith Newburgh by a somewhat more
shaded route up over the crest of these chalky ranges, and then with
several turnings, steeply down, and at length, “by and large”—as sailors
say—to the village of West Lulworth, which lies at the inland end of a
coombe, the better part of a mile from Lulworth Cove.

                         [Picture: Lulworth Cove]

To Lulworth—or as he terms it, Lullstead—Cove, Mr. Hardy returns again
and again.  It is the “small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs” where
Troy bathed and was supposed to have been drowned; it is one of the spots
where _The Distracted Preacher’s_ parishioners landed their smuggled
spirit-tubs, and upon its milk-white shores of limestone pebbles the
lifeless bodies of Stephen Hardcombe and his companion were found.  It
was the first meeting-place of Cytherea Graye and Edward Springrove; and
was, again, that “three-quarter round Cove” where, “screened from every
mortal eye,” save his own, Solomon Selby observed Bonaparte questing
along the darkling shore for a suitable place where his flotilla might
land in his projected invasion of England.

             [Picture: Lulworth Cove.  The coastgard station]

Lulworth Cove is an almost perfect circle, eaten out of the limestone in
the long ago by the sea, in an unusually geometrical manner.  Bindon Hill
frowns down upon it, and in summer the circle of light-blue water laughs
saucily back, in little sparkling ripples, just as though there were no
storms in nature and no cruel rock-bound coast outside.  The Cove is, if
you be classically minded, a Bath of the Naiads; and, if less
imaginative, is at any rate a delightful spot that even in these
tidied-up and ordered days, when every little seaside cove has its hair
brushed and face scrubbed, and is made always to look its Sunday best,
persists in being littered with a longshore fishing and boating medley of
anchors and lobster-pots, ropes, chains and windlasses, infinitely more
pleasing to right-thinking persons—by whom I indicate those who think
with myself—than the neatest of promenades and seats.  True, they have
rebuilt or enlarged the Cove Hotel and red-brick manifestations of a
growing favour with visitors are springing up beside the old thatched
cottages; but Lulworth—Cove or village—is not spoiled yet.  The
Coastguard Station, perched on what looks like a hazardous pinnacle of
cliff, with the wild chasm of Stair Hole to one side of it and the sheer
drop into the Cove on the other, is the most striking feature, looking
down from landward, of this curious place, which has not its fellow
anywhere else, and is the sunniest, the ruggedest, and certainly the most
treeless place along the Dorset coast.

To those who have persevered along the roads into Lulworth, the prospect
of again climbing those hills is perhaps a little grim, and they should
so contrive to time their arrival and departure that they comfortably fit
in with the return to Weymouth of the excursion steamer plying in the
tourist season between the two places.

                        [Picture: Lytchett Heath]

              [Picture: The Equestrian Effigy of George III]

                 [Picture: Entrance to Charborough Park]




CHAPTER XXIV


                           BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE

BOURNEMOUTH, the “Sandbourne” of _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ and of minor
incidents and passing allusions in others of Mr. Hardy’s novels, is one
of the principal gates of entrance to his Wessex.  Just within the
western borders of Hampshire, or what he would call “Upper Wessex,” the
heart of his literary country is within the easiest reach of its pleasant
districts of villa residences, by road or rail, or indeed by sea; for
Swanage, the “Swanwich” of a Hardy gazetteer, and Lulworth Cove, his
“Lullstead,” that azure pool within “the two projecting spurs of rock
which form the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean,” are
the destinations in summer of many steamboat voyages.

“Sandbourne has become a large place, they say.”  Thus Angel Clare,
seeking his wife somewhere within its bounds.  Large indeed, and growing
yet.  Census officials and other statisticians toil after its increase in
vain.  I find a guide-book of 1887 speaking of its population as “nearly
18,000.”  I find another, of 1896, putting it at “about 40,000,” and then
referring to the last census returns, discover it to have further risen
to forty-seven thousand souls, and a few over.  By now it doubtless
numbers full fifty thousand, and has further rubricated and underscored
its description in the last pages of Tess: “This fashionable
watering-place with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its
groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was to Angel
Clare like a fairy place, suddenly created by the stroke of a wand, and
allowed to get a little dusty.  An outlying eastern tract of the enormous
Egdon waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece
of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen
to spring up.  Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every
irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed
British trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of
the Cæsars.  Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s
gourd; and had drawn hither Tess.”

“By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding ways of this new
world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against the
stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous
fanciful residences of which the place was composed.  It was a city of
detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel;
and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it was.

“The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he thought
it was the pines, the pines murmured in precisely the same tones, and he
thought they were the sea.”

                [Picture: Bournemouth: The Invalid’s Walk]

This rich and populous seaside home of wealthy valetudinarians was until
well on into the nineteenth century a lonely waste, whose only
frequenters were smugglers, fishermen, rabbits, and seagulls.  In the
midst of its pine-woods, sands, and heather a little stream, the Bourne,
which now gives this great concourse of villa paradises, palatial hotels,
and fashionable shops its name, flowed into the sea, just where, in these
days, tricked out with cascades, and fountains, and made to wander
circuitously at the will of landscape-gardeners amid the neatest of lawns
and the gayest of flower-beds, it at last trickles exhaustedly into the
sea, under the pier.  Its natural course from the neighbourhood of
Kinson, down Bourne Bottom, to that smallest of “mouths,” is some six
miles, but in these days it is made to work hard in the last stretch,
through the public gardens, and where it once covered one mile, is now
looped here and turned back there upon itself, and exploited generally,
until it has become as sophisticated a stream as anywhere to be found.
The Bourne is, indeed, like the humble parent of some overwhelming social
success, made to alter its ways and put aside its rustic manners, to do
credit to its offspring.

The country folk who live in the background of this oft-styled “City of
Pines,” still call it merely “Bourne,” as it was when, many years ago,
Dr. Granville made the fortunes of the hamlet, frequented by a few
invalids and others rejoicing in the spicy odours of the pine-woods, that
had grown in a scattered and chance fashion upon the heath.  “No
situation,” said that authority upon spas and watering-places, “possesses
so many capabilities of being made the very first sea watering-place in
England; and not only a watering-place, but what is still more important,
a winter residence for the most delicate constitutions requiring a warm
and sheltered locality at this season of the year.”  Then follow
comparisons favourable to the site of Bournemouth, and derogatory to
other seaside resorts.

Every circumstance insured attention being drawn to this weighty
pronouncement, and advantage being taken of it.  Consumptives came and
found the air beneficial, and Bournemouth grew suddenly and astonishingly
upon a lonely coastline; arising in that residential
all-round-the-calendar character it has kept to this day, in spite of
those holiday-folk, the excursionists and trippers whom its “residential”
stratum discourages as much as possible.  But when even so thoroughly
exclusive a residential health-resort has been so successful, and has
grown so greatly in that character as Bournemouth has grown, there comes
inevitably a time when the workers and tradesfolk, ministrants to the
wants of those residents, themselves become an important section of the
community.  It is a time when suburbs and quarters, invidiously
distinguished from one another in the social scale, have established
themselves; when, in short, from being just the resort of a class, a
place becomes a microcosm of life, in which all classes and degrees are
represented.  The seal was set upon the arrival of that time for
Bournemouth with its admission to the dignity of a municipal borough,
fully equipped with Mayor and Town Council, in the summer of 1890, and
again, later, with the opening of electric tramways.  Railway-companies
urge the attractions of Bournemouth upon holiday-makers, with great
success, and nowadays one only perceives the place in anything like its
former characteristic air at such time when the summer has gone and the
holiday-maker has returned to his own fireside.

Bournemouth has already gathered together some odds and ends of
sentimental associations.  Mary Wollstonecraft, widow of Shelley, died
here in 1853, and lies in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, beside Godwin
and his wife, whose bodies were brought from the London churchyard of St.
Pancras.  Keble died here in 1866, and the present St. Peter’s is his
memorial.  Robert Louis Stevenson, Bournemouth’s most distinguished
consumptive, resided at “Skerryvore,” in Alum Chine Road, before he took
flight to the South Seas.

But—singular and ungrateful omission—one looks in vain for a statue to
Dr. Granville, who, by his powerful advocacy, made Bournemouth, just as
Dr. Russel made Brighton a century earlier.  In this it is not difficult
to find another instance of “benefits forgot.”

The juxtaposition of a place so new as Bournemouth with one so ancient as
Poole is a piquant circumstance.  When Bournemouth rose, not like
Britannia, from the azure main, but from beside it, there was a
considerable interval of open country between the hoary seaport and the
mint-new pleasure-town.  That interval has now shrunk to vanishing-point;
for, what with Bournemouth’s expansion, growing Parkstone’s position
midway, and Poole’s own attempt to sprout in an eastwardly direction, to
meet those manifestations, the green country has been abolished beneath
an irruption of bricks and mortar.

The piquancy of Poole’s ancient repose being neighboured by Bournemouth’s
wide-awake life is italicised when that port—the “Havenpool” of _To
Please his Wife_—is entered.  It would not be correct to say that the
days of Poole as a port are over, but with the growth in size of modern
ships, the shallowness of Poole Harbour in whose recesses it is tucked
rather obscurely away, prevents any but vessels of slight draught coming
up to its quays.  For that reason, large ocean-going steamers are
strangers to Poole, more familiar with wooden barques and brigantines and
their maze of masts and spars, than with the capacious steamships that,
although of much greater speed and tonnage, carry very slight and
insignificant sticks; and were it not for the china-clay shipments and
for that coasting trade which seems almost indestructible, Poole would
assuredly die.

But Poole, besides being ancient, has been a place to reckon with.
Already, in 1220, when by a proclamation of Henry III. the ships of many
ports were sealed up, Poole appeared among the number.  In 1347 its
contribution towards the siege of Calais was four ships and ninety-four
men, and it was the base from which the English army in France was
provisioned.  Then in 1349 came that fourteenth century scourge, the
Black Death, and Poole, among other towns, was almost depopulated, and
lost the Parliamentary representation it had long enjoyed.  But it made a
good recovery, and in the time of Henry VI. regained its Parliamentary
representation.  Leland, writing of the place describes it, two hundred
years later, as “a poore fisshar village, much encreasid with fair
building and use of marchaundise of old tyme.”  Poole, after that
description was penned, continued to recover itself, and fully regained
its lost prosperity.  Fifty years later it is found carrying on a
thriving trade with Spain, and how truly it was said that its merchants
were men of wealth and consideration may be judged from their large, and
architecturally and decoratively fine, mansions still remaining, although
nowadays put to all kinds of mean uses and often occupied as tenements.

Poole, however, long enjoyed a very bad reputation, and the wealth of
which these were some of the evidences, was not often come by in very
reputable ways.  When it is said that Poole “enjoyed” a bad reputation,
it is said advisedly, for Poole was so lost to shame that it really _did_
enjoy what should have been a source of some searchings of heart.  It was
a veritable nest of pirates and smugglers, and the home of strange and
original sinfulnesses; so that at last an injurious rhyme that still
survives was circulated about it:

    “If Poole were a fish-pool, and the men of Poole fish,
    There’d be a pool for the devil, and fish for his dish.”

So early as the close of the fourteenth century, the buccaneers of Poole
were infamous, and at their head was the notorious Harry Page, known to
the French and the Spaniards as Arripay, the nearest they could frame to
pronounce his name.  Arripay was a very full-blooded, enterprising, and
unscrupulous fellow; if without irreverence we may call him a “fellow,”
who was the admiral of his rascally profession.  There can be little
doubt but that tradition has added not a little to the tales of his
exploits, and it is hardly credible that he and his fellow-pirates
should, on one occasion, have brought home a hundred and twenty prizes
from the coast of Brittany.  His forays were made upon the shipping of
the foreigner, and with such system that no ship, it was said, could
successfully run the gauntlet of his lawless flotilla.  His success and
power were so great that they necessitated the sending of an expedition
to sweep the seas of him.  This was an allied French and Spanish force,
commissioned in 1406, and sailing under the command of Perdo Nino, Count
of Buelna.  Adopting the tactics of raiders, they burnt and ravaged the
coasts of Cornwall and Devon, and, coming to Dorset, swept into Arripay’s
hornets’ nest of Poole Harbour, and landing at Poole itself, defeated the
townsmen in a pitched battle.  The brother of the redoubtable Arripay was
among the slain.

A worthy successor of this bold spirit in the pike and cutlass
way—although he was no pirate, but just an honest stalwart sailor—was
that bonny fighter, Peter Jolliffe, of the hoy _Sea Adventurer_.  Off
Swanage in 1694, he fell in with a French privateer having a poor little
captured Weymouth fishing-smack in tow, and attacked the Frenchman
repeatedly, and at last with such success, that he not only released the
smack, but drove the privateer ashore near Lulworth, its crew being made
prisoners of war.  For so signal an instance of bravery Jolliffe received
a gold chain and medal from the hands of the king himself.

Jolliffe’s example fired enthusiasm, and the following year, William
Thompson, skipper of a fishing-smack, aided only by his scanty crew of
one man and a boy, attacked a Cherbourg privateer that had attempted to
capture him, and actually succeeded in capturing it and its complement of
sixteen hands, instead.  He brought his prize into Poole, and he too,
fully deserved that gold chain and medal awarded him.

In St. James’s church itself—disclosing an interior not unlike that of a
stern cabin of an old man-o’-war, writ large—is a monument to the
intrepid Jolliffe.  From a reminiscence of it, no doubt, Mr. Hardy chose
to name Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, that shipmaster engaged in the
Newfoundland trade who is the ill-fated hero of _To Please his Wife_.

For the rest, Poole figures so largely in the Civil War, as a town
ardently in favour of the Parliament, that it has a long and stirring
story of its own, in the varying fortunes of Roundheads and Stuarts.  It
is too lengthy a story to be told with advantage here.

The High Street of Poole, a mile long, is busy enough to quite dispel any
idea that Poole is not prospering; but, on the other hand, the many
puzzling narrow streets that lead out of it are so rich in what have been
noble residences, that they tell in unmistakable tones of a greater
period than this of to-day.

These byways lead at last past the church of St. Paul, the fellow to St.
James’s, with its dolphin vane, to Poole Quay, where the most prominent
feature is an ancient Gothic building, looking very like some desecrated
place of worship, or a monastic tithe-barn.  It is, as a matter of fact,
neither, but the “Town Cellar,” a relic of a past age when Poole was part
of the manor of Canford.  The lords of Canford, away back to that
ubiquitous John o’ Gaunt, “time-honoured Lancaster,” who seems to have
owned quite half of the most desirable properties in the England of his
time, took toll in money, when they could, and in kind when silver marks
and golden angels were scarce; and in the “Town Cellar” were stored those
bales of wool, those spices from Ind, and those miscellaneous goods,
which were made in this manner to render unto the Cæsars of Canford, in
times when such things were.  It is a picturesque old building, its walls
oddly composed of flint intermingled with large squared pieces of stone
that, by the look of them, would seem to have been plundered from some
older structure.

Opposite stands the Harbour Office, not altogether unpicturesquely
provided with a loggia supported by columns, and still retaining the
sundial erected when clocks were scarce.  The Mayor of Poole, who in 1727
presided over the fortunes of the port, is handed down to posterity by
the quaint tablet let into the gable wall, showing us the quarter-length
relief portrait of a stout personage in voluminous wig and mayoral chain
and robes, lackadaisically glancing skyward, as though longing to be gone
to those ethereal regions where double chins and “too, too solid flesh”
are not.

Poole Quay—its old buildings, waterside picturesqueness, and the shipping
lying off the walls—is an interesting place for the artist, who has it
very much to himself; for the holiday-maker does not often discover it.
But waterside characters are not lacking: sailors, who have got berths
and are only waiting for the tide to serve; other sailors, who are in
want of berths; town boys, who would dearly like to go to sea; and
nondescript characters, who would not take a job if offered to them, and
want nothing but a quayside bollard to sit upon, sunshine, a pipe of
tobacco, and the price of half a pint: these form the natural history of
Poole Quay, which though it may have been—and was—one of the gateways
into the great outer world, in the brave old days of Arripay and his
merry men, is now something of a straitened gate, and Poole itself for
the land voyager very much in the nature of one of those stop-blocks at
the end of a railway siding: what a railway man would call a “dead end.”

                          [Picture: Poole Quay]

For Poole is not a main road to anywhere, and when you have turned down
into it, on those three and a half miles from Bournemouth, you are either
compelled to return the way you came, or else cross a creek by the
toll-bridge to Hamworthy, where there is nothing but a church built in
1826—and precisely of the nature one might expect from that date—and, a
little way onward, a lonely railway junction in midst of sandy heaths and
whispering pines, which, even at night, “tell the tale of their species,”
as phrenologists say, “without help from outline or colour,” in “those
melancholy moans and sobs which give to their sound a solemn sadness
surpassing even that of the sea.”  It is the district of _The Hand of
Ethelberta_, and if we pursue it, we shall, as Sol says, in that novel,
“come to no place for two or three miles, and then only to Flychett,”
which, in everyday life, is Lytchett Minster, a place which, despite that
grand name, can show nothing in the nature of a cathedral, and is, as Sol
said, “a trumpery small bit of a village,” where possibly that
wheelwright mentioned in the story still “keeps a beer-house and owns two
horses.”  That house is the inn oddly named the “Peter’s Finger,” with a
picture-sign standing on a post by the wayside, and showing St. Peter
holding up a hand with two extended fingers in benedictory fashion, as
though blessing the wayfarer.  The origin of this sign is said to be the
custom, once usual in Roman Catholic times, of holding manorial courts on
Lammas Day, the 1st of August, the day of St. Peter ad Vincula—that St.
Peter-in-the-Fetters to whom the church on Tower Green, in the Tower of
London, is so appropriately dedicated.  On that day suit and service had
to be performed by tenants for their lands, which thus obtained, in
course of time, the corrupted title of “Peter’s Finger” property.

Around the village so slightingly characterised in _The Hand of
Ethelberta_ there is little save “the everlasting heath,” mentioned in
that story, “the black hills bulging against the sky, the barrows upon
their round summits like warts on a swarthy skin.”  It is true the road
leads at last to Bere Regis, but it has little individuality and no
further Hardyesque significance, and so may be disregarded in these
pages.




CHAPTER XXV


                             WIMBORNE MINSTER

WIMBORNE MINSTER or “Warborne” in _Two on a Tower_—is, or was, for the
Romans and their works are altogether vanished from the town, the
_Vindogladia_ of 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 in A.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 about A.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.

                     [Picture: Sturminster Marshall]

           [Picture: 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 the narrower 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 past _régime_: 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 when the
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.

[Picture: The Wimborne Clock-Jack] But 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, and by 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.

     [Picture: 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 survived at 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.




CHAPTER XXVI


                     WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY

WIMBORNE shall 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 as _Mons Badonicus_—Badbury Rings—the scene
of the overwhelming victory gained in A.D. 520, over Cerdic 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 of _Two
on a Tower_ were 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 of stags 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 passed the
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 in _Two 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 as rustic satire lives, will assuredly not be
allowed to die.

[Picture: The Tower, Charborough Park] Shapwick 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 unknown monster 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.

       [Picture: 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 festival of 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 now
    Undying 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” and became “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.

                  [Picture: 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” of
_Tess_.  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.

            [Picture: 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 the market 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.




CHAPTER XXVII


                     WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY
                              (_continued_)

ONWARDS from 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 of _Tess_ would
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.

                           [Picture: 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 in 1718 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.”

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 Blynfield stands, 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 that side.
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, in
A.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 digging
on 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 with
_Jude 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 windows through 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.”

                    [Picture: 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!”




CHAPTER XXVIII


               WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH

IT is 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 of
_Barbara 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. Hardy drew his idea of the tower
in _Two 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.

                    [Picture: 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 cottage near 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.

   [Picture: Horton Inn: the “Lornton Inn” of “Barbara of the House of
                                 Grebe”]

                         [Picture: 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.




CHAPTER XXIX


                    OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW

BEYOND the 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 array of 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.”

                      [Picture: 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 energy of 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 and _fortis et felix_ in 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 marriage of 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 of _Tess 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 stony lanchets—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 down the 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.

                         [Picture: 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.

            [Picture: 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 been breathed 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” of _The Woodlanders_, was founded so
early as A.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 a bastard “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.

[Picture: Abbot Milton’s Rebus, Milton Abbey] The 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 grotesque
disproportion of ancient size and magnificence to modern use, you will
feel very reverent indeed.

                         [Picture: 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.

                        [Picture: 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 1903 decided 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 another _Woodlanders_
landmark, 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- 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: a _facilis 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.




INDEX.


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

                                * * * * *

BANKES FAMILY, 37, 106, 108, 111

_Barbara of the House of Grebe_, 43, 298, 299

Barnes, Reverend William, 65

Basingstoke, “Stoke-Barehills,” 2, 3

Batcombe, 171, 172

Bathsheba’s Farm, 57–59

Beaminster, “Emminster,” 38, 170, 244, 245

Bere Heath, 50, 128, 130

Bere Regis, “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” 54, 126, 127, 132–146, 163, 302

Berkshire, “North Wessex,” 2

Bincombe, 211, 248–250

Bindon Abbey, 122

Bindon Abbey Mill, 123

Bingham’s Melcombe, 303–306

Blackmore, or Blackmoor, Vale of, 36, 38, 39, 65, 169, 191, 195, 197,
198, 288, 291, 292

Blandford Forum, “Shottsford Forum,” 39, 42–47, 138, 282, 302

Bloody Assize, 83

Bloxworth, 140

Bockhampton, Lower, 157, 160

Bockhampton, Upper, 157–160

Boscastle, “Castle Boterel,” 6, 7

Bourne, River, 259

Bournemouth, “Sandborne,” 31, 88, 257–262

Bow and Arrow Castle, 229

Bredy, River, 237

Bridport, “Port Bredy,” 82, 231, 237, 240–244

Brit, River, 237

Broadwey, 212

Browning, Robert, 37,

Bryan’s Piddle, 145, 163

Bryanstone, 46

“Budmouth,” Weymouth, 71, 200, 207, 209, 210, 212–221, 225, 226, 232, 246

                                * * * * *

“CASTERBRIDGE,” Dorchester, 26, 35, 38, 47, 58, 61–83, 116, 138, 148,
149, 153, 168, 199, 206, 207, 215

“Castle Boterel,” Boscastle, 6, 7

“Castle Royal,” Windsor, 2

Castleton, 186

Cerne Abbas, “Abbot’s Cernel,” 31, 38, 116, 170, 199–203, 206, 302

Cerne, River, 205

“Chalk Newton,” Maiden Newton, 168

Chamberlain’s Bridge, 130, 132

Charborough Park, 50, 123, 136, 192, 278, 279

Charminster, 79, 168, 205

Chesil Beach, 224, 231, 240

Chesil Bourn, 304

“Christminster,” Oxford, 3, 5, 6

_Clavinium_, 207, 246

“Cliff without a Name,” 8

Colyton House, 78

“Conjuring Minterne,” 172

Coombe Bissett, 35, 40

Corfe Castle, “Corvsgate Castle,” 87, 92, 93, 97–113, 121, 133, 138, 277

Corfe Mullen, 277, 278

Cornwall, “Nether Wessex,” 6, 292

“Corvsgate Castle,” 87, 92, 93, 97–113, 121, 133, 138, 277

Cranborne Chase, 35

Cross-in-Hand, 170

                                * * * * *

_Desperate Remedies_, 60

Devonshire, “Lower Wessex,” 2, 6

_Distracted Preacher_, _The_, 252, 254

Dogbury, 191, 197

Dole’s Ash Farm, “Flintcomb Ash,” 170, 305

Dorchester, “Casterbridge,” 26, 35, 38, 47, 58, 61–83, 116, 138, 148,
149, 153, 168, 199, 206, 207, 215

Dorsetshire, “South Wessex,” 2, 38, 39, 44, 134, 135, 138, 149, 291, 292

Drax family, 193, 194

Dungeon Hill, 195

D’Urbervilles, the, 37, 124, 126 132, 170

_Durnovaria_, 62, 80, 207

“Durnover,” Fordington, 61–63, 148, 149

                                * * * * *

EAST STOKE, 122

Eastbury Park, 40

“Egdon Heath,” 128–130, 132, 161–167, 254, 258

“Emminster,” Beaminster, 38, 170, 244, 245

Encombe, “Enkworth Court,” 94–96

“Endelstow,” 8

“Enkworth Court,” 94–96

Erle-Drax, J. S. W. Sawbridge, Esq., M.P. 192, 278, 279

Evershot, “Evershead,” 169, 172, 198

                                * * * * *

“FALLS PARK,” MELLS PARK, 172–175

_Far from the Madding Crowd_, 43, 48, 53, 56–59, 156, 236, 254

Fawley Magna, “Marygreen,” 2, 4, 94

_Fellow Townsmen_, 237, 241, 243, 244

_Fiddler of the Reels_, _The_, 150, 161

_First Countess of Wessex_, _The_, 31, 172–175, 237

“Flintcomb Ash,” Dole’s Ash Farm, 170, 305

“Flychett,” Lytchett Minster, 268

_For Conscience’ Sake_, 177

Fordington, “Durnover,” 61–63, 148, 149

Fortune’s Well, “Street of Wells,” 224, 225, 227, 231

Frome, River, 38, 62, 115, 117, 118, 121, 123, 124, 156, 157, 161, 163,
205, 306

                                * * * * *

“GAYMEAD,” Theale, 2

“Giant of Cerne,” 203

Glydepath Lane, 76, 78

Goathorn, 114

Godmanstone, 205

“Gray’s Bridge,” 70

“Great Hintock,” Minterne Magna, 39, 168, 191, 198, 302

“Great Hintock House,” Turnworth House, 311, 312

_Group of Noble Dames_, _A_, 14, 31, 43, 172–176, 189, 205, 237, 297–299

                                * * * * *

HAMPSHIRE, “Upper Wessex,” 2, 257

Hamworthy, 268

_Hand of Ethelberta_, _The_, 86, 90, 93, 94, 98, 268, 269

Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester, 76, 77

Hardy, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman, 66, 232, 233

Hardy, Thomas, birthplace of, 158–160

Hardy, Thomas, residence of, 148

“Havenpool,” Poole, 88, 107–109, 111, 140, 261–268

_Hearts Insurgent_, 4

Heedless William’s Pond, 160

“High Place Hall,” 78

High Stoy, 39, 191, 197

“Higher Crowstairs,” 75, 199

Holnest, 123, 191–194, 302

Horner family, 173–175

Horton, 50, 298

Horton Inn, “Lornton Inn,” 297–299

Hurst, 163

                                * * * * *

ILCHESTER, Earls of, 172–175

Ilsington Woods, 159

_Interlopers at the Knap_, 168

“Ivell,” Yeovil, 169, 176–178

                                * * * * *

JORDAN HILL, 246

_Jude the Obscure_, 4, 5, 29, 30, 31, 151, 294, 295

                                * * * * *

“KENNETBRIDGE,” NEWBURY, 2

“King’s Hintock Court,” Melbury Park, 172–176

King’s Stag Bridge, 195

“Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” Bere Regis, 54, 126, 127, 132–146, 163, 302

Kingston, 92, 93, 94, 97

Kingston House, “Knapwater House,” 60, 150

Kingston Lacy, 106

“Knapwater House,” Kingston House, 60, 150

“Knollsea,” Swanage, 84–92, 97, 111, 257, 264

                                * * * * *

_Lady Mottisfont_, 14

_Lady Penelope_, _The_, 205

Lainston, 19, 20

Langton Matravers, 92

Launceston, “St. Launce’s,” 8

Lidden, River, 195

Little Ann, 23

“Little Hintock,” Melbury Osmund, 176, 198

“Little Jack Horner,” 174

Lobcombe Corner, 26

Lodmoor Marsh, 246

“Long Ash Lane,” 168, 169

Long Burton, 191, 192

“Long Piddle,” Piddletrenthide, 57

“Lornton Inn,” Horton Inn, 297–299

Lower Walterstone Farm, 57–59

“Lucetta’s house,” 78

Lulworth Cove, “Lullstead,” 139, 254, 255–257

Lulworth West, 254

Lytchett Minster, “Flychett,” 268

                                * * * * *

MAIDEN CASTLE, 208

Maiden Newton, “Chalk Newton,” 168

Marnhull, “Marlott,” 36, 285, 288, 290

Martinstown, or Winterborne St. Martin, 153

“Marygreen,” Fawley Magna, 2, 4, 94

Maumbury, 71, 72

Max Gate, 63, 148

_Mayor of Casterbridge_, _The_, 23, 25, 26, 63–80, 149

_Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion_, _The_, 248–250,

Melbury Osmund, “Little Hintock,” 176, 198

Melbury Park, “King’s Hintock Court,” 172–176

Melbury Sampford, 172–176

“Melchester,” Salisbury, 16, 26–28, 31, 35, 36, 187

Melcombe Regis, 66, 210, 215–217, 220, 221

Mells Park, “Falls Park,” 172–175

“Mellstock,” Stinsford, 61, 149–151

Middlemarsh, 194

“Middleton Abbey,” Milton Abbas, 38, 306–311

Milborne Port, 302

Milborne St. Andrew, “Millpond St. Jude’s,” 48–50

Milton Abbas, “Middleton Abbey,” 38, 306–311

Minterne Magna, “Great Hintock,” 39, 168, 191, 198, 302

“Monmouth Ash,” 299–301

Monmouth, Duke of, 83, 121, 140, 299–301

_Mottisfont_, _Lady_, 14

                                * * * * *

NETHER CERNE, 205

“Nether Mynton,” Owermoigne, 252, 253

Newbury, “Kennetbridge,” 2

                                * * * * *

OBSERVATORY, The, Horton, 298

Old Sarum, 21, 28, 179

_On the Western Circuit_, 29

Osmington, 250

“Overcombe,” Sutton Poyntz, 246, 247, 250

Owermoigne, “Nether Mynton,” 252, 253

Oxford, “Christminster,” 3, 5, 6

“Oxwell Hall,” Poxwell Manor, 250, 251

                                * * * * *

_Pair of Blue Eyes_, _A_, 6, 7, 8

_Penelope_, _The Lady_, 205

Pennsylvania Castle, “Sylvania Castle,” 229

Pentridge, “Trantridge,” 36, 37

Piddle, River, 54, 57, 117, 121, 132, 144

Piddleford, or Fiddleford, 285

Piddletown, “Weatherbury,” 53–58, 157

Piddletrenthide, “Long Piddle,” 57, 302

Plush, 170

Poole, “Havenpool,” 88, 107, 108, 109, 111, 140, 261–268

Poole Harbour, 39, 114, 117, 131

“Port Bredy,” Bridport, 82, 231, 237, 240–244

Portisham, 232–234

Portland Bill, 224

Portland, Isle of, “Isle of Slingers,” 209, 210, 214, 222–231, 240

Poundbury, 79, 206

Poxwell, 250, 290

Poxwell Manor, “Oxwell Hall,” 250, 251

Preston, 246, 250

Pulham, 195

“Pummery,” 206

Purbeck, Isle of, 85, 87–89, 97, 115

                                * * * * *

“QUARTERSHOT,” Aldershot, 2

                                * * * * *

RADIPOLE, 213

Reading, “Aldbrickham,” 2

_Return of the Native_, _The_, 114, 128, 129, 161

Revels Inn, 199

Rye Hill, Bere Regis, 131, 132

Ryme Intrinseca, 176, 177

                                * * * * *

ST. JULIOT’S, “ENDELSTOW,” 8

“St. Launce’s,” Launceston, 8

Salisbury, “Melchester,” 16, 26–28, 31, 35, 36, 187

Salisbury Plain, 31

“Sandbourne,” Bournemouth, 31, 88, 257–262

Sandsfoot Castle, 222, 223

“Serpent,” The, 155

Shaftesbury, “Shaston,” 39, 277, 290, 291–296

Shapwick, 280, 281, 282, 283

“Shapwick Wheeloffs,” 281

“Shaston,” Shaftesbury, 39, 277, 290, 291–296

Sherborne, “Sherton Abbas,” 38, 39, 178–191

Sherborne Castle, 184, 186–190

“Sherton Abbas,” 38, 39, 178–191

Shillingstone, 282–285

“Shottsford Forum,” Blandford Forum, 39, 42–47, 75, 138, 282, 302

“Slingers, Isle of,” Isle of Portland, 209, 210, 214, 221–231, 240

_Some Crusted Characters_, 70

Somersetshire, “Outer Wessex,” 2, 176

Sparsholt, 20

Stalbridge, 302

“Stickleford,” Tincleton, 157, 160, 163

Stinsford, “Mellstock,” 61, 149–151

Stoborough, 115

Stockbridge, 16, 21–23, 26

“Stoke-Barehills,” Basingstoke, 2, 3

Stonehenge, 31–34

Stour, River, 38, 277, 278, 280, 282, 283, 288

“Stourcastle,” Sturminster Newton, 39, 286–288

Strangways family, 173–175

“Street of Wells,” 224, 225, 227, 231

Sturminster Marshall, 38, 277, 278, 280

Sturminster Newton, “Stourcastle,” 39, 286–288

Sutton Poyntz, “Overcombe,” 246, 247, 250

Swanage, “Knollsea,” 84–92, 97, 111, 257, 264

“Sylvania Castle,” Pennsylvania Castle, 229

                                * * * * *

TARENT ABBEY, 134, 145

Tarrant Hinton, 40

Templecombe, 38, 39

Ten Hatches, 70

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 12, 17, 31, 32, 36, 38, 122–126, 143, 147,
161, 168, 170, 199, 244, 257, 258, 285, 288, 289, 305

Theale, “Gaymead,” 2

_Three Strangers_, _The_, 75, 199

Tincleton, “Stickleford,” 157, 160, 163

_To Please his Wife_, 262, 265

_Tragedy of Two Ambitions_, 177

“Trantridge,” Pentridge, 36, 37

Trebarrow Sands, “Trebarwith Strand,” 7

“Troy Town,” 59

_Trumpet Major_, _The_, 70, 218, 222, 230, 232, 246–248, 250, 253

Turberville, Dr. D’Albigny, 30, 146

Turberville, George, 48, 146

Turberville, John, 123

Turberville, Thomas, 146

Turberville, family, The, 126, 134, 140–144, 146, 304

Turnworth House, “Great Hintock House,” 311, 312

_Two on a Tower_, 49, 53, 115, 270, 275, 278, 280, 298, 299

                                * * * * *

_Under the Greenwood Tree_, 59, 149, 150

Upper Bockhampton, 63

Upwey, 211, 212

                                * * * * *

“VALE OF GREAT DAIRIES,” 38, 156, 161, 306

Vale of Little Dairies, 38, 39

“Vale of White Hart,” 196

Village Choirs, 151–155

_Vindogladia_, 270

                                * * * * *

WALLOP, LITTLE (OR MIDDLE), 26

Wantage, “Alfredston,” 2

“Warborne,” 270

Wareham, “Anglebury,” 10, 38, 86, 111, 113–122, 138, 192

“Warm’ell Cross,” 252

“Weatherbury,” Piddletown, 53–58, 157

Weatherbury Castle, 50, 51, 80

Weeke, 18

_Well Beloved_, _The_, 224, 226, 229, 230

Welland House, 50, 278, 279

“Wellbridge,” Woolbridge, 124, 127

“Wells, the Street of,” Fortune’s Well, 224, 225, 227, 231

Wessex, 1, 9, 14, 21, 148, 253

Wessex, Lower, Devonshire, 2, 6

Wessex, Mid, Wiltshire, 2, 292

Wessex, Nether, Cornwall, 292

Wessex, North, Berkshire, 2

Wessex, Outer, Somersetshire, 2, 176

Wessex, South, Dorsetshire, 2, 38, 39, 44, 134, 135, 138, 249, 291, 292

Wessex, Upper, Hampshire, 2, 257

West Bay, 237, 238, 239, 241

West Stafford, 157

Wey, River, 212

Weyhill, “Weydon Priors,” 23–25

Weyhill Fair, 24, 25

“Weydon Priors,” Weyhill, 23–25

Weymouth, “Budmouth,” 71, 200, 207, 209, 210, 212, 221, 225, 226, 232,
246

Whitcomb, 65

Willapark Point, 8

Wilts, 2

Wimborne Minster, “Warborne,” 106, 138, 270–276

Wincanton, 39

Winchester, “Wintoncester,” 9–17, 21, 148

Windsor “Castle Royal,” 2

Winterborne Came, 65

Winterborne Monkton, 208, 210

Winterborne St. Martin, or Martinstown, 153

Winterborne Whitchurch, 47, 48, 146

Winterslow, 16

“Winterslow Hut,” 27

“Wintoncester,” Winchester, 9–17, 21, 148

“Wishing Well,” Upwey, 211–213

_Withered Arm_, _The_, 74

Wolveton House, 168, 205, 207

Woodbury Hill, Bere Regis, 138, 140

_Woodlanders_, _The_, 43, 176, 286, 191, 195, 197, 198, 308, 312

Woodlands, 298, 299

Woodyates Inn, 35, 36, 38, 40

Wool, 38, 123, 126, 130

Woolbridge, “Wellbridge,” 124, 127

Woolbridge House, 122, 123, 125

                                * * * * *

“YALBURY HILL,” YELLOWHAM HILL, 59

Yellowham Woods, “Yalbury Great Wood,” 59, 150

Yeo, River, 176, 178, 186, 191

Yeovil, “Ivell,” 169, 176–178

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

  _Printed by Hazell_, _Watson & Viney_, _Ld._, _London and Aylesbury_.

                                * * * * *




FOOTNOTES


{174}  In text the genealogy is: Thomas Horner of Mells _m._ 1713
Susannah, daughter of Thomas Strangeways, of Melbury, co. Dorset, born
1690, died 1758: they had issue Elizabeth Horner (born 1723, died 1792).

Elizabeth Horner _m._ 1736 Sir Stephen Fox, afterwards 1st Earl of
Ilchester, etc.  Born 1706, Died 1776.—DP.




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