THE SOUL OF DORSET
t f
A
THE MAYPOLE AT BURTON BRADSTOCK
Design of a picture by Albert Rutherston, in the possession of
M. H. Salaman Esq.
79070
THE
SOUL OF DORSET
79070
F. J. HARVEY DARTON
" This other Eden, demi-paradise. . . .
England, bound in with the triumphant sea.'
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1922
-
-DA
GTO
Printed in Great Britain at
The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.
TO
RUTH
PREFACE
THIS book has been written as a pleasure to myself
over a period of twenty years, in the intervals of
a busy life. It began as an attempt to describe,
mainly for the use of friends who shared that life, most of
them now dead, the admirable fitness of Dorset for walking
tours. But the more I walked in that county and there
is only one little corner of it that I have not visited at least
once the more I learnt of England ; and I modified my
original idea. It seemed to me that here, on the frontier
of England (for Dorset was really that until late in the
Middle Ages), I had the true story of England ; not the
extremes of romance and war and politics, but the mean.
So I changed my plan, and have tried to do or combine three
things in each chapter of the book to sketch very slightly
the main tendency of English history in a series of epochs ;
to apply that history to its local exhibition in Dorset ; and,
finally, to describe a string of places, within the compass
of a reasonable day's walk, in which some remains of the
epoch dealt with are still patent. The Buttier at the end
" ruttier " is a good old word borrowed from a great English
classic, and might well be restored as a shibboleth for alleged
patriots shows how these walks can be combined and
worked out in practice. But I have not attempted (God
forbid) to write a " gossiping guide," or series of "rambles " :
my concern is at least as much with my country as with the
county in it which I love best.
I do not think I have mentioned any place or building
vii
viii PREFACE
which in the course of happy years I have not seen for
myself ; not as an antiquary, but as (with exceptions) a
healthy person using his proper legs. But my personal
knowledge would be small but for certain invaluable
publications, to which I render the warmest thanks : the
Proceedings of the Dorset Field Club, Somerset and Dorset
Notes and Queries, the Victoria County History, and the
original of them all, Hutchins' Dorset. I owe much in the
earlier chapters to Mr. Hadrian Allcroft's Earthwork of
England. There are a number of less universal works
those of Coker, Warne, Roberts, and others to which the
same general gratitude must be given, as also to national
works of reference of all kinds. It would be tedious to
enumerate the books devoted to special periods or places
which have been of assistance (like Mr. Damon's on Geology,
Mr. Robinson's on Purbeck, Mr. Bayley's on the Civil War,
Mr. Moule's on Dorchester), or the smaller local histories
or pamphlets which in many cases have led me to fuller
investigation. Dorset is rich in competent local historians,
and I hope rather than am certain that I am indebted to
them all. When I have quoted them directly, or when they
seem to be the sole authority for the facts involved, I have
mentioned them by name in the text.
I do not pretend to the status of an historian, any more
than to that of an antiquary. I am quite sure that a
specialist in either kind can condemn me in detail, because
if there is one thing I learnt of my kindly mother, Oxford,
it is that the omniscient scholar cannot and does not exist.
Life would not be worth living if he did exist. What I have
tried to do is to see the chief activities of each successive
age in one English county sympathetically, and to illustrate
them by local facts. I want to dwell upon what he whom
we used to know as Mr. Balfour long ago called subordinate
patriotism. If in my later chapters I have touched with an
PREFACE ix
apparent lack of proportion on the difficulties of the farmer
and his man, it is because I believe that only in their solution
will England find her true soul. If the agricultural labourer,
under conditions which raise him above the beasts (" beast "
is the Dorset plural) he tends, can really come to have a
pride in the country he has made habitable through centuries
of dumb toil, and a pride likewise in the past hopes and
heroisms I have tried to chronicle, then God prosper
England. But if not, if he is always to be " the
poor," God help us, and forgive those who keep him
in that state.
I am very grateful to friends for help : to Mrs. Ruth
Williams for reading the manuscript and proofs and making
suggestions; to Mr. F. Harcourt Kitchin (seduced from
Devon for a few weeks) for a valuable, if painful, decimation
of the manuscript, and to Mr. Cyril Hurcomb for reading
part of the proofs ; to my publishers, friends of old standing,
for other suggestions as well as for their kindly practical
interest ; to Mr. Albert Rutherston for letting me use a
delightful picture in which, as his original guide to West
Dorset, I may claim almost a god-paternal interest ; to Mr.
Charles Aitken, keeper and fosterer of the Tate Gallery,
for leave to reproduce Stevens' portrait of his benefactor,
and for valuable suggestions; to Mr. Wilson Steer and
Mr. Gwynne- Jones for the use of pictures of the county in
which they, too, have been happy ; and to Mr. C. J. Sawyer
for finding and lending some engravings.
The Index is not meant to cover historical periods as
such the chapters do that nor special subjects. When-
ever a person or place occurs more than once and is given
particular attention, the chief reference is placed first,
irrespectively of order of pagination. The Appendix
x PREFACE
(except for one or two necessary entries) is not included in
it, because it is so arranged thafc the itinerary of each
chapter coincides with the pictured Ruttier or chapter-
heading. These Ruttiers are by Miss Ruth Cobb, to
whom I am indebted for her care and adaptability. The
prefatory quotations also are not included.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PEACE Page
To-day's inheritance of the ages. Its value for probate ... 1
A Ruttier of the Coast of Dorset 3
CHAPTER II
BEFORE THE FLOOD
Man's conquest of Nature, and its difficulty in Dorset. Nature's
dictation of conditions to Man. The beasts that perish and
have perished, from the beginning until the Iberian and the Celt
appeared. The dragons of Lyme Regis . . . . .11
A Ruttier of the way from Poole Harbour to West Lulworth . . 13
CHAPTER III
THE HILLS OP THE DEAD
The Iberian and the Celt in Dorset. Their great works, and the spirit
of lost kingdoms. The past that lives . . . . .37
A Ruttier of a way from Dorchester to Abbotsbury ... 39
CHAPTER IV
THE GREEN ROADS
The Roman dominion from A.D. 49 to A.D. 416. The Roman Peace
in a Dorset farm. The legionary on a Dorset road . . .61
A Ruttier of the Roman Way from Badbury Rings to Dorchester and
beyond .......... 53
CHAPTER V
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS
The Dark Ages of Saxon and Danish conquest, from A.D. 416 to A.D.
1066. The envelopment of Dorset. The Kings Ine and Alfred
and Cnut, Bishop Aldhelm and Abbot ^Elfric . . . .71
A Ruttier of Edward the Martyr's way from Corfe Castle to Shaffces-
bury 78
xi
^ CONTENTS
CHAPTER VI
THE CHRISTIAN CONQUERORS PQQG
The Normans who took and possessed Dorset in the year 1066 and
thereafter . .
A Ruttier of the Norman habitations between Maiden Newton and
Powerstock . . * 93
CHAPTER VII
THE GREAT ABBEYS AND THE AGE OF FAITH
The wars, pestilences, and famines that lay between the Normans of
1066 and the Tudor settlement of 1500. The spirit of Holy
Church. The spirit of Kings ... . 105
A Ruttier of a way from Maiden Newton through Cerne Abbas to Bere
Regis . . . ... . . .107
CHAPTER VIH
THE NEW RICH
The change of lordship in Dorset. The merchants and seamen and
common folk of the Tudor reigns. Raleigh at Sherborne . . 129
A Ruttier of a way from Burton Bradstock to Sherborne % - . 131
CHAPTER IX
PRINCES IN FLIGHT
The quarrelsome days and petty life of the Stuarts' reigns. Prince
Charles in flight through Dorset, King Monmouth in triumph and
in ignominy. The Bloody Assize , , . . . 157
A Ruttier of the Princes' road from Lyme Regis to Bridport and
thereabouts . 159
CHAPTER X
THE AGE OF ELEGANCE
Some persons of quality in Dorset in the eighteenth century. A
Nabob, a politician, a poet, a murderer, some great families, and
a parcel of gipsies. The Canning case reconsidered . . .187
A Ruttier of the gipsies' wanderings from South Perrott to Abbots -
bury and Dorchester . . 189
CHAPTER XI
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
Farmer George at Weymouth. John Wesley in Dorset . 223
A perambulation of Lyme Regis .... 225
CONTENTS xiii
CHAPTER XII
MARINERS OP ENGLAND Page
The seamen and Admirals of Dorset, especially during the wars with
Bonaparte. The Hoods, "Nelson's Hardy," the Byves', the
privateers. Captain Coram . . . . . 9 .241
A Ruttier of the coast-way from Bridport Harbour to Abbotsbury
and Weymouth ......... 243
CHAPTER XIII
THE SEQUESTERED VALE
The enclosure of commons. The misery of the labourer. The Dor-
chester Martyrs ......... 269
A Ruttier of a way from Beaminster round and through Marshwood
Vale to Bridport 271
CHAPTER XIV
HOLY AND HUMBLE MEN OP HEABT
The nineteenth century in Dorset, and its great men Alfred Stevens,
William Barnes, Shaftesbury, Thomas Hardy . . . .295
A Ruttier of a way from the hills to the valley and back from
Shaftesbury to Sturminster Newton and Blandford . , .297
CHAPTER XV
AN EXCEEDING HIGH PLACE
Peace? Where are we ? 315
A Ruttier across mid -Dorset, from Evershot to Blandford . .317
APPENDIX
How to link all the Ruttiers into one 333
INDEX . 345
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE MAYPOLE AT BUBTON BBADSTOCK . , . frontispiece
Design of a picture by Albert Rutherston, in the possession of
M. H. Salamav, Esq.
Facing page
LULWOBTH COVE . . . .32
From a painting by Allan Guynne-Jones
ST. CATHEBINE'S CHAPEL, ABBOTSBUEY . . ... .48
From a drawing by C. Dayes, 1802
COBFE CASTLE . . . . , . . . .78
From a painting by P. Wilson Steer
CEBNE ABBEY GATEWAY . . . . .112
Engraved from a drawing by J. W. Upham
THE WEYMOUTH OP GEOBGE III . . . . . . 228
From an engraving of 1789
BBIDPOBT HABBOUB . . . . . . . . .256
From an engraving of a drawing by J. M. W t Turner, 22 A.
POBTBAIT OP A CLEBGYMAN ; BELIEVED TO BE OF THE REV. THE
HON. SAMUEL BEST. BY ALFBED STEVENS .... 300
From a drawing in the Tate Gallery, by permission of the Trustees
I
Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye
are and whereof ye are the governors ; a nation not slow and dull, but
of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and
sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point, the highest
that human capacity can soar to. . . . What could a man require
more from a nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge ?
What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil but wise and
faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets,
of sages, and of worthies ? We reckon more than five months yet to
harvest ; there need not be five weeks ; had we but eyes to lift up,
the fields are white already."
JOHN MILTON,
Areopagitica.
" This season's Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year's :
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance
To be perpetual."
RUDYARD KIPLING,
Songs from Books.
I
PEACE
WlMBORNE /
f 1 | "^HE England of my dreams is of a magical nature.
It appears to me as a green chalk hill, high and
JL strong, running towards the sunset. Far behind
you, as you walk westward, lie the smoke and wealth of
herded men who are English, too, but do not live in my
dream-country. In the bottoms that run north and south
into the long ridge are secret and friendly villages, the homes
of those who have made the earth rich by their secular
labour. The hill ends in a little forsaken port, where change
comes not, nor does any man grow old.
That England is built up partly from my intimate love
of one place, Bridport Harbour in Dorset, where the world
for me seems to end, and partly from many walks I have
taken on the Dorset hills on my way to that haven of rest.
Once in particular I seemed to be really in that England
of my fantasy. I stood with a companion in great content-
4 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
ment on a great hill, looking out over the blue and golden
mists where Bridport lay against the dazzling sea. The
earth stretched away into infinite sunshine, and I felt as if
I were contemplating the ultimate peace on earth for which
the ages have striven, and were a part of it, able to continue
in it for ever. Yet as I turned away I knew I must soon go
back to less happy places, must face menacing hopes and
fears, perform tasks, live and die : not dream.
At the slight suggestion of death there came into my
memory an incongruous recollection ; no dream, but a
comment upon civilization. I was sitting many years ago
in the bar-parlour of an inn at Bridport Harbour, where
the mariners and coastguards assembled cheerfully of an
evening. Some of us were playing whist, some talking or
eating bread and cheese, all drinking from straight mugs.
Suddenly a head came round the door, and a voice said
" Dick, you're wanted." One of my companions got up and
went out, and a moment later summoned a second to join him.
They were absent about half an hour, and then came back
and resumed beer and whist without delay or explanation.
I asked Dick later why he had been called away. " Old
P 's dead," he replied. " Died in a fit, all hunched up.
We had to go and lay him out. He'd got stiff, and I had to
sit on his knees to straighten him."
When that scene flickered so irrelevantly across my
mind on Eggardon Camp, I wondered idly, as we looked out
from the hill towards the sea, whether, five thousand years
ago, when perhaps the Camp was first dug, the reason why
the Stone Age men were often buried (as they were) " all
hunched up " in their barrows was that they had not
thought of Dick's simple remedy for rigor mortis. His
matter-of-fact grimness made our civilization appear a very
primitive thing. It made the fancy of a happy England,
in which society shall really have become stable and painless,
seem a childish invention. And it gave me also the feeling
that the development of mankind may have been like a bad
cinematograph drama repetitive, discontinuous, and futile ;
PEACE 5
and that our progress may not yet have gone far, if one looks
at it honestly.
Yet that night as I stood on the little black wooden pier
at West Bay (Bridport Harbour's alias), and watched the
still beauty of the moonlit sea, the conviction came back
to me that there is, after all, something of true peace in an
English county some solid precipitate left after the shaking
of the centuries. I thought of other places and experiences
in that divine county which had given me the same con-
viction.
I remembered especially one occasion when I had gone
down to the " mother and lover of men, the sea," between
that pier and its absurd brother. It was on a coastwise
vessel, a squat broad craft of two hundred or three hundred
tons, such as the vanished Bridport shipyard used to build
a generation ago. Ships have to be warped out to the pier-
heads here. You bump, sailless, down between the tiny
piers, creaking, rattling : familiar voices cry commands
from the ship and from the harbour in turn ; and all the
sounds seem separate and ineffably distant, because you are
upon a dead hulk, a shell moved by alien hands : a ship
being warped out has no soul. But in a little while the last
friendly voice dies : the last rope flies curling and flaps
upon the drab deck. Blocks squeak, a winch clacks, a few
deep orders sound ; the grey lifeless sail climbs slowly and
jerkily with its yard, and then, with a quick writhe and a
report like a shot, is big and round with the unseen wind.
The sea begins to clap its hands upon the curves of the hull.
The boat hisses, and leaps, and sways to the tiny song of
its tackle. It is born again, a thing of mastery and move-
ment. The pilot goes below and drinks good health to the
skipper, and climbs laboriously down the side into his
little cockboat ; and soon he too recedes. You are alone
upon the curving globe.
The port looks infinitely small now. You see it as with
the eye of God a poor gathering-place of transitory men,
busied with petty occasions ; no more ; little, remote,
6 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
pathetic, like man's life itself. You have come into the real
world, the universe where the stars march in their celestial
motions. You and your brave ship are your own world,
a commonwealth of high adventure.
And yet in the distant, inconsiderable village, that now
has become but a few twinkling candles in the strange
depth of late twilight, there lingers the necessary and
indefinable friendliness of humanity, which the landward
look from the sea perceives so clearly. There is no greeting
like that of the land to the mariner, no longing like that for
port after stormy seas. The familiar fields, those corners
and stones and the very puddles that you have so long ago
learnt to avoid : the smell of a house : the steadiness of the
little quay, the grating shingle, the people watching your
coming : so Englishmen have always seen their land, and
known peace of soul :
Oh ! to be there for an hour when the shade draws in beside
the hedgerows,
And falling apples wake the drowsy noon :
Oh ! for the hour when the elms grow sombre and human
in the twilight,
And gardens dream beneath the rising moon.
Only to look once more on the land of the memories of child-
hood,
Forgetting weary winds and barren foam :
Only to bid farewell to the combe and the orchard and the
moorland,
And sleep at last among the fields of home !
The seas and the hills and far-away enchantments may
call a man to the ends of the earth. But at the last, before
the conclusion of the whole matter, before the final dim
adventure, he will cling to those poor, friendly beginnings,
and come back, if he may, and be comforted.
That seems to be an eternal thing. Yet is it reality, or
only an emotion ? We come back, I say, to our squalor,
our splendour, to our hopes and futilities in what we call
our home. We take some sort of dwelling-place for granted,
and search eagerly for the trivial amenities we have learnt
PEACE 7
to love. And yet how have we secured even that much ?
What are the aim and value of all the efforts by generation
after generation to master the riddle of the painful
earth ?
The story of those efforts may point to an answer to the
question, What is peace ? I have tried to imagine some
of its chapters, as they may still be read in broken letters
in a few places in one English county. How long has it
taken a Dorset village to reach its present state, and why
and how have its folk won and kept a hold on life ? What
have been their hopes, fears, successes, failures, century
after century ? That is what I want to guess at in this book
of local happenings.
I will string together, by way of prophecy, so to speak,
some incongruities of the place where I began the book.
They may suggest something of the jumbled romance of
mankind. Bridport itself, a beautiful eighteenth-century
town clustered among hills, and its harbour where every
house seems to be an afterthought, may serve thus as an
epitome of the long story. It contains vestiges of almost the
whole of man's life in Dorset.
The town lies on the most permanent thing in nature a
river, a very small river, cutting its slow way oceanward
between hills, and dragging down soil to choke its own
mouth ; struggling also against the sea's barrier of cast-up
shingle. As long ago as King John's day, the harbour was
in danger of obliteration. As late as King George V's day,
there was talk of dredging it and deepening it to take a
squadron of motor-boats. There has even been a proposal
to flood the whole valley up to the town, and build a great
breakwater from Thorncombe Beacon, and make a lordly
harbour, rivalling Weymouth and Portland. Man seeks
eternally to subjugate even that little stream. There is
one chapter-heading for the story.
Yet the river will surely survive in its own persistent way.
8 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
Consider one of its victories. Thirty years ago, when the
little green between the Bridport Arms and Pier Terrace
was made, they dug up a dead man in the river gravel.
He had two great jars round the neck of his skeleton, and
he lay in the old river-bed. There is not a word of his story
known : whether he was a smuggler, or reveller overcome,
or mere carrier fatally belated, or some whimsical trader
buried fantastically no man can tell, nor when he died.
He is but bones that carried a jar.
Or go into the Bridport Arms and hear other stories
from the brook. Stand on the left-hand side of the bar :
you are in Symondsbury parish. Stand on the right : you
are in Burton Bradstock parish. Nowhere are you in Brid-
port parish, and yet this is part of Bridport if geography
and politics and custom can make it so. The property of
the church and a monastery was once divided along that
line. In that little detail the dead hand of monasticism
and pre-Reformation Church organization is faintly visible,
as if striving still to grasp a shadow of power. That is
another chapter.
And the parish division, running thus through a house,
is an echo of yet another side of history, of geographical
facts. Why should it take that line ? Why should the
old boundary cut through a venerable inn ? Because
Dorset was made without man's leave asked or given :
because once, when the parish boundary was determined,
the river Brit, which was the boundary, ran along that line.
Later it was silted up, after the manner of streams in those
parts, and cut itself a new channel. But the old boundary
remained on dry land. And that brings us back to the
geological chapter.
Look, again, at the buildings of the harbour. All to the
east lie great stone barns, some empty, a paradise of hens,
some full of timber for the petty commerce of the place.
They seem to-day beyond all use in size and stability ;
one can peer out under their huge rafters through a bright
square of unglazed window as from a prison, the blue sea
PEACE 9
of freedom shining outside cruelly. They have stood there
a hundred years or more. A generation ago, before the
railway came and took away the sea trade, they were all
full of hemp and jute and rope, and the linchets on the hills
up the valley were blue with flax. All the rope for Nelson's
ships* was made in Bridport, which for eight hundred
years had maintained the same industry, so that " a Brid-
port dagger " became a proverbial saying. (To be stabbed
with that weapon a halter was the same thing as falling
off a platform while engaged in conversation with a clergy-
man, and resulted in your dying in your stockings and
being put to bed with a shovel.)
There is still great traffic in rope and twine in the clean
town itself, two miles away. Its wide streets, because they
were made spacious for the drying of yarn on their pave-
ments, are the comeliest in Dorset. But the glory is departed
from the barns at the harbour. One ship, before the war,
still came specially from Russia every year with hemp :
almost all the other boats that blunder between the piers
are coasters bringing coal or timber, and going out with the
exceeding fine shingle that the inexhaustible sea frets off
the Chesil pebbles, and casts up year by year, without
diminution, for the streets of cities and the manufacturer
of concrete.
And lastly, to continue these haphazard clutches at the
past, observe certain chapter-headings in Bridport town
itself. Look at the Fives Court wall by the Fives Court
Inn (now being obscured by a garage), for instance :
this was built in 1847 by merchants of the town, who in
those days kept, as in Dorchester and Blandford also, a
social state of dignity and ordered well-being : they used,
for example, to send their Madeira to Newfoundland (a
great Dorset trade, three centuries old) and back, in their
* And the rope for King John's ships, and for Henry VIII's ships, and
all and sundry ships of England : and much wire netting to catch the
evil fish that came out of Germany in 1915 : and likewise lanyards for
Jellicoe's bosuns. Moreover, to some extent, flax-growing has been
revived : a ripple from the stone thrown into world-markets by the
Russian Revolution.
10 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
own ships, to mature it. Or the local ironwork railings on
the Harbour Eoad : there is no iron ore near here ; they
are a century old. Or the decent Town Hall. Or the
magnificent collection of Borough records (Bridport had a
mint in the days of Athelstan).* Or the open-air rope-
walks. Or the warning, just outside the town, that anyone
who damages the county bridge will be transported for life
signed by an official whose family surname under George III
began with a capital F, but now begins with if. Or a
thousand other odd and discrepant vestiges of creation.
I want to know what such things mean, and their relative
significance in time ; what expression they really are of
the spirit of man, and where man has got to in this one piece
of England. It seems to me that I may be able to guess more
nearly what the progress of mankind has been (if there has
been any progress) by visualizing it in a single county (and
in a county of which I love every inch) ; by trying to find
out with what intention our forefathers built or fought or
lived since man came into England, and what kind of Dorset
the first man in it and the generations after him have found
and altered.
* Almost, but not quite, certainly. It is not determined whether Bredy
(up the Bride valley) was not the " town " so honoured, though if so its
glory departed very quickly.
II
" It is a question if the exclusive reign of orthodox beauty is not approach-
ing its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempo may be a gaunt waste
in Thule : human souls may find themselves in closer and closer
harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our
race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually
arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain
will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods
of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the
commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vine-
yards and myrtle gardens of South Europe are to him now ; and
Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the
Alps to the sand-dunes of Scheveningen."
THOMAS HARDY.
The Return of the Native.
" BBOADBENT (stopping to snuff up the hillside air). Ah ! I like this spot.
I like this view. This would be a jolly good place for a hotel and a
golf links. Friday to Tuesday, railway ticket and hotel all inclusive."
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW,
John Bull's Other Island.
II
BEFORE THE FLOOD
TUDLAND
-Hf-
Church K-nowIe
Creech Boyr-ou; x - . I ^f
,---""" (
RS-BATOOW KIMMERIDGL'-
STRICTLY speaking, I suppose, the history of man
in Dorset should begin with a conjectural account
of the origin of all life with the atom, the ion, the
amoeba, the nebular hypothesis, and a view of the (till
lately) infinite space where stars grow into worlds. But
(praise be !) I know nothing of world-physics, nothing of
astronomy, nothing even of astrology ; I cannot so much
as cast a horoscope, which seemingly almost any clerk in the
Middle Ages could achieve. In this book, therefore, I shall
speak of the celestial universe (three- or four -dimensioned
space and its contents) no further than to point out, upon
this opportunity, that the monkish clock in Wimborne
Minster is wrong when it alleges in a pantomime, as it has
alleged for six hundred years past, that the sun travels
round the earth.
But if one pretermits these huge speculations, it is still
13
14 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
impossible to deny all reference to the grim science called
geology ; least of all in a county which has given a world-
name to three notable formations. Moreover, the rocks in
Dorset are a chronicle open and clear. Not only do Dorset
folk use in many ways the stones of the time before the
Flood ; not only do the foundations of the county contain
the tremendous mystery of man's first appearance ; but the
cliffs and the hills and the valleys are themselves a chronicle
of past wonders, now plainly visible. They are as insistent
as an earthwork or a ruined castle. Here, then, shall be a
journey through the old time before our oldest fathers.
The most ancient " rocks " in the county more venerable
far than man are the cliffs of Charmouth and Lyme
Regis, and the meadows of Marshwood Vale. The epochs
that went to create them must have been much longer than
all time since. Next upon the stairway of the years stand
the most important of all the county's strata. From
Portland comes the stone that creates the soft shadows of
St. Paul's Cathedral ; from Purbeck the grey columns of
Westminster Abbey, and the splendour of the west front
of Wells Cathedral.
But mankind was not extant when those rocks took shape.
There were thrown up next the glorious chalk hills. On
the chalk the shepherd is able to exercise the first and oldest
art of subjugation. In the high downs higher, nobler
in Dorset than in the more-praised dominion of Sussex
rise the scores of streams that the dairies need ; and upon
the sweet turf feed myriads of comely sheep ; the true
horned sheep of Dorset, a valiant and fertile stock with an
old pedigree, the envy of less happier lands, the ornament
and treasure of the green slopes. And in those slopes also
the dominant race of earliest Britain cut its vast and
enduring citadels.
But man was still not born in England even " when first
the hills in order stood." There are clays and sands older
than he. The white earths of Stoborough Heath, which for
generations the Five Towns have drawn from Dorset for
BEFORE THE FLOOD 15
their craft of pottery, were formed ages before the only
creature that has learnt how to use a thumb : near here also
is the best clay for long churchwarden pipes. Lower down
the Dorset slopes, by the rivers and marshes, is the poor
kingdom of land that alone is coeval with mankind. There,
where still the winds and the streams change by little and
little the infirm water-courses, stretches the new-built
earth that is man's twin. All else was old and established
before any human voice was heard in the fantastic world
of continental England.
For that is the unimaginable condition of the beginning
of man's life in Dorset a condition whose results still
govern that life. The county lay formerly upon no sea :
it was part of a lost Atlantis. How long and how often it
was joined to Europe not even the geologists will say with
certainty. Twice at least it was submerged beneath the
waters, to rise again with land where now the grey warships
ride. It was in turn arctic and tropical. Whole generations
of living things were born : the earth shook and was opened,
and when the torment was past the living things were rock.
At some time in that ebb and flow of terror man appeared
in England : Eolithic man. We do not know if he is our
direct ancestor : there is in England no link found between
him and the later, yet incalculably old, generations of
Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. We only know that he had
to strive against a power we cannot so much as describe :
the full might and fury of Nature herself. To Nature fell
the victory. Never again in England did she prevail so
completely.
Dorset seems to hold a record of that first defeat. Upon
the Ordnance Survey's gay and pretty geological map, in
the very heart of the county, there is a bright pink speck in
the midst of the green stripes that stand for chalk. It is
unique, and has a name peculiar to itself. It is called
" Elephant Bed of Dewlish " : perhaps the finest achieve-
ment of any science in the way of mixed homeliness and
romance.
16 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
All that is left of the elephants who slept in that bed
their last sleep is in Dorchester and Salisbury Museums.
The immense curving tusks are over six feet long. They
are imperfect : in life they must have measured more than
eight feet. The molars are like great lumps of rock. They
belonged to the elephant known as Elephas meridionalis,
the Elephant of the South : by whose presence in our island
we know that England must then have had a warm climate.
He vanished from the face of the earth in the Pliocene Age.
Close by the remains of these monstrous creatures were
found some little chipped flints. They have been thought
to be the possessions of Eolithic man. With those feeble
weapons he must fight for life against such beasts, with those
poor tools he must conquer the hard earth : and but for
them we might not know even that he had ever existed in
this part of England.*
He vanished, too, like the Elephant of the South. Before
Palaeolithic man appeared, there was another vast trans-
formation of the earth's face, and England was islanded for
a time. Then once more man, Palaeolithic man, appears ;
in Dorset he has been traced on the Devon border and at
Wimborne. Then again came the cold, and the land rose
up from the waters, until, by stages not to be numbered
certainly, the last great breach with Europe occurred. Man
in England had viewed the promised land, but he might not
possess it might not leave upon it the marks which after-
wards Neolithic man made ineffaceably in Dorset until
the triumphant sea had torn the cliffs of Purbeck and Port-
land into walls against itself.
I think the lowest of the many computations I have seen
of the duration or evolution of the three Stone Ages in
England is 139,000 years. The Neolithic Age ended for
us about 2000 years before Christ ; hardly 4000 years ago.
If in 135,000 years from now England grew too cold for
* We do not really know, so far as Dorset is concerned. The flints
are now said not to have been worked by man. But the Elephant is
authentic, and, like the mocking-bird in Mrs. Trimmer's Robins, had
better remain here " for the sake of the moral."
BEFORE THE FLOOD 17
human life, how much of our civilization would be left for
those who at length came back, as perhaps Neolithic man
came back, from the warmer zones of the south ? I know
that it is a vain speculation ; and the years of geologic
time are beyond the mind's comprehension. Yet it is some
such indescribable and terrifying immensity as this that the
Dewlish flints and Purbeck and Portland stones imply :
an immensity containing even the reversal or the dethroning
of all that we mean by man's dominion alike over organic
and inorganic nature.
Once, from near Dewlish itself, I looked up to the hills
and saw as it were a travesty of that antique strife. There
was an empty lane climbing the hill between hedges, and
the day shone with the hard brightness of spring before the
buds have opened. I had grown tired of roads, and looked
to the top of the ridge with hope. Suddenly there appeared
over the clean line of road the head of a mounted man,
with a black cap ; and then a red coat and then the
multitudinous waving sterns of hounds ; and after that
more red coats and fine horses, ambling easily, first one,
then another, and pairs, and at last a host, every one coming
into sight like the units of an army terrible as an army
with banners, for had they not killed the fox ? It was a
gay sight, a triumphant simplicity, this famous Cattistock
Hunt ; and yet it seemed also a parody of that remoter,
huger war that had once taken place in those very hills,
when all the odds were not upon the hunter. What if the
fox, in a million years, had conquered Nature, and made
man as the elephants of Dewlish ?
Any man can see in a reasonable walk* most of that
geological pageant which I have just suggested ; and he
need not trouble himself much about geology, for the places
themselves speak in a good comprehensible tongue of their
own.
* By " reasonable walk," or indeed by " walk " alone, I mean now and
hereafter any distance from twelve to thirty miles, according to circum-
stances. For further details see the Appendix I. In the present case I
suggest also the goal of an alternative walk.
18 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
Begin at Poole Harbour, where the sands and heather and
brambles stretch from the western bank into Studland
Heath and Little Sea. Here, at the outset, the unstable
foreshore performs, by way of forecast, the still unended
miracle of earth-building. A bunch of whin near an inlet
will suddenly hold together a small island of sand : the
wind comes, and lo ! a grass-topped hill in a yellow desert.
The waters slowly push the sand higher, scooping their
own shallow channel a little deeper ; and so, in a few
centuries of minute toil, there is formed a delicate con-
tinent of dunes, whose shape and colour change without
ceasing.
The waters too have simple proofs here of the unhuman,
almost inhuman tasks accomplished by Nature alone.
Poole Harbour, Lytchett Bay, Arne Bay, Wareham Channel
are now pied with islets of stubborn grass, like molehills on
a flat meadow. A gull or a heron may make them his throne
while he rests a few minutes from the search for food,
thinking highly, doubtless, of the Providence that in the last
few years has suddenly set up these inns for his sojourning.
But there is a stranger wonder in the green tufts than the
mere convenience of birds. The grass comes from America,
and with it the New World is rebuilding the Old. A few
seeds of an American grass chanced to come by ship, it is
said, into Southampton Harbour : and by chance, too, they
so fell that they took root ; and now all the flats of water in
that region are filled with the quick-growing sturdy weed,
and the channels are being narrowed and deepened more
securely than man could compass.
It is almost a battlefield, this little strip of coast : sea
against land, man against both. At its westernmost curve
the waves are daily triumphant. Here, beneath Handfast
Point, stands Old Harry. By his side formerly stood also
his long-faithful consort, Old Harry's Wife, a second un-
gainly pillar of chalk. But the subtle, indefatigable sea
plucked at her robes continually, and slid away her founda-
tions, till suddenly she dissolved into the waters, and was
BEFORE THE FLOOD 19
but a heap of diminishing white lumps. Even so will her
lorn spouse presently perish.
That cruel deed must have been the revenge of Ocean ;
for Studland Heath before that had robbed him not less
cruelly. In the waste of sand and lagoons on the Heath,
lies the enclosed mere named Little Sea. In Ralph Treswell's
Tudor map it is an arm of the great sea, upon which swim
swans and ducks and what appear to be pelicans of a pro-
digious bigness ; but now the land has imprisoned it, and
there are no pelicans. Men say that in its still depths is
buried Excalibur, flung there by Sir Bedivere against his
will ; and indeed the brown marsh is a ghostly place, where
in the twilight the most knightly soul might forget his
vows.
There is power in this strange and lovely place : a power
not only of beauty beyond description, not only of legend,
but of some spiritual force as well. It may be only some
trick of light and colour, such as sometimes you get in the
Welsh hills or on Romney Marsh. There is contrast enough
here for any illusion of the sight : the white cliff of Vectis
standing stiffly out at sea, the gold and silver of the sand, the
blue and white and grey water, the profound dykes, the
heather and pines all these are played upon by sun and
wind and cloud without hindrance to the line of sight,
until not twice running will a view appear the same : and
in turn the hues play upon the eye of the mind, so that as
the wraiths of old chivalry pass dimly, and faint echoes
ring in the brain from the forlorn passions and hopes of the
knightly years, the whole world and he who regards it from
Studland Heath are subdued into a sombre union, an
ecstasy of loneliness.
Another legend and another fragment of earth-history
lie close at hand. Westward of Little Sea the shaggy heath
begins to grow upon clay, coeval with man, and not now
shifting and unstable like the sand. In the midst of its
wildness are set two great alien stones, the Agglestone and
the Puckstone. Legend says that the Devil, having taken
20 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
a hatred of Corfe Castle, threw these stones at it (from his
natural home in some Isle of Wight watering-place), and they
fell short. The stories told by scientists are less interesting
and not much more plausible. But by any account the
Agglestone and the Puckstone are older than their resting-
place, and older than man.
From the Heath one comes into the geologically older
world of Purbeck. But at this point, he who walks comes
upon a serious obstacle. He climbs up to Ballard Down,
and sees at his foot a rather large and offensive town,
stretching up every valley, full of grievous things : houses
built to appear important to unimportant persons ; sham
half-timber, eruptive and incongruous glass of many
colours, ironwork and paint of the Public Baths and
Washhouses Period, cornices that bear no weight, be-
dizened doors, gables in number like the tents of an
army.
Not that Swanage is wholly vile, however. The old pond,
and a few grey and white houses of a grave and stubborn
homeliness, and the new church, and the harbour, and
its seemly Georgian hotel these have reticence and
character.
It is with mixed feelings that after crossing the town one
looks back at the unseemly parodies of architecture which
climb Durlstone Head. They are, after all, man's victories
over Nature in a land where victory has not been easily
won. As you pass them, you will see many invitations to
the Caves of Tilly Whim. Defy the warning of experience
of watering-places : go to these alleged caves. They are
not caves :* they too are a battleground. They are disused
quarries, worked by the Company of Marblers of Purbeck
(a vigorous trade gild or union) many years ago, before they
* Nor is Tilly Whim, strictly, their name. They are Tilly's Whim
Quarries. Tilly was one of the first to use a crane, or whim, some two
hundred years ago : an effort of progress which doubtless Dorset under
the Georges regarded placidly as the summit of mechanical skill. But the
quarries here have not been worked now for a century past. (See A Royal
Warren, by C. E. Robinson. Privately printed.)
BEFORE THE FLOOD 21
migrated to other galleries. In the silent workings are all
the secrets and all the spirit of an immemorial craft. Men
have riven and split the stone in the same way, with the same
tools, perhaps since imperial Rome set up marble where
before were only the wattle huts of the Celts. There is
something indescribably hard and penetrating, yet venerable
also, in the grey unchanging masses : they have almost a
life they could speak with the voice of old Time himself,
and tell of all the humble hopes, the anger, the joyful
strength, the caprices, from which they suffered blows :
of all the nameless men now more still than the very dust
of the quarry.
Yet even the stones are not wholly dumb. Here have
been found many still undefaced records from the dimmest
antiquity fishes of strange shapes, and vast turtles, fit
dwellers in such a place and such an epoch as formed
Purbeck marble : and one trace of life more romantic,
even, than the elephants of Dewlish. It is the footmark
of an iguanodon ; one print only, a shamrock-like impress
of a huge lizard's foot, twelve inches or so across, left when
the rock that now is so painfully carved was but soft mud.
It is like the footprint upon Crusoe's island, solitary, un-
related, full of terror : but it is from no mere sea that it
comes ; it is stamped high and dry above the tide-mark of
time itself.
On the lonely hills towards St. Aldhelm's Head, there is
a desolation no less suggestive of the beginnings of the earth,
though it is in reality a man-made solitude. The coarse
grass is strewn with great shaped boulders, like the ruins of
a giant's palace. There are strange holes in the turf, de-
cayed walls, little deserted stone shelters where once the
smaller blocks were shaped and stacked ; brambles and
nettles are everywhere, and no smooth surface anywhere.
It might be the workshop or rubbish heap of a world-
builder. It is but a deserted quarry, left haphazard as though
the marblers had fled in some sudden fear. It is strangely
full of the atmosphere of awe, like the grisly " chapel " where
22 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
once Sir Gawain must abide the three strokes of the Green
Knight :
" Wild it seemed to him ;
He saw no sign of resting in that place,
But high steep rocks on either side the dale,
Rough knuckled boulders, rugged stones and rocks,
With shadows full of terror . . .
* I wis', quoth Gawain, ' wilderness is here :
This is an ugly grass-grown place of prayer,
Where well that Knight in green might pay his vows,
And do his reverence in the devil's way.' "
At last, after a league of desolation, comes St. Aldhelm's
Head St. Alban's or St. Aldhelm's, as the Ordnance map
observes punctiliously ; but St. Alban had no commerce
with Wessex. The promontory of the great Saxon bishop
Aldhelm is as it were the pivot or apex of the Isle of Purbeck.
It is an impregnable salient thrust into the sea. Near its
summit the two hard rocks, Purbeck marble and Portland
stone, are broken off ; except for a little strip near Wor-
barrow Bay, they are not seen again on the coast until
Portland itself rises up at the western end of the wide
curve of the cliffs.
The Headland, perhaps, does not fasten itself upon the
imagination as do certain other seaboard places of Dorset :
at any rate in calm weather. But in the wind and the rain,
when the south-westerly tempest blows clear across the
Atlantic into the narrow groove of the Channel, it is glorious.
The rock seems to join the sea in the war against their
common conqueror. How many tall ships, through the
ages, have been blown safely past the Start, past the terrible
race of Portland, almost into the peace of Christchurch
Bay, to be broken to splinters upon Dancing Ledge or
Anvil Point ?* Out of the innumerable company of their
dead would rise the armadas of nations long vanished, of
empires from whose numb hands sea power departed
countless generations ago. Every race and every tongue
* One almost as I wrote these words.
BEFORE THE FLOOD 23
of Europe would be found there, in ships of strange rig,
the little brave creeping ships of the old world.
The low, strong Norman chapel on the headland is by
tradition a record of one such disaster. A father, in 1140,
it is said, saw his son drowned in a gale before his eyes, and
set up this little four-square house of prayer to be at once
a beacon-holder and a chantry for the souls of sailors.
There is a change in the pageant of the rocks at the
Headland itself. The hard stone ceases and gives place
to what seems a more kindly land. Below the cliff is a round
blue pool and a gorse-embroidered valley ; beyond, yet
another valley, full of trees, and then hill after hill cut short
by the sea, until, far away, the cliffs end in a dying fall at
the sunset. Instead of the bleak quarries, there comes,
after a patch of shale, a great stretch of chalk downs.
If you are walking westwards from here, you can choose
either of two routes ; close to the coast, through Kimmeridge,
or along the inner chalk ridge, over Creech Barrow. By
the Kimmeridge route Encombe Glen (below the House)
must be avoided ; ill-behaved trippers have caused it to
be closed to the public. But the coast can be reached
again near Smedmore, east of Kimmeridge.
The geologist takes great delight in Kimmeridge. The
shale ledges are older even than the Purbeck and Portland
stones ; and the wrinkled sea that slides over their grey,
oily layers hides dreadful things that the earth has done
geological faults, lapses from regularity, highly original
sins which make science a ghoulish joy. Are they not
recorded and pictured in the Museum of Jermyn Street ?
Man converted the Purbeck and Portland rocks to his use
by sheer force. Kimmeridge shale is too subtle for force.
This black little piece of coast, grimy, slippery, unfriendly,
is a record of curious futilities undertaken in many
generations. The earliest identifiable men, those of the
Stone Age, have left their tokens here. They worked the
shale and made ornaments of it ; and made also other
things the meaning of which is even now not certainly
24 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
known. Kimmeridge " coal-money " consists of round
discs with symmetrical piercings. Legend says they are
coins. They have been found in circumstances that prove
them to be at least pre-Roman. Some cold-blooded
persons of to-day assert that they are merely the end-cores
thrown aside from the lathe, which was beyond doubt used
by Celt and Roman for making their beautiful vases and
other wares of shale. But against this is the strange fact
that in many places the " money " has been found care-
fully stored in cinerary urns. Here is a riddle set by a
vanished sphinx. The tokens are almost like what Mr.
Edmund Gosse's father imagined fossils to be devices
contrived by the Creator, with immemorial prescience, to
tempt later scientists into impious speculation.
That industry, whatever its meaning, was succeeded, two
thousand years or so later, by a less reputable trade. The
Abbey of Cerne possessed this coast, and with it the right
to benefit from wreckage ; a right which is said to have been
extended, at any rate once, under Henry VII, to the pro-
vision of material for its exercise. And then, in a less
fierce age, came the Clavells of Smedmore, of the lineage of
Walter de Clavile, an authentic comrade of the Conqueror.
Greatest of the family, perhaps, was that Tudor Sir William
who is buried in Kimmeridge Church :
" Within this marble casket lies
He who was learned, stout, and wise,
Who would for no expense conceal
His projects for the common weal,
And when disloyal Irish did
Rebel against the Queen their head,
Approved valour then did get
Him the reward of Banneret."
The deeds and customs of the Elizabethan squires of
Dorset are matters for a later chapter. Here my interest
is only in man's general conquest of the earth's fabric.
Sir William believed that it would be " for the common
weal," to say nothing of his own profit, to work the alum
BEFORE THE FLOOD 25
in the shale. This industry, " by much cost and travail, he
brought to a reasonable perfection." But a monopoly of
alum had been granted to other men, who seized his works.
Thereupon, being one " whom one disaster dismayeth not "
and he met many disasters of a financial kind he set
up a glass-house and a salt-house, and made " at his own
charge, with great rocks and stones piled together, a little
quay." A fragment of the little quay long after jutted
forlornly towards the sea, with never a boat or a mariner
to wake the echoes of its stones. Once it was populous with
wild and terrible figures : for Clavell's workmen, by reason
of " the offensive savour and extraordinary blackness " of
the shale they burnt in their furnaces, appeared " more like
furies than men."
The toil and hopes of Clavell died with him, and nearly
two hundred years later even his quay came almost to
nothing ; for the sea beat upon the stones and wrecked the
pier, so that it could no longer be used even for chance
traffic. All the industry that was left to Kimmeridge in
the eighteenth century was the working of the shale as a
kind of coal, which was sold at six shillings a ton. It burnt
hotly ; and it also, in the words of science, " liberated
sulphuretted hydrogen," so that here too Nature had her
revenge. . . .
Yet her enemy was indefatigable. In the nineteenth
century certain Gauls devised a new assault. They built a
little railway, and a fresh quay, and set to work to distil
oil, gas, and ammonia from the shale. They failed : they
could not purify the stubborn substance sufficiently.
Twice or thrice was this effort made, and it is said that now
once more men are to attempt it. But all that the way-
farer on the coast to-day can see is the dismal skeleton of
enterprises long ago disappointed and abandoned, a little
broken fortress of man's hopes, and the sly, slow triumph
of the eternal earth and eea.
From Kimmeridge one comes to Tyneham and Wor-
b arrow, and joins the alternative westward route, which
26 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
from St. Aldhelm's Head runs to Kingston. At Kingston
the two churches are landmarks : the older one of poor
Georgian Gothic, the newer one a masterpiece of the
Municipal Style. From this village the way lies due west,
through Lord Eldon's park. Take the middle path. West
of the park, go across country northwards to Church
Knowle. Turn west again, and a little way past a very
humble inn you will see a path (unmapped) on the right
hand ; which brings you to a silver road winding uphill.
When you have reached the top of the ridge, Creech Barrow
stands up like a mountain.
To reach the summit you must go round a long smooth
valley. It is well to refrain from looking at the view until
the highest point is attained, for it is then the most perfect
of surprises to look suddenly north and east and south and
west ; but even if you have forfeited that surprise by looking
about you as you climbed, you can still look long and
behold always new beauty. Once there was a hunting
lodge of the Angevin kings here ; a few stones are left.
Upon Ralph Treswell's map it is shown as it w r ere a spacious
temple ; and indeed a man might search his soul in solitude
upon Creech Barrow, and fall a-worshipping the power that
spread the world out beneath his feet ; for it is no less than
a mirror of the world that stretches every way to the limit
of sight the world that has waited for mankind.
It is to the north and east that old Time is made visible.
Here lies a shrunken atomy of the last great earth-
cataclysm in the history of England. Far below the green
and golden slopes of the hill is a brown wilderness through
which, with innumerable tributary streams and isolated
pools, run two broad rivers, gleaming strangely in their cold,
bright windings. The flats are sombre and still, but the
waters, issuing at last together into the Channel, have a
quiet power and vitality as of never-ending life.
When those rivers ran in their fullest pride, Dorset was
not Dorset, nor England England. Look to the north-west.
A long ridge of hill, tree-topped, is the horizon, fifteen
BEFORE THE FLOOD 27
miles off. Half-way up the slope, concealed in the blue
pale distance, is Dewlish. When man faced the elephant
there, the Frome and the Piddle were not silver threads,
but a broad flood running into that yet more tremendous
stream which is now the English Channel. The Stour,
Hampshire Avon, and the Solent were tributaries of that
same enormous river : and the rivulets that run north-
wards from the ridge, hurried more turbidly past Avalon
to a huger Severn. All this land was a causeway of waters
roaring to an unimaginable torrent. The shining cliffs of
the Isle of Wight stand up like their gateway.
River and heath and sea are still marshalled by the great
gesture which swept Dorset into its present shape. The
older hills, the chalk and the shale and the limestones, were
an amphitheatre for the battle between land and water ; the
lowlands seem to be but the shrivelled ramparts and trenches
of the conflict itself. When it ended, England was kindly
once more. Poole Harbour dwindled into a quiet estuary ;
the floods towards Somerset were slowly diminished into
marsh-land, and so, at last, within the memory of mankind,
into meadows ; the green things that we know familiarly
grew upon the earth ; and our veritable father, man
from whom we trace unbroken descent, was found in
Dorset.
Behold also from Creech Barrow a picture of his kingdom
thenceforward to now. Twenty miles away, upon a high
hill which yet, in a clear atmosphere, is not the horizon by
another twenty miles, is a straight pillar ; it commemorates
Nelson's Hardy. Beyond is fold upon fold, the strong
kingdom of the fort-building Durotriges, men of power two
thousand years ago. Beyond again, on a clear day, Devon
can be seen. A little south lies Portland, resting upon the
sea like the happy realm of the Phaeacians, a shield prone ;
or more truly, a stone cold and brutish, justly set apart
in the inhospitable ocean.
Follow with your eye the path the sun would tread if he
obeyed the Wimborne clock. Lewsdon and Pilsdon, the
28 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
one hairy, the other smooth, like Esau and Jacob, stand up
in the north-west, thirty miles distant, and more. East
of them a clump of trees crowns a ridge ; it is High Stoy,
of which Hardy has written that if it had met with an
insistent chronicler, it " might have been numbered among
the scenic celebrities of the century." Where the middle-
north ridge ends, more hills jut out, one behind the other.
The round ball far off is Melbury Down, that looks upon and
is seen magically from the hill-town of Shaftesbury. Walk-
ing four miles an hour, you could reach it in seven hours.
To the right is yet another clump of trees on a hill : a holy
place, a grove as high in the story of England as in the county
of Dorset : Badbury Rings, where, maybe, Arthur fell.
And so to newer things again : Charborough Tower,
where Lady Constantine, of Two on a Tower, was en-
chanted by her young astronomer : and that other tower
of Christchurch on the western horizon, whispering faintly
the enchantments that populous trim Bournemouth, near
at hand, can neither recover nor forge. And white and
silver at your very feet gleam the potter's clay-fields, with
their toy railways and their pools of indescribable blue and
green. No authentic sound comes up to the height from
them, and the trains that glide evenly to Corfe and Wareham
move but with a faint ghostly postponed murmur, like an
echo of some more immense labour long ended.
All these things, in one way or another, will come again
into the story now to be written of man's life on the soil of
Dorset : here is but a pageant or prophecy of them. They
are visible enough, emblematically, in Purbeck to-day ;
they stand there for the human victories of aeons.
It is hard to leave this noble hill. And yet, leaving it,
be comforted ; for you will see nine-tenths of the same
glorious vision for three miles to come, as you march west-
ward upon the windy edge of space. There is something
in the turf of these chalk downs that quickens life, and
makes the long cool shadow of the valley villages and trees
seem a paltry thing, an artifice of comfort and littleness.
BEFORE THE FLOOD 29
The dry sweet grass tinkles as with a thousand tiny cymbals ;
the snail-shells, violet, orange, pink, flaming white, are
jewels from Aladdin's cave, the scabious and the daisy
coloured stars in a green heaven. Every step, like Antaeus
his overthrows, gives back some of the earth's own vitality,
and one seems to be marching upon a road glistening still
with the dews of dawn, made firm with the pride of midday,
and ending in the golden sunset gates of a kingdom where
youth is for ever lord.
Yet this very exhilaration has behind it something sober
and earthy and human, something that dignifies and
ennobles rest after toil. There is no ale, no cider, no cheese
so good as that in a warm dusky village into which a way-
farer stumbles from the heights. There is no tolerance so
large and kindly as that which comes from a little ease in
such a nest of apparent indolence. Look down upon the
hamlets in the valley of Corfe river. There is Barneston
Manor ; its stones stood in the same place, the stones of
Barneston Manor still, when Edward III was king. There
is the old cruciform church of Church Knowle. There is
Steeple, where a Tudor squire rests in a complacent tomb,
having done his duty quietly and long ; and hard by lies
buried an artist-poet of once slightly alarming bodlihead.
There is Tyneham, where the old family that built Bond
Street still abides. North are other manors, thick copses,
white -flagged railway trains ; and a delicious " gate "
leading from nowhere to nowhere, built strongly of lime
and stone in a German Gothic manner. All these things
seem natural and eternal, so beneficent is the highway of the
chalk. They are part of a world in which, to a Radical,
Conservatism may well appear the creed of Utopia, rather
than the abhorred dogma of the Primrose League. The
faith is too good to be changed : so it has always been, so
it shall always be. Forget the quarries, the waste and horror
of the antediluvian earth ; forget the obscene shale, the
wrecker monks, the oil-traders. " Allons ! to that which
is endless as it was beginningless. . . ."
30 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
But in a little while you will find the end comes. Just
beyond Tyneham there is a low gap in the sea-wall, and a
grey knob of cliff protrudes into the sea. Its westernmost
end rises up into a great hill, upon which the coast path from
Kimmeridge and the track from Creech Barrow meet. It
is Ring's Hill, of which the highest part is adorably named
Flowersbarrow (" Flowersbarrow "... Are we a prosaic
nation ? Once it may have been called Florus' Byrig).
It is a strange and tremendous hill. On the very top of
it is the last thing you would expect to find in a place so
remote and so inaccessible ; a huge earthwork, five hundred
and sixty-seven feet above a sea which needs no bulwark. It
guards the very end of the Isle of Purbeck. A chalk ram-
part shuts off all the stone and marble formations of the
Isle from the younger clays of the Frome Valley ; the Isle
really is an island, a geological fastness, whatever the
geographers, with their talk of water surrounding land,
may say to the contrary. And Flowersbarrow gives a
most extraordinary vision of that curious self -containment
of Purbeck. Just as from Creech Barrow could be seen the
primal path of the inner waters, so here can be seen, abrupt
and clean, the terrible achievement of the main Channel
stream. Purbeck is cut short, broken off sharp, at Arish
Mell Gap : the old world ends visibly. The sea will not here
give up the dead land.
Go through the camp, climb the three deep western
trenches, and begin to descend the slope. Right in front
stands up what appears, from here, to be a sheer green wall.
In reality, Bindon Hill is not sheer, but simply very steep
indeed. Its white edge is a straight line from the top to the
sea five hundred and fifty feet below. Between it and
Flowersbarrow is a smaller hill, perfectly rounded, like an
inverted bowl girt with a fairy ring. There is a little sheltered
gap at the western curve of this ring ; and from that gap
you look straight across to Portland, the brother land of
Purbeck, now for ever separated from it. There is nothing
between save water and a few grim rocks : Purbeck ends
BEFORE THE FLOOD 31
in a grey blank wall : Portland stands upright eleven
miles away : the quiet, insuperable waves hold them
apart.
The tiny valley of Arish Mell (an old Celtic name) is a
place of warm peace, where kine drift down from the meadows
to the seashore itself. Their friendly brown coats are not
the brightest colour here. The face of the coast, from
Worbarrow Point to Mupe's Rocks, is like a many-hued
puzzle, a geological jigsaw. The shingle is yellow and blue-
grey : the down turf wears its eternal green : Bindon, its
flank dark with pines, has a face of gleaming silver : but
Ring's Hill contains every shade from scarlet to purple,
while the little headland of Worbarrow is striped with
contorted formations, of grey and drab and black. Mupe's
dark rocks are of a threatening brown, with the white snow
of waves at their base. I do not know whom this desolate
and lovely place may most fully satisfy ; the geologist,
the artist, the historian, the mere walker may all take
delight in it : It satisfies always and fully. There is no
emotion with which it is not in sympathy, no happiness
which it does not glorify by its kindly peace and its austere
beauty.
And so, over the great hill of Bindon along this cliff-edge
to West Lulworth, where lobsters die in readiness and
numbers for the wayfarer.
There is one other place in Dorset where the Earth's own
past obtrudes itself, in a great view, upon one's thoughts
about man's past and present. That is the summit of the
highest cliff between the Wash and Land's End, Golden
Cap. That glorious hill is known and loved by all Dorset
men. It stands up with a peculiar boldness : a piled-up
sloping mass, and then a bare stretch of yellow earth,
crowned with a dark brown plateau. It can be seen from
many a Dorset height ; from Blackdown, from Pilsdon,
from Hooke, even from great Bulbarrow himself, thirty
miles away : always it is the same a straight flat line
32 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
cutting the sky proudly, and a golden edge sloping steeply
down.
The ascent of Golden Cap is a noble walk from Bridporfc
or from Lyme, or in the journey from one to the other :
though if you go the whole way nine miles or so you have
to climb Charmouth Hill (500 feet), Stonebarrow Hill
(500 feet), Golden Cap (619 feet), and Thorncombe Beacon
(500 feet) and descend to sea-level between each. More-
over, the last hundred feet up the Cap, whichever way you
choose, is the worst stretch. It grows steepest there, and in
summer the face of it is so slippery with desiccated grass, or
so prickly with gorse, that the lost agility of Eolith ic man
would be a boon to-day. Beware also of rabbit snares-
wire nooses strongly pegged into the ground. If you come
from the east shun the lower undercliff, which looks less
arduous as first ; here be quags and (in due season) serpents,
as well as primroses and blackthorn and violets and black-
berries.
When at last you come to the top, go across the plateau
towards the south-west. Cast yourself down at the edge
and dream. There are no history-lessons here : only a
stillness, a poising of the soul, as of the body, over depths
that bring the uttermost wonder of tranquillity. If you can
bear it, look down :
" The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles . . .
The murmuring surge,
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high."
Or if it can be heard, on this cliff by comparison with which
Shakespeare's would be a paltry ledge, the sound is but the
caress of a kindly mother visiting your sleep ; a wistful
charity in which any man might find peace. What is man
in that superb isolation ?
It is always of long-established peace, to me, that Golden
Cap whispers. So high, so far, so lonely, you cannot be
gl
BEFORE THE FLOOD 33
in the world. Why, the very gulls and daws that are
floating below you are yet five hundred feet above land.
The sea itself could not rage here : the huge arc of cliffs
holds out arms to calm it. Portland is not rock now : it
is but a grey shadow. West Bay piers look the toys that in
truth they are. And inland there is only a glowing ember
of the earth's old fires : one of those flushing forests of the
fire that hold shepherds and sheep and trees and all pastoral
delights. The smooth roundness of Langdon Hill is red
with heather and warm with golden gorse : the dark firs
are unburnt coal : and there are (or once there were)
shining flecks of cold ash white rabbits at large upon the
green and purple : and dead gorse standing for calcined
coal. Far off there brood two great beasts, the slow ruminant
backs of the Cow and her Calf, as sailors used to name
the shapes of Pilsdon and Lewsdon Hills.
But if you go westwards a little you come back to geology,
and in its most romantic form. On Golden Cap you have
for a moment been on chalk. Then a little way down you
are on the Middle Lias, and then on the Lower Lias. You
are in the land of dragons. And the cliffs and the shore
are full of dead bodies : fossils of all kinds.
These cliffs between Lyme and Golden Cap are unique
in the whole world, for here took place a meeting that can
never be repeated, a recognition the most uncanny in the
history of the earth. In 1811 a child of twelve, daughter of
a carpenter and curiosity-monger of Lyme Regis, caught
sight of some strange bones in the blue cliff. Having some
knowledge of fossils already, Mary Anning caused these
bones to be dug out carefully. She was the first known
human being, since the very beginning of time, to look upon
a fish-lizard, or ichthyosaurus. No man has ever seen one
alive : she first saw one dead. A few years later she also
first beheld a plesiosaur, and in 1828, a flying dragon, or
pterodactyl. Fossils of little creeping things, sponges,
waving plants, worm-like curly insects, or humble organisms
whose dust is now stone these man had discovered already *
D
34 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
and was beginning to name. But the monstrous beasts of
these cliffs were something more, something new the
creatures of a past not merely remote, but wholly alien
and terrible. Some perhaps were fierce, as menacing to
man, perhaps had they survived to meet him as the
sabre-toothed tiger or the mammoth. Most of them were
probably 'of a mild nature and un warlike equipment, ill-
fitted for conflict with that puny destroyer. But none
survived. The ground quaked : mountains and seas of
which no chart can ever be made were confounded : and
the earth destroyed her hugest children.
That is the grim vision hidden beneath the primroses on
the banks of the little streams below Golden Cap : a vision
of a horror more tremendous than the most terrific earth-
quake or eruption of our calm day of a fantastic breed of
beasts upon a strange earth, and then, in the twinkling of
an eye, obliteration : for in this, as in most other geologic
changes, death seems to have been abrupt, as of a Roman
soldier at Pompeii.
One generation telleth another : but there is no story
like that told by the dragons to Mary Anning, for it is the
story of all the generations. Look down, when you go over
the last hill past Charmouth, upon little Lyme dreaming
upon the sea, with its sturdy quiet Cobb and its dignity
and decency. It is two and a half centuries since Lyme was
in the full stream of history, save for a few hours when the
survivors of the Formidable struggled ashore there. For
twelve centuries and more before Monmouth's landing,
strife went to and fro with hardly a break in Lyme, as else-
where in Dorset. For three hundred years before that,
again, there was the Roman peace, that first began for
England in the generation of Christ's death. Before Christ
there were ages of bronze and stone, while the Iberian
and the Celt hammered out their civilization as slowly as
one of them might hammer a flint axe. Yet when they strove
man was old in England : in his Old Stone Age he had
dwelt with and outlived the woolly rhinoceros, the grizzly,
BEFORE THE FLOOD 35
the mammoth. And yet again behind his dim shadow is
a still dimmer figure the lonely, tremendous figure of
Eolithic man standing against what seemed a hopeless
dawn.
The cliffs of Charmouth have seen all that strange
pageant. They saw the dragons, too, and their catastrophe.
In such a secular chronicle, man's history is but a short
page : but in the shops of Lyme the dragons are merchandise.
Ill
" And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the
earth . . . that the Lord said, * My spirit shall not always strive
with man, for that he also is flesh.' "
The Book of Genesis.
" But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals
with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.
Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids ? Herostratus lives
that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it ; Time
hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself.
In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good
names, since bad have equal durations ; and Thersites is likely to
live as long as Agamemnon. Who knows whether the best of men be
known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot,
than any that stand remembered in the known account of Time ? "
SIR THOMAS BROWNE,
Hydriotaphia.
^
.
U)
III
THE HILLS OF THE DEAD
THE story of the rocks does not end with the death
of the dragons ; but when those monsters have
vanished, and Eolithic man also has fallen back into
the darkness out of which he rose so mysteriously, the story-
teller has a new standpoint. He has to show what man
made of the earth, and of himself, rather than what the earth
inflicted on man. Man's life and progress are continuous
henceforth.
It is at Dorchester, perhaps, more definitely than at any
other place in England, that this continuity is visible. It
is a town which has been a town ever since towns first were
in England. Here every race that has lived in Britain has
lived ; and when you stand near where now the two rail-
ways join one another, you are standing upon a spot than
which no place in this island has been for a longer time
continuously inhabited.
39
40 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
It is beyond doubt, it seems, that either Maiden Castle
(the Celtic Mai Dun, the High Fort) or Dorchester itself
is the Dunium spoken of in Trajan's day by Ptolemy the
geographer. Dorchester is a palimpsest. Its walls are
Roman : in them the Roman bricks still inhere. It is full
of Roman pavements. Maumbury Rings, the amphi-
theatre, is in its present form Roman. But recent excava-
tions have shown that its circle was first cut in the Neolithic
Age, and that even before that, in the dimmest antiquity,
it held a deep Palaeolithic shaft.*
Close to the present cemetery is a crowded Roman
burial ground. And Poundbury Camp " round Pummery "
is said to be Danish : on little evidence, for Celtic and
Roman remains have been found in its now rather confused
lines : but the Danes once wintered there during a prolonged
raid. One other race also inhabited Pummery. From
1914 to 1918 it was filled with German prisoners of war.
It was curious to come across the hills of the dead round
Dorchester, in the utter dark, and see this old fortress of
the ravaging Danes blazing with search-lights ; curious
also to me, in the company of an official propagandist
cinematographer to see sturdy Germans in bizarre patched
uniforms laughingly loading sacks into waggons, with the
shopkeepers of the eighteenth -century street looking on,
and cheerful farm girls in breeches helping them.
Dorchester was a Saxon town after the Romans went,
and had a mint under Athelstan. It was sacked by Sweyn.
It was Norman ; there is a most gentlemanly Norman
knight sculptured in Fordington church. It was the home
of men of worship and good lineage in the Middle Ages.
The Archduke Philip lay at Sir Thomas Trenchard's house,
just outside the town, in 1506. It aided the Puritan settlers
of Massachusetts, whose Dorchester, so to speak, is our
Dorchester. It had the plague as constantly as most
* It is not creditable to our national knowledge and traditions that only
the most strenuous exertions at the last moment prevented a railway
company from cutting clean through this meeting-place of the generations,
and also from demolishing part of Poundbury Camp.
THE HILLS OF THE DEAD 41
towns, heard the drums and tramplings of the Civil War,
and suffered more terribly than any other place under the
Bloody Assize. Defoe found it a place of singular dignity
and charm. It was the scene of a peculiarly horrible exe-
cution in the eighteenth century. It bore a part in the
Napoleonic wars. It tried those poor " conspirators "
who are known (not quite accurately) as the Dorchester
Labourers, and it housed the judges who in 1831 examined
the heroes of the last peasants' revolt in England. William
Barnes walked its streets, and it is the home of Thomas
Hardy. If you seek continuous history, here, as Mr.
S queers said, is richness. The town and its doings will
recur constantly in these chapters.
I shall deal later with the different stages in that long and
still unended romance. It begins with man of the Old
Stone Age. A journey from Dorchester to Abbotsbury and
the hills round it shows us the lost kingdoms of the Iberian
and the Celt : a kingdom that still can sway the mind of
man.
It is when you set out for Maiden Castle, and begin to
draw near to that immense stronghold, that the spirit of
things very far off, very powerful, falls upon you. There is
no time of year, no condition of light and shade, when the
vast ramparts do not call up awe and wonder, and even
pity : for the people who dug those trenches were a great
race, and their power and their glory are utterly gone.
But they live in soul. Maiden Castle, a thought made
visible for ever, has still almost the strong power of a thought
newly uttered into the world. To this day it dominates and
hypnotizes.
I remember a certain winter's day when I walked out
over the High Fort and was led, it seemed to me, very close
to the mighty dead. Snow had fallen, a rare thing in South
Dorset, and when I left the broad street where Rome's
soldiers once marched, and took the footpath past where
they lay asleep, the ice and thin crusted snow crackled
under foot like artillery, so clean was the silence. The air
42 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
was clear, with the lowering dull glow of storm ; and indeed
before my journey's end I was to suffer many fierce sudden
showers. Now and then pale sunshine flickered for
a moment, but the light nearly all that afternoon
was sombre. There was little wind at first : the
atmosphere was wet and bitter, inimical to the blood of
man. The snow had ceased at midday : there had not been
enough to cause deep drifts, or cover the hills uniformly
with white. But all the corrugations were chalk-white,
and only a few peaks stood out dark where the snow had
not rested.
The northern escarpment of Mai Dun, a mile distant,
rose up like a low strong wall from the smooth-scooped
valley of Fordington Field. The valley itself was full of
mist, a faint luminousness exhaled from the ground after
the storm. It hid everything all round except a tall building
or a tree. Even so the Weald of Kent, seen from a height
on a favourable autumn morning, appears a grey sea with
little clear rocks emerging above it here and there. But
whereas the churches and trees of Kent recall the kindly
habitations of articulate-speaking men, Maiden Castle,
at that magical distance, seemed a very citadel of evil
wizards. Dark and sharp rose the fortified edges : the
streaks of white on the slopes marked out the labyrinthine
dykes with a plainness that was a threat. The fortress had
a personality, a strength not of this world. Even now, I
thought, in that grey stillness (for hardly a farm-hand was
abroad on such a day), strange races, our blood kindred
but the uttermost antagonists of our minds, might be
celebrating there their obscene rites, islanded by the mists
in their cold fortress, and cut off from knowledge of the so
changed world in which I was. They could live there easily
enough, and we in the street of to-day none the wiser.
Their beasts, their households, their prisoners (prisoners
of this century ? were there really no changelings now, no
witches, no demoniac possessions ?) all alike would be
hidden in that vast arena, secure. The well in the midst
KTHE HILLS OF THE DEAD 43
haps was frozen : but the slopes, frost-bound, would be
unassailable, so that no enemy would come, and daring
men might scurry down the steep southern wall to the stream.
Only from one quarter, the western spur with its more
gradual fall, could foes approach the hill from nearly its own
level ; and there, maybe, the royal dead who lay in Clandon
Long Barrow would put forth their grim and ghostly might,
and give protection.
It is impossible not to feel a sense of awe and even of
reverence in this amazing stronghold. It may be simple-
minded to be impressed by mere size. But the huge size
of Maiden Castle it is the largest and finest Stone Age
earthwork in the world is a genuine part of its appeal.
When the first little group of men who worked upon it
began 5000 or more years before Christ to chip the hard
chalk with stone axes, they chose this site because it juts
out like a promontory from the higher ridges into the river
valley. They had a sure strategic eye. They looked out
from the height on to fuller rivers, wider and wetter marshes,
through a damper air. Beasts no longer found in England
the wolf, the wild cat, the beaver, the aurochs were in
those marshes. There were forests in many places where
now the tamed cattle pasture.* Only in Mai Dun was
safety.
There is little doubt that the fort was begun by the
Iberian, perhaps in Late Palaeolithic days. Generation
after generation must have toiled at it ; thousands of hands
must have been needed to cut five miles of trenches that for
a great part of their three circuits of the hill are sixty feet
* Gen. Pitt-Rivers found a curious example of this on the county border,
in excavating the Bokerly Dyke (which, however, is not a Stone Age relic,
but a Roman-British defence against the Saxons). Its western end is
" in the air," as the soldiers would say. When it was dug, however, it
rested on the sheltering thickets known as Selwood Forest, now no longer
existing except in small patches : it filled the gap between the Forest and
Cranborne Chase. These ancient forests lasted long in some cases. Only
five hundred years ago, it is said, a squirrel could travel all the five miles
from Shaftesbury to Grillingham, by his own airy track from tree to tree,
without ever touching the ground (here I use " forest " in the colloquial
sense a wooded place not in the technical sense).
44 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
deep. Very possibly even the eight-fold cross trenches at the
main entrance were the separate thoughts of successive
chieftains. We know from the gradual betterment of the
stone weapons that man was slowly growing into the mastery
of mechanical things. But we do not know exactly when or
where some unknown Bessemer forged the bronze that was
to overcome the stone and give the Celts dominion in
England. We know that there was trade with distant
lands : amber from the Baltic has been found in Dorset
Neolithic graves, and gold (perhaps from Wales) in Clandon
Barrow hard by Maiden Castle. Man was beginning to
live in society, therefore, not in small hostile units. We
know that he could weave flax : linen still adheres to an
axe-head found near here. But we cannot guess how
quickly or slowly these changes came, nor how they spread,
nor what stir they caused in our forefathers' time. We can
only look at Maiden Castle, and see, in its symbolic green
walls, the age-long wonder of man. " The number of the
dead long exceedeth all that shall live."
From Maiden Castle on to Blackdown there are two
ways one by road, through Winterborne St. Martin
(Martinstown), the other along the hills, past countless
barrows, by a glorious track on soft close down turf. On
that winter day I chose the road : the other way, however,
is the better : it is one of the three best walks in Southern
England.
Martinstown was utterly frigid and desolate. In summer
it is very warm, and the little stream that runs along the
main street is almost dry. That day the stream was truly
a " winter bourne " : squadrons of ducks struggled with
its flood. But bare though the wide comely street was, it
was more human than the utterly lonely road beyond it.
I seemed to be walking alone out of life into what ? It
was just as the stillness became most oppressive that I
came upon a strange answer to the half-unasked question.
I turned the corner of a high hedge and saw a little black
wooden shed. In front of it were two figures standing by a
THE HILLS OF THE DEAD 45
rough table. They were short dark hairy men, in ragged
clothes. They had knives in their hands, and they were
bending over a third figure stretched upon the table : a
naked pink figure.
For the moment I was back in the Stone Ages, looking
on the horror of human sacrifice : a natural thing in that
kingdom of the dead. But the two peasants were only
scraping and cleaning a little pig.
The interminable gritty road seemed emptier than ever
after that. Heavy clouds were coming up, and the air grew
darker, as the cold wind increased in violence. I came to
the last steep stretch up to the summit of the hill, as bare
and bleak a place as you could find, where the earth itself
is dark and stony and the green turf has almost ceased :
only heather and bracken, briars and bilberries, will grow
there. At the most exposed point the earth was all at once
blotted out by a grey wall of hail.
I ran, battered and wet, to what shelter I could get in
the lee of the great column set up in memory of Admiral
Hardy. In a few moments the storm was over, and the sun
shone suddenly at full strength. I looked out over sea and
cliffs and meadows alight with peaceful happiness. I had
come back from the dead past into life.
Life that is what, by some curious inversion of feeling,
the hills of the dead round Abbotsbury have always meant
to me. The beauty and loneliness of them are informed
with some spirit of human continuity, of the splendour and
endurance of human effort.
Blackdown, however, is not so full of that spirit as the
hills westward. It gives a spectacle of sharp contrasts,
natural beauty, and comparatively recent history. The
view is magnificent. All Devon down to Start Point can
be seen on the clearest day : Dartmoor standing on the
very far horizon. Eastward on a few days I have seen the
white cliffs of the Isle of Wight, beyond Ringstead Cliff
and the hump of Swire Head. North, the view is limited
by the equally high ridge which is the backbone of Dorset,
46 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
some ten or twelve miles away. South, Portland Harbour
and its warships, eight miles off, seem on a clear day to be
at your feet.
There is something Italian about this part of the coast.
Tropical plants grow in the open : azaleas bloom in March :
there is an infinite stretch of very blue sea with a very white
thin fringe of foam for miles. The lower foothills stand up
absurdly like the hills in an early Italian landscape, and the
few trees are dark like olives against the bright green fields.
If you look back, you look upon death and desolation.
They are still there as you walk westwards from the curiously
impressive monument. But now they are directly parallel
with country bearing that appearance of bright life which the
sudden sunshine gave me on this winter walk : and in
summer the contrast is stronger. On your left still lies the
brilliant coast and the fertile land behind the Chesil Beach.
On the right, as you go westwards from Blackdown, is the
dark Valley of Rocks : a singular avenue of stones (I do not
know whether they are a natural outcrop or not) which
curves all along the floor of a noble valley, leaving a green
path in the midst, up to the top of the hollow. They have
a look of symmetry, of purposeful arrangement. They lead
from a very city of tumuli and prehistoric remains, directly
up through the curve (ceasing, however, at its end), towards
the stone circle strangely named the Grey Mare and her
Colts : and further, if you ignore modern plantations and
fields (which here, in practice, I have found it to be difficult
and painful to do, not to speak of illegality), to Abbotsbury
Camp.
Past the Valley of Stones, you continue, as so often in
Dorset, on a high ridgeway, with the same enchanting
view, the same contrasting hills and valleys, on either side.
You come above Portisham to a vast natural amphitheatre
one of the largest scoops in a chalk ridge I have ever seen.
The road then curves down into Abbotsbury. But it is
better to leave it and continue by an almost disused track
along the southern edge of the ridge. This brings you within
THE HILLS OF THE DEAD 47
sight of (and finally beyond) Abbotsbury village and that
beautiful Tudor seamark, St. Catherine's Chapel, and leads
eventually to Abbotsbury Camp.
The Camp is an irregular triangle, following the contours
in the main. A road has been cut at one end which may
possibly have obliterated some of its original line : east
of this road there are confused trenches and hummocks
which look as if man might have shaped them. The lines
of trench are fairly clear still, but their true depth and
strength are hard to determine. Heather, bracken, and gorse
have here had unlimited power. There is little turf. The
rabbit is incredibly plentiful. My Bedlington once spent six
hours continuously in chase : one down, t'other come on :
to my great content. I say this without shame : he was
doing national service. It is wrong that so splendid an
earthwork should be let decay so heedlessly. The Camp is
simply a rabbit warren with a covert or two planted just
below it. The rabbits are mining it to atoms. The neglect
can serve no useful purpose. There is no production here.
The two or three slopes which look as if they might once
have been cultivated have been allowed to revert to wilder-
ness (one is a blue sheet of wild borage in the summer).
It is true that a farm a little westward, close to the shore,
on the lowest slope is called Labour in Vain. But at
Abbotsbury Camp there can have been no labour, vain or
fruitful, for long past, except for a little digging of flints.
Here, by the way, I was once granted the privilege of
seeing and hearing the cuckoo sing both at rest and in flight.
I testify that one did so before my eyes, perching in the
copse north of the Camp and flying south-west over my
head, all the time garrulous.
The Camp itself is to me almost the best-loved place in
Dorset. Here one can lie in a nest of bracken and heather
and dream all day in utter happiness. Even in winter
there is a gentleness about the rough worn walls of the fort.
In summer, when the whole West Bay sleeps in the sunshine,
the loveliness and peace would bring rest to the most
48 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
troubled mind. Even if you look inland, instead of at the
glorious curve of foam from Portland to Devon, the citadels
of the Iberian and the Celt, the hills covered with trenches,
tumuli, monoliths, stone and earthen circles, seem less grim.
You can see from here almost the whole extent of the chief
domain of the fort-building Durotriges, with whom even
Vespasian (only a sub-commander then) had to fight many
pitched battles before victory. But the hills are no longer
menacing. The battles are over, the old races vanished save
in our bodies and souls. Bexington and Labour-in- Vain
farms, the white-walled coastguard station, the tower of
Abbotsbury Church are what we have reached after the
centuries of strife and toil.
Yet are they after all greater and more stable achieve-
ments than this ruinous citadel that looks down on their
apparent prosperity ? Anywhere between here and Swyre
you can trace the outline of fields once rich with crops, now
conquered again by gorse and bracken : and likewise on
the steep road down into Abbotsbury. In Abbotsbury
itself there are a hundred emblems of stranded pride. The
church has a Saxon carving of the Trinity : where is the
Saxon Church ? Where is its predecessor, the Celtic
Church that the priest Bertufus, " in the verie infancie of
Christianitie among the Britains," built at the bidding of
St. Peter in a vision ? Where is the monastery that when
it was surrendered in 1539 was valued at over 400 a year ?
Some of it is visibly built into the cottages of the village.
Part is used as a stable. Only the stone coffins of the Abbots
and the noble Tithe Barn and the carp pond testify to its
former greatness. Even its customs are obscured. The
Barn has a chamber over the great door with windows
looking both inwards and outwards obviously for an
overseer or clerk to tally the incoming tithes and keep the
accounts. " That's where the Monks starved themselves,"
I was told.
Where again to-day are the uses of St. Catherine's Chapel ?
It is a seamark, true. But who pays for masses for sailors
THE HILLS OF THE DEAD 49
in it ? Who in Abbotsbury knows anything now of the saint
whose face shines so gravely and graciously in a piece of
old glass in the church ?
There must have been among the Durotriges eager
builders, fervent priests, fighting men who violated holy
places as Abbotsbury Church was violated during the
Parliamentary wars. There must have been humble
toilers, happy lovers. Were they relatively (and that means
absolutely, too) less happy, less prosperous, less comfortable
than we ? Perhaps some later century will know : perhaps
there may even be proof in the space between them and us,
which I am now to traverse. Meanwhile the sunlight and
the heather and bracken on the Camp can do away with all
emotions but present happiness.
IV
" Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
(Cedo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore voltus,
Orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus
Describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent :
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(Haec tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos . . .
Sunt geminae Somni portae. . . ."
PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO,
Aeneia VI.
" Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half -devil and half -child."
RUDYARD KIPLING,
The White Man's Burden.
IV
THE GREEN ROADS
THE Roman roads in Dorset are curiously eloquent
of the present as well as of the past. They show,
because of their comparative unimportance in the
strategic and commercial aspects, just what was real to
Rome as to us. The chief Roman city in the county,
Dorchester, was never of the first importance, nor was the
great road that ran through it the main highway to the last
outpost of the Empire in the west. There was, perhaps,
a certain settlement of Romans in the county : but quota
portio faecis Achaei ? How many were true Romans,
how many adventurers of the outer races drawn into the
Roman army, cannot be known. Apart from the
idiosyncrasies of the roads, to which I shall return, the
significant features of the Roman period in Dorset are
three : the farm settlement in Cranborne Chase excavated
by that great archaeologist, Gen. Pitt-Rivers : the Bokerly
53
54 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
Dyke, which is neither pure Roman nor pre-Roman : and
the Chi-Rho symbol the first two letters of the name of
Christ, in a monogram in the mosaic floor uncovered at
Frampton.
It is perhaps simplest, from an historical point of view,
to start with the Chi-Rho. That emblem of Christianity
almost certainly shows that between the death of Christ
and about A.D. 400 probably between 200 and 400 after
Christ, when the Roman order had become apparently
permanent in South Britain -there was a Roman-Christian
household in Dorset. If only a tiny fraction of the Glaston-
bury legends is true, that is not in the least incredible.
The further arguments, however, which deduce a connection
with the Apostles of Christ from a stone fragment found at
Fordington, are much more ingenious than convincing.
But the tradition of the Celtic -Christian Church at Abbots-
bury seems to be fairly trustworthy. And the stones in
Wareham Church inscribed with the name of Cattug may
possibly be connected with a Cattug or Cattogus who was
concerned in the Pelagian discussions of A.D. 430. It is
at least a highly likely conjecture, therefore, that the
exotic religion from Palestine had some foothold in Roman
Dorset.
Csesar arrived in 55 B.C. His excursions into the Home
Counties can hardly have touched Dorset. But echoes
of the clash with the great civilization of Rome must have
reached even the far-off Durotrigcs. It must be remembered
that they were not savages. They may have used woad
and worn skins : I have seen blue face-powder and furs in
London to-day. They may have burnt prisoners in wicker
cages (that is one theory of the origin of the giant at Cerne).
But they were probably part of the third wave of immigrant
Celts, and they had come themselves, far back, from the
Europe with which, if only because of the gold and amber
which I have mentioned, they were still in habitual contact.
They used a Greek design for their coins, that of the well-
known Macedonian stater, of which Dorset examples are
THE GREEN ROADS 55
preserved in the County museum. They had certainly
some sort of ordered civilization of their own, however
loosely knit. And they had rendered the soil of England
in some degree hospitable to man's needs they, and the
Iberian before them. There was thus the result of five
thousand years of purposeful work, undertaken not by
eccentric units but by communities, upon which Rome
could readily impose her greater order and peace.
Practically nothing is known of the real conquest in A.D. 43.
It is pretty certain that the Durotriges the real border
folk of the Celtic race in the south-west just as the Dorsaetas
later were the march folk of Saxondom must have fought
stoutly. It may be conjectured, perhaps, that as Claudius'
army of occupation had the eastern end of Southampton
Water for its base, Dorset was entered from the south-east
rather than the north-east (the same problem arises in
connection with the Saxon invasion). One of the pitched
battles was in all probability fought on Hod Hill, a wonderful
eminence above the Stour, where a Roman camp of the
regulation square type has been cut in a corner of the much
larger British contour fort. Possibly another encounter
took place the evidence suggests it on Pilsdon Pen.
It must have needed all Rome's military efficiency and
startling rapidity of movement to subdue the sturdy people
of the green forts.
Consider now the lines of the proved Roman roads in
Dorset.* They enter the county from east-central England.
The main trunk road, which probably determines all the
rest, was that which ran from Sarum (Salisbury, as near as
no matter) through Badbury Rings to Dorchester, possibly
Bridport, and Exeter. The direction of the vicinal roads
branching from it may be significant.
It is not known when, nor exactly why, this main road
was built. There are no records of strife or important
events in the West after the first conquest, even when, with
a first-rate British heretic in Pelagius, and an emperor of
* See Codringtoii's Roman Roads in Britain (3rd Ed., 1918 : S.P.C.K.)
56 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
an enterprising and unusual type the first British admiral
in Carausius, and the death of a Roman Emperor, Con-
stantius, at York, England seemed to be well in the main
current of European history. The road was in all prob-
ability at once a precaution against risings, a direct route
to the Celtic frontier west of Exeter, and a commercial
necessity. The striking thing about it is that it follows the
line of a string of Celtic or British forts.
From Old Sarum (Celtic) it swings, after some miles in
a south-westerly direction, south-west of south at the county
border. It passes close by a cluster of Celtic and Iberian
tumuli on Handley Down, where there is a Roman British
farm and villa, just under the upstanding Celtic earthwork
of Pentridge (whence a very noble view of the road, and the
Bokerly Dyke, and Cranborne Chase, and Grim's Dyke, and
half Wiltshire, can be gained). It goes straight to Badbury
Rings, one of the most beautiful as well as most famous of
Celtic works. It swings again westwards to the Celtic
Crawford Castle (Spettisbury Rings). It keeps along the
ridge to the British village above Bere Regis. It passes
close under the earthworks and tumuli of Rainbarrow.
It goes direct to within half a mile of the greatest of all
forts, Dunium, and the Palaeolithic work at Maumbury
Rings. It runs then in an almost straight line westwards
to the splendid fort of Eggardon. And then
Well, then, according to the archaeologists, it becomes
non-Celtic. It drops to Bridport, and is no longer a ridge-
way track. It leaves Dorset, however, close by the Celtic
earthwork at Lambert's Castle : and so on to Exeter.
The evidence for the stretch from Eggardon westwards is
not strong.
If the good engineering of an easy road were the sole
aim of the road-makers, this latter non-Celtic stretch was
their most sensible effort. But if their object was either
to move troops to tribal centres or to link those centres up,
the portion up to Eggardon was the most successful, and
the remainder useless. For west of Eggardon the road
THE GREEN ROADS 57
neglects the earthworks at Cattistock, and the British
villages above Cerne, the camps above Beaminster and at
Pilsdon Pen : and it does not proceed, if the Bridport route
is correctly judged to be the main one, by that principle
of sight-survey which Mr. Belloc expounds so convincingly
in The Stane Street. The view-points, the long glimpses
from peak to peak, are lost by the Bridport route. And some
rtions at least of the Bridport route must have provided
ery heavy going in damp weather, with rivers fuller than
ow (the spring-level was 80 feet higher) : the present road
is not infrequently flooded.
There might be several explanations of this seeming
change of purpose in the road-builders. The track may even
have been wrongly mapped by modern experts. The last
effort of British resistance may have been on Eggardon,
though Pilsdon Pen's earthworks are so strong, and the
height so commanding, that it would seem almost essential
for Rome to be able to reach it by a good transport route.
The branch roads are also interesting. One runs from
Badbury Rings to near Hamworthy, on Poole Harbour.
It is believed that Rome had a port there. Another connects
Dorchester with Weymouth, which, from the Roman
remains found, was also probably a port even then. The
earthworks at Flowersbarrow and Bindon Hill, where,
apart from those two names, the Celtic name Arish Mell also
survives, are not linked up at all with the Roman road
system. There is evidence of a track running northwards
from Badbury to Shaftesbury, along or near the line of
earthworks above the Stour valley. But there seems to be
no trace of a road along the real central ridge, west and
north of Bere Regis, where the noble camp of Rawlsbury
commands the Dorsetshire Gap. The road from Dorchester
to Ilchester, on the other hand, runs through territory
clearly inhabited and fortified by the Celts.
The position, therefore, seems to be that the chief road in
the county, so far west as Eggardon Hill, was planned to
fit existing British settlements ; and its chief local branch-
58 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
road was the cross-cut to the great west main road at
Ilchester. The cross-cuts to the ports of Hamworthy and
Weymouth both, perhaps, non-Celtic seem, however, to
show the new world-standpoint. If the Celts in Dorset
used a port at all, it was likely to be at Arish Mell Gap,
where the chalk in which they loved to build touches the
sea, and where their names and forts still live ; whereas
Rome, building with an economic outlook of European
scope, chose the natural harbours on Poole estuary and
Weymouth Bay, and linked them up artificially with a road-
system adapted to the tribal population. But she thought
it safe, apparently, to leave the minor Celtic centres in the
county unconnected with the main arteries.
The nature of the Roman settlement is probably seen
most accurately in Cranborne Chase, rather than in the
more highly and perhaps more artificially civilized town of
Dorchester. Gen. Pitt-Rivers excavated remains of an
extensive farm or farm-colony near Woodyates. His finds
are suggestively various. There are a few pieces of fine
pottery, good ornaments and trinkets, studs of blue and
yellow enamel on fibulae, decorated furniture of imported
Spanish wood, an elaborate system of central heating,* coins
covering the reigns of many emperors ; and alongside
these things, which a Roman colonist (say, a retired captain
or sergeant-major) would take care to possess in a so distant
and savage spot, many remains of farm tools, some well
finished and clearly imported, but others rough and primitive,
like native products. The farm might well be like an up-
country station in Rhodesia to-day.
" The people of these parts," says Gen. Pitt-Rivers,f
" in Roman times were much shorter than they are at
present, shorter than they afterwards became when the
Teutonic element was introduced. . . . They were not
hunters, but lived a peaceful agricultural life, surrounded
* The skeletons discovered show that the inhabitants suffered from
rheumatoid arthritis.
| Excavations in Cranborne Chase.
THE GREEN ROADS 59
by their flocks and herds. . . . They spun thread, and wove
it on the spot, and sewed with iron needles." They kept
horses, oxen, sheep (all of small breeds), mastiffs, terriers,
and dogs of a dachshund type, roedeer, red deer, swine.
They ate horse and dog, though not so much as beef. They
had apparently none of those snails which Rome is said
to have introduced into Britain. Their wheat was of
high quality, as might be expected when Britain was a
granary of the Empire. The labourers seem to have lived
in wattle and daub huts.
Dorchester, on the other hand, would be nearer akin to
the older Pretoria (it was not, however, a Colonia, nor the
seat of a legion, though very likely troops companies or
even only a platoon were stationed there from time to
time). It had its still-preserved walls, its fine amphitheatre,
a score or more villas of a good standard of provincial
luxury, its cemetery, its water supply from Compton
Valence. A little way off, at Wey mouth, there was a temple.
And it may even have had, as has been said, devotees
of the new and eventually fashionable religion called
Christianity.
There are abundant tokens of the dead past in such a
place. I was at Maumbury Rings in one of the years during
which it was excavated. The chalk was cleanly cut into
tiers of seats. There was a trench between them and the
central ring, perhaps for safety. The socket-holes that must
have held barrier posts were still brown with the dye of
damp wood. The den at the far end had clearly contained
beasts. And two soldiers of Rome, disinterred once, lie
again at rest beneath one of the green curves.
So the Roman-British pursued, in the contentment
reared and strengthened through ten generations of man's
life, those arts of peace which an island with no enemies,
under the shield of a vast Empire, might enjoy. Doubtless,
as I have said, they heard of the doings that troubled great
Rome of wars upon distant and to them unimaginable
frontiers : of the new Eastern religion that Constantine,
60 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
whom in Britain they knew so nearly, had thrust upon the
dominions won by the soldiers of older gods : of the heresies
and radical faiths that shook that young established
Church, and more particularly of that heresy of Pelagius
the Briton. There would come to them, slowly and un-
noticeably and with easy acceptance, as it came to us also,
the knowledge of little technical improvements of life : better
nails, a finer earthenware, a cheap imitation of the red
luxurious Samian, a new art in pot-shaping. There would
come also the alien splendours of the Roman official : the
fine stone houses he built, the delicate shining coins he
decreed to be current over the rough native mint ings,
the stoves that even poor settlers' houses might expect,
the intricate wonders of his mosaic pavements, the wide
paved causeways. They could gradually work their finer
artistic sensibility into the heavy Roman work.
There must have been strange memories in the Dorchester
of those days for men who had been young in the war with
Vespasian, and for their sons and grandsons. For a thousand
years their fathers had trodden the ancient tracks from
hill to hill, from fort to fort. They had walked upon the
path from Badbury to Mai Dun, from Mai Dun to Eggar
Dun : they had been wont to flee from the valleys into
those great strongholds where a whole tribe could live
securely. And now the narrow old footways upon the green
hills were paved and made wide and firm, and there was no
longer war, and the bright chalk trenches grew green with
disuse : in Mai Dun itself arose a rich man's house of lime
and stone. Warriors who before would have fought their
very kinsmen in that land of tribal wars sailed now to the
Oversea Dominions, to uphold there by their strength and
skill the power to which they had yielded, the peace in which
their houses were henceforth set. Upon the ancient wells
of generations too old even for folk-memory, the rulers had
traced the circle of a circus, for a spectacle in which Britons
fought, after the manner of men, with beasts which once
they had hunted precariously. The ships came trafficking
THE GREEN ROADS 61
to Hamworthy : news and merchandise went to and fro
with regularity. We to-day have to conceive of a national
strike, or of utter severance from friends across many
seas, before we can imagine what augmentation of comfort
the establishment of routine government from an all-
powerful centre meant to these distant provinces.
Yet it is in the singular appeal of the great roads that
Rome seems nearest. I stood once, not long after Belgium
was first invaded in 1914, above Cattistock, where the
road is inexorably straight and very lonely. Suddenly the
unique carillon at Cattistock began playing a hymn tune,
and I remembered that the thirty-two bells were cast at
Louvain, then lately ravaged, and that one of the chief
of them bore the motto " Grant peace in our time, Lord."
Peace was Rome's gift to Celtic England. There was longer
peace in England then than at any time since : a peace
stretching as long as from the last of the Tudors to the House
of Windsor.
There are many wonderful stretches of these noble roads
in Dorset. The structure of the road itself is nowhere
better seen in England than where it enters the county from
the north-east. It runs, a broad high dark ridge, four or
five feet above the down-surface, as inflexibly and as en-
duringly as the fine modern coach-road from which at this
point it separates. The modern road goes to the rich little
valley towns. The old road makes straight for the hill
fortress of Badbury, whose trees can be seen from many
other distant hills. The ridge of its actual formation is
visible also in the stretch a little east of Spettisbury Camp,
and again near the Milbornes. The road was strongly and
purposefully engineered : its purpose of peace is still
visible.
The portion just north of Badbury Rings, if one comes
(contrariwise) to it from the west, brings the ages before one
in a curious jumble. Behind that fir-topped hill lies a wood.
The road curves past the green ramparts hardly less, in
places, than the terrific defences of Maiden Castle and,
62 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
almost invisible, across some cultivated land : and then
there opens suddenly a pathway among trees so fantastically
venerable that they seem older even than that ancient
trackway. Huge wych-elms they are, grey and twisted
with the deformity of naked time : year after year has
gripped them, and bent a fibre or turned a shoot, until their
old arms are the very emblems of unabated agony. Ivy
crawls upon them, and between grow thick brambles and
unpruned hawthorns that might guard a Sleeping Beauty
if the strange awe of the place did not suggest rather a
sleeping dragon.
Chivalry, with its capricious romance, its heroism of
loneliness, was born in the welter of Rome's death. In this
little acre of meagre forest, where the old Rome's road
still runs, knights of the new Rome might well have ridden
on their first adventures. Here a man jingling on a clumsy
horse might have seen rough bearded knaves in ambush,
or a maiden tied to a tree : or lions or unicorns or dragons
or monstrous boars, wherein the world was then putatively
rich. Guy might meet here a three-headed giant, or
Arviragus encounter the wizard who could remove rocks
from the sea : or that student might wander who in a dream
saw his fellow killed in a stable. Among these trees any
legend might be true : and yet there is enough of reality
left in the road to make the sweat and the dirt as plain
as the romance. If men in the past did fare here upon
strange errands, nevertheless they hoped or feared as we
do. They saw the same world, the same incommunicable
life of other organisms : stepped in the same mud, stumbled
over the same tree-roots, startled the same race of squawk-
ing blackbirds. The old tracks are the very vehicle of
time : this grassy way has been trodden for a millennium
and a half, and every blade of grass in it, every twig, even
the very worm-cast mould, is of an ancestry as splendid
as man's. If it be preserved only by so little as one way-
farer's steps in a year, it is still the authentic and un-
diminished chronicle of stories that have become our minds.
THE GREEN ROADS 63
It was here, I like to think (and not without some historical
warrant), that the last stand of Roman Britain against
the heathen Saxon was made. Badbury may well be the
Mons Badonicus on which Arthur fought and died : for
the historians seem agreed that Arthur may really have
lived, that he checked the Saxons by his final victory, and
that " the last great battle in the West " took place either
here or near Bath.
From Badbury onwards, if one goes eastwards through
the enchanted forest, the road is like many another ancient
way for some distance a path maintained for no very
clear reason save its antiquity. It runs, as the Winchester
Pilgrim's Way often does, between high hedges, through
whose interstices there are sometimes views of a pleasant
spaciousness. Its line is straight : it has the directness
which popular scholarship ascribes to Rome's ways, though
it has not often the bare visible strength. It is, in fact,
a hedged track of no marked character. It crosses a few
lanes, and is joined by a few others. After many parasangs
it reaches, with an annoying deviation from its straightness,
a hamlet populous and great which the Ordnance Map
shyly refuses to name, and which I decline to incriminate.
This place is very strange : it is like a loose end of, say,
Beckenham, cut off and transplanted. Its contents are :
(1) a gabled, bow -windowed studio - villa - parish - room
(large enough and comprehensive enough for all those
functions), which, it is to be hoped, will crumble before
posterity labels it typical of any period of English
architecture (it suggests the soul of a retired advertisement
contractor, with a taste for Birket Foster and bad water
colours) : (2) a few long low stucco buildings hardly of the
decent proportions which stucco demands : (3) some
ordinary ugly cottages which look like 1890 : (4) some
buildings which simply are 1890 suburban villas, and nothing
else. Quite a number of houses, no shops, no purpose,
no character : a phenomenon rare in Dorset.
64 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
The wayfarer must here continue along what, by the
straight-line method, is the obvious Roman way, past the
uninteresting cottages. At the top, in a wood, a gate
to the right bears a threatening notice about privacy.
The path beyond it leads . . . however. . . . Well,
at any rate ... the fact is, it is quite possible here to
walk across the park without directly disregarding any
notice : and the Roman road (a path of decent ancestry,
after all : older even than a nineteenth-century peerage)
runs right through the park, close by the great house.
Its track continues thence undeviatingly, across the stream
at Gussage All Saints, up through tumuli over Gussage Down
one of the alleged sites of Vindogladia, an imperfectly
identified Roman-British settlement and over the crest
of Bottlebush Down, where it joins the modern road,
near a still greater host of tumuli, under Pentridge Hill ;
and so out of the county : in its way touching the Ox Drove
across the Wiltshire hills.
The Ancient Britons, our forefathers not cut off sharp
from us either by Julius Caesar or by William the twentieth
or thirtieth Conqueror were no doubt subject to the
emotions of joy, pity, and terror much as we are. Their
lives were less secure and more volatile than ours. They
lived in what are more like the lower portions of our base-
ment houses of the nineteenth century than anything else
since : half-buried huts, of which many traces remain on or
near this great road. They used successively stone, possibly
iron, and bronze. They secluded flocks and herds of sheep
and cattle in their vast citadels. They made linen, they
ate much the same food as, in our simpler moments, we eat.
They had an organized religion. They did not know the
potato, the hop, the cherry, root crops, or a hundred other
pleasant things familiar to us. They had in the course
of centuries exterminated the beaver, and had at last got
the better of the wolf, though he still existed in the woods.
The terrible semi-tropical beasts that Palaeolithic man had
to face were never their enemies. Our sheep and cattle of
THE GREEN ROADS 65
i o-day, like the valley sheep of the ballad, are fatter than
theirs, which must have been lean, strong, and nearer to a
wild type. " The number of cattle is very great," said
Caesar. The turf was infinitely less rich, and there were no
meadows or hedges. Very probably, in fact, a fastidious
modern verdict on the Britons would be the familiar
" manners none, customs beastly."
That would be the application of a wrong standard.
Caesar thought Kent "the civillest place in all this isle."
We have not his opinion on Dorset, since he never visited
it ; nor have we Vespasian's. But at least this is tolerably
certain, that the Durotriges were not to Rome as the
Australian aborigines were to Captain Cook. Their vestiges
show a civilization nearly as high as that wilich Caesar
underestimated in Kent. They had long ceased to jabber
uncouthly, to struggle hard for a bare existence, to be un-
aware of other folk. On the other hand, they had tribal
wars. They had had torrents of invasion (fresh hordes of
Celts) unknown to us except by vague conjecture. They
knew a great civilization lay east of them.
Did the coming of Rome seem different from their other
wars, except in that it was more highly organized, more
permanent in effect ? As they hurried the herds along the
hidden way of the Ox Drove, or scuttled hastily, women,
children, cattle, and domestic implements all confused
(or perhaps marshalled orderly by preconceived plan), into
Badbury Rings or Maiden Castle, had they any sense of
destiny ? Pretty certainly not. They were just afraid and
angry. Very likely they did not even think they were being
wronged. But we cannot anyhow get back veritably into
their minds. That is the supreme defect of archaeology as
compared with documented history. And we must leave
it at that. There is only the end of an immense epoch to
be recorded : an end violent in its early stages, but not
ungentle in its results, not a catastrophic and final conclusion.
The settlement at Woodyates (like that at Rockbourne
Down, a little way off, just over the present Hampshire
66 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
border) means coalescence, not absorption, nor suppression ;
a few Romans, Roman law, Roman conveniences, greater
security, a number of small changes (for the good) in daily
habits, better houses, better tools, and life as before birth,
love, marriage, death, with the old trees behind Arthur's
battlefield outlasting them all.
What did the incoming Roman think ? He must have
worked and made others work unceasingly to repair the
damage of his invasion and render life safe for himself and
the conquered. Merchants, missionaries of Empire, must
have come quickly for the fine British gladiators, the large
British dogs, the bursting British grain sacks. (We know
from Cicero's letters how in remote Cilicia Pompey and
Brutus, high financiers and low money-lenders, had swiftly
got greedy fingers into the work of Empire development).
Later, the feeling must have been to some extent reversed.
Priests and politicians and soldiers of fortune came from
the most distant outposts to disturb the central decadence
at Rome itself : as it might be a financier from South Africa
or Canada in London to-day.
But in the early days, when the first legionary stood
on Spettisbury Rings, what emotion was in his mind ?
Probably none, except a certain pride and sense of adventure.
He could not see, as we see now, the distant towers of
Wimborne Minster. Yet his Eternal City alone made the
Minster possible. He could not look out over the sunset,
and see the few twinkling lights of the village below, or
hear a train roaring through the cutting in the chalk walls
which he may have had to storm, and think (as we might
like him to have thought), " Here am I on the edge of the
world : all the universe is spinning round me in the twilight,
and it will change and die : I, Rome, alone am immortal,
because I am an idea."
He was probably very tired, and not a Roman at all, but
some countrified lad from Spain or Africa. All he wanted
was a good meal and sleep. The next day he must get up
early and go on to " the next of these beastly barbarian
THE GREEN ROADS 67
villages " (he who may so lately have been a barbarian
himself) : " more fighting, perhaps : Ibernium, Ivernio,
some such outlandish name." (The correct spelling would
be settled by the scholars five or six generations later.)
" Quite a lot of those Brythons there." And a spring, it was
said better than the swamp he had just crossed below
Badbury (for to-day's lovely old bridge at Spettisbury was
not built till fifteen hundred years later). Ibernium seemed
healthy when he got there : a good place for a properly
sunk well. And so to-day, if you lean on your stick at the
green hut circles above Bere Regis, it may suddenly vanish
into the soft moss where Rome made the well for the Roman-
British village.
And thus on to the famous town of Dunium, which Rome
had really heard of : to be rechristened Durnovaria and
provide Thomas Hardy with one of his unerring fictitious
names. As the Roman marched over the last stretch of
track, he trod land probably unchanged from then till now
Hardy's Egdon, the noble brown Rainbarrow. He
could see the marshes of Dorchester before him, and the
high menacing Ridgeway beyond to the south and west ;
could discern, as we can still, the notch in the Purbeck
skyline which is Flowersbarrow camp ; could see far away
the gap in the hills which Corfe Castle once guarded long
after his time, long before ours ; and in front of him the
huge white trenches of Mai Dun.
And after Dunium ? Prisoners probably told of the other
great forts at Abbotsbury (its Celtic name has not survived)
and Eggar Dun and Pils Dun. The troops, with their
amazing celerity of movement, their perfect and compact
equipment, must hurry on to the sunset, along the British
track that the inhabitants would soon have to turn into a
proper paved road. It leaves to-day's turnpike-era road
about three miles west of Dorchester, and goes straight up
the hill to the next view-point. It is a grass-grown lane
between hedges now ; sometimes unhedged, swinging with
the topmost line of the hills, still, somehow or other, pre-
68 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
served ; in some places curiously fenced by slabs of stone
that might once have been its own pavement.
It climbs steadily on for several miles, a little up or down
as the hills run, following the ridge with unyielding certainty.
There is no life on it at all but that which has always been
there gorse and bramble and hawthorn, harebell and fox-
glove, toad-flax and scabious : green generations that may
outlive us, their younger brother. So deserted is the track
that in all my wanderings upon it I have but once met
another person a solitary postman. He appeared to be
going nowhere in particular : but he seemed somehow
symbolic, a unit of the organization that was just coming to
its first birth in England when the road itself was first
paved. The Roman posts ran along that road.
Rome is. apt to stand out in the mind as a self-contained
thing. But, as the excavations in Cranborne Chase prove,
here in Britain there was the half-fluid life of a frontier.
Here in this last plain stretch of the Roman Road in Dorset
one gains a geographical vision, as it were, of the limits of
the far-flung Empire. The lonely track takes a final slight
bend and runs between thick bramble hedges, where families
of stoats play openly, almost deriding the multitudinous
rabbit. (A hawk once chased and was in turn chased by
my dog here, so aloof and unsophisticated is the place.)
Then the hedge ends, and the sea suddenly blazes on your
left, as though the Channel were a vast heliograph. The
Devon.coast?is before you. A curving promontory, bare but
for one little tree,* ridged with trenches, stretches westwards
for forty score yards, and ends abruptly. You are on
Eggardon Hill, one of the greatest and perhaps the most
nobly placed of all the Neolithic fortresses of the West.
With it ends the chalk backbone of England. Save for
Marshwood Vale, the rest is Devon and Cornwall Dyvnaint,
the country of the " Welsh." Dorset, as I have said, is the
real English frontier the place where invasions and con-
* A smuggler once made a plantation of trees there, to be a sea-mark for
his trade ; but an unsympathetic government cut it down.
THE GREEN ROADS 69
quests weakened into fusion : beyond are the purer, older
races, the blacker, older faiths.
When they had taken Eggardon and they approached,
one can hardly doubt, from the only direction from which
it could be taken by force, for all the sides other than the
eastern are precipices, up which even a terrier after rabbits
must go slowly the Romans looked out towards the
uttermost west to which they ever penetrated. On Pilsdon
Pen alone is there a western prospect comparable to this,
and that view is inferior because it does not include the same
vision of Golden Cap, nor the same bare deep wide cleft
made by the tiny Bridport rivers.
It is a magical vision, that from Eggardon. You are
looking into sunset kingdoms into which you must almost
fear to enter, lest there be in them enchantments from
which you cannot escape : but happy enchantments. You
see, as elsewhere in England, the " coloured counties,"
the whole of several huge valleys parcelled like a map.
You see depths of shade, of luminous mist, spaces of blazing
sea, clean- outlined hills, billowing in waves to a horizon
thirty or more miles away ; and at the same time you have
fields almost under you but several hundred feet beneath
you. Nowhere in Dorset, nowhere, for that matter, in the
south of England, have I felt (and resisted) so strongly the
call to the West that has made European civilization.
I say resisted, for here to me England, except for a little
necessary stretch of foothills, ends. Here, on this glorious
headland, is all the happiness and peace I can ever desire.
Here I can look out and be sure that in the end I shall
attain to Tier-nan-Oge, as my forefathers the Ancient
Britons hoped to fortunate isles " beyond the baths of
all the western stars." I can look down on life hence, as I
look down on the lane below, and say " I am on the heights :
I have lost the whole world and gained my own soul."
" Some, therefore, of the miserable remnant, being taken in the mountains,
were murdered in great numbers ; others, constrained by famine,
came and yielded themselves to ba slaves for ever to their foes, running
the risk of boing instantly slain, which truly was the greatest favour
that could be offered them : some others passed beyond the sea with
loud lamentations instead of the voice of exhortation. ' Thou hast
given us as sheep to be slaughtered, and among the Gentiles hast thou
dispersed us.' Others, committing the safeguard of their lives, which
were in continual jeopardy, to the mountains, precipices, thickly
wooded forests, and to the rocks of the seas (albeit with trembling
hearts), remained still in their country."
THE EPISTLE OF OILDAS THE WISE
(Ed. J. A. Giles).
" In the meantime, [Alfred] the King, during the frequent wars and other
trammels of this present life, the invasion of the pagans, and his own
daily infirmities of body, continued to carry on the government, and
to exercise hunting in all its branches ; to teach his workers in gold
and artificers of all kinds, his falconers, hawkers, and dog-keepers ;
to build houses majestic and good, beyond all the precedents of his
ancestors, by his new mechanical inventions ; to recite the Saxon
books, and especially to learn by heart the Saxon poems, and to make
others learn them ; and he alone never desisted from the mass and
other daily services of religion ; he was frequent in psalm singing
and prayer, at the hours both of the day and the night. He also went
to the churches in the night time to pray, secretly, and unknown to
his courtiers ; he bestowed alms and largesses on both natives and
foreigners of all countries ; he was affable and pleasant to all, and
curiously eager to investigate things unknown."
ASSER'S LIFE OF ALFRED (Ed. J. A. Giles).
V
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS
WHEN Rome went, peace went. Peace herself
had indeed already set about going, for the
barbarians had long been raiding Britain as
well as the inner Empire. But the withdrawal of the
legions, and with them of authoritative central govern-
ment, meant that organization (which may be much more
important than plausible peace) also disappeared. The
picture given by all the chroniclers, whatever their value,
and however great their discrepancies, is of a country
disorganized, frightened, incoherent : not so much of civil
war, though that may also have taken place, as of civil
dissolution.
It is not agreed how or when Dorset became Saxon.
The battle of Mons Badonicus, whether it took place at
Badbury Rings or not, was probably fought in 516. It
73
74 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
seems likely that the invaders left Dorset alone (save for
peaceful penetration) until, proceeding westwards from
Salisbury, they conquered Somerset in the days of King
Ine.
By then, however, the county had a strong Saxon tinge.
Ine's own sister founded Wimborne Minster in 705, and
his Bishop Aldhelm Sherborne Abbey : Aldhelm had also
associations with the Isle of Purbeck. There was a monastery
at Wareham, too, though the Saxon church still standing
on the walls there may not have been built till much later.
It must have seemed, indeed, under the beneficent
episcopate of Aldhelm, as though order and peace were
coming back to the troubled county, now veritably part of
the strong kingdom of Wessex. But two generations later,
in 787, came the first sign of new torment. Three ships of
the Northmen appeared off the Dorset coast (probably at
Weymouth) and slew the King's reeve when he sought to
question them. He was the first Englishman they killed.
The ninth century was to suffer worse and more frequent
raids, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records with blunt
accuracy :
" A.D. 833. This year fought King Egbert with thirty-
five pirates at Char mouth, where a great slaughter was
made, and the Danes remained masters of the field. . . .
" A.D. 837. Alderman Ethelhelm, with the men of Dorset-
shire, fought with the Danish army in Portland Isle, and for
a good while put them to flight : but in the end the Danes
became masters of the field, and slew the Alderman. . . .
" A.D. 840. This year King Ethelwulf fought at Char-
mouth with thirty -five ship's crews, and the Danes remained
masters of the place."
Before the tenth century ended, to sack Wareham had
become almost an annual pastime with the pirates. It took
an Alfred to deal with them.
From the time when he buried at Wimborne the brother
whom he succeeded, till the last year of the ninth century,
when he himself was laid to rest at Winchester, Alfred must
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS 75
have been constantly in Dorset. So also, unhappily for
Dorset, were the Danes : " the greater part of that province
was depopulated by them." They lay much of one whole
winter at Dorchester (very probably in Poundbury). But
in 876 their fleet of 120 vessels was caught in a mist and storm
off Swanage, and utterly destroyed. Yet through all those
years of trouble ^Elfric was at Cerne Abbas, making it a
centre of learning for half England.
The next century and a half was as full of tragedy as
Alfred's reign was of splendid romance. Immediately on
his death his nephew seized Wimborne : and though he was
easily suppressed by Alfred's son Edward, his attempt was
prophetic of the domestic strife to come. The Wessex
Kings of all England were at constant war with Mercia or
the Danes or their own kin. Under Edward's son, Athelstan,
however, Dorset may have enjoyed greater peace. He
established four mints there at Shaftesbury, Wareham,
Dorchester, and Bridport and his connection with the
county, apart from his foundation of Milton Abbey, seems
to have been close. In his reign, it is probable, the bones
of St. Wite or Candida were brought in their leaden reliquary
to Whitchurch Canonicorum, where they still rest.
For some little time Dorset itself was untroubled, though
it may well be that her sons had to perform their military
service with the Fyrd in the north, where most of the fight-
ing took place. And then, in 978, occurred the event which
stirred the imagination of England as well as of Dorset,
and helped to give Shaftesbury in years to come a glory that
spread far beyond England : the murder of the boy King
Edward at Corfe by his stepmother.
It will be convenient, before considering the direct
effect of that crime on Dorset, to look forward to the uneasy
period that ended with the coming of " King Norman."
The chroniclers say that it was ushered in with portents :
" this same year (979) was seen a bloody welkin oft-times in
the likeness of fire : and that was most apparent at midnight,
and so in misty beams was shown : but when it began to
76 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
dawn, then it glided away." Three years later " the pirates
landed and plundered Portland. In 998 they encamped at
Frome-mouth, " and went up everywhere, as widely as they
would, into Dorsetshire." In 1001 they marched through
Hampshire and Dorset into Devon and back, burning and
laying waste. In 1003 Sweyn ravaged the land from Devon
to Hampshire. In 1006 all the population from Wessex was
called up and " lay out all the harvest under arms against
the enemy. " In 1 1 5 Canute himself encamped at Wareham ,
" and then plundered in Dorset and in Wiltshire and in
Somerset " ; and there was a battle near Gillingham the
next year, in which the Danes were defeated.
When Canute became King of all England, there was
greater peace, and by the time he died at Shaftesbury in
1035, Dorset may well have recovered from the incessant
ravaging. It was his steward Ore who founded the abbey
of Abbotsbury (where still the Saxon carving of the Trinity
survives), and Ore's wife Tola had possessions in mid-
Dorset, where her name lives in Tolpiddle. The mother of
the Confessor owned Dorset land, and the great Earls
Godwin and Harold held estates there. Godwin was fre-
quently at Portland, from which base he harried the south
coast in 1052. Brihtric is recorded to have held many
hides. Aiulf the Sheriff had estates at Durweston and Marsh-
wood, growing vines, according to his fancy, in the almost
forgotten Celtic way (he alone in the county suffered little
loss of lands at the Norman Conquest). But save for a few
name? like that, there is little direct evidence of the country's
activities after 1015 until in 1066, " very many " Dorset men
fell fighting round Harold under the Dragon Flag at Hastings.
There were, then, in this corner of Wessex, three main
factors at work in the five or six centuries after the Roman
peace crumbled : the wars of races and eventually of
dynasties : the slow progress of the resettlement of
agriculture, with the obscure gradual birth of what we still
call the agricultural labourer a greater figure, a greater
problem, than any dynasty : and the solemn, sincere vision
,
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS 77
and growing power of Holy Church. They were all to become
dominant in turn: the labourer not till the Black Death
altered economic conditions, and then only for a moment ;
the dynasts as soon as the strong rule of the Conqueror ended.
The Church, made strong in the West by Aldhelm and
Alfred and Dunstan, was to hold men's imaginations for six
centuries more, under the impulse of such scenes as were
inspired by the murder of Edward. Follow the path of the
martyr from Corfe to Shaftesbury.
The story of the murder is simple and well known.*
The boy-king had reigned three years and eight months,
when, having hunted in the woods round Wareham (" now
only a few bushes," says the chronicler, writing perhaps in
the twelfth century), he remembered that his younger
brother Ethelred lay at Corfe a few miles away (" where
now" and by implication not then "a large castle
has been built."). He loved Ethelred with a pure and sincere
heart. He dismissed his attendants, and rode to Corfe
alone, fearing no one, since not even in the least thing
was he aware that he had offended any man.
Word of his approach was brought to Elfrida, his step-
mother, who, " full of wicked plans and guile," rejoiced at
the opportunity of obtaining her desire, and hastened to
meet him and offer him hospitality. He said he had but
come to see his brother, whereupon she invited him to
refresh himself with drink. As the cup touched his lips,
one of her servants, " bolder in spirit and more vile in
crime " than others, stabbed him from behind. He fell
dead, " changing his earthly kingdom for a heavenly one,
his transitory crown of a day for the unfading diadem of
eternal happiness."
The body was hurriedly carried for concealment to a
cottage (local tradition says it was thrown into a well)f .
* The account here given is freely adapted, from the St. John's College,
Oxford, MS. life in monkish Latin, first printed by the present Dean
of Winchester in 1903. Mr. W. H. Hudson has given a fine romantic
version of the story in Dead Man's Plack.
t The chronicler states that a spring of pure water broke out from the
place where the body was cast later.
78 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
But that night the woman of the cottage, old, and blind
from birth, a pensioner of the Queen's, watching by the
body, had a vision : the glory of the Lord filled her hovel
with a great splendour, and she recovered her sight and saw
that which she guarded. When the Queen heard of this, she
was struck with terror, and had the body cast out into the
marshes that lie between Corfe and Wareham. Herself she
went hastily to her house at Bere Regis, northward across
the Heath, taking the new king, Ethelred the Redeless, with
her. He, poor boy, gave way to grief, and did not cease
to weep and lament. But Elfrida, driven to fury, beat him
with candles so savagely (" she had no other weapon to her
hand ") that ever after he could not bear candle-light.
But her bitterness could not prevail to hide her deed.
In a short time, the legend says, a column of fire stood over
the spot where the body had been thrown down. Certain
devout men of Wareham perceived it, found the body,
and bore it to their town, amid a great concourse of people
mourning as it were with one voice. They carried it past
the Priory to the church of Lady St. Mary, and laid it in a
rude shrine there. The shrine still stands, in part, at the
south-east of that gracious and beautifully placed house of
God ; and still St. Edward's stone coffin rests in the
church.
The divine pillar of light must have shone down on the
same brown heathlands of Stoborough (mother-town of old
Wareham, it is said) as the sun looks down upon to-day.
Had the devout men had our book-learning, they might
have had a vision of another old chieftain, a nameless king
of the Neolithic Age, who lay buried in a deer-skin near their
path : they might have remembered those strange British
or Danish Christian chieftains whose memorial stones, in
Wareham Church, were plainer then, perhaps, than in the
poor fragments left to-day. They must have seen the almost
newly built castle by the river as they crossed it to go to the
shrine, and have thought of this fresh renewal of the terror
their town seemed to have passed through not knowing
S fe
W S>
Pn .5
11
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS 79
that worse was to come. Their act, however, was perhaps
just what the chronicler calls it devout, a duty of religion
and the expression of human grief.
There were other miracles during the year the body
rested at Wareham in its simple shrine : and at last, after
the end of the year, it was exhumed and found to be yet
incorrupt. It was lifted by the hands of reverent men and
set on a bier, and borne with a great following of clergy and
people to Shaftesbury, to the famous abbey of Mary the
Mother of God.
It is not difficult to see that procession : stately enough,
may be, for ravaged Wessex, but poor beside the splendour
that the martyr was soon to bring to his last resting-place.
The brown figures, straggling over roads or tracks that even
now in April (the month of the translation) are none too
easy, must have taken more than one day over the twenty-
mile journey. We cannot tell which track they followed :
all the roads north lead in the end to Shaftesbury. I like to
think that they chose that beautiful deserted byway
across the open heath, from which to-day there is a magical
prospect of Corfe Castle, in its gap, and the shining clear
ridge of Purbeck. The red and green fungi fringe would
star the brown earth then as now, the bog myrtle scent the
air.
Thence, in time, I think, the pilgrims would cross the
Stour and climb to the dry clean ridge that runs from
Blandford due north. Leaving the valleys, even the
Minster's chapel at Iwerne, on their left, they would come at
last to a place behind Fontmell and Melbury Downs where
the ancient Ox Drove from the east vanishes. There a black
copse makes a cleavage in the green to right and left. The
trees sink abruptly into a steep valley. For a mile or more
this valley runs low and slim, interrupted, at almost regular
intervals, by long transverse slopes and hollows, whose
denuded flanks show a peculiar cold blue soil. The ghostly
deeps are folded regularly, like the narrow central trackways
formed if one interlaces the fingers of the two hands, knuckles
80 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
upwards. At the end a huge round hill blocks the channel.
Along the right-hand ridge the Ox Drove begins or ends
its course, and a view of other slopes and uplands to the
north is opened.
Hitherto the western edge of the hills has, at most points,
kept the outer western prospect invisible. And as one looks
to the east from behind Melbury Down, it seems as if a man
might walk for ever, as in Purbeck, poised over void space,
silent, remote, never beholding the dark, patient folk who
live below among trees and streams. And then suddenly the
long track falters. The hills drop all away, and the wide
scroll of Blackmore Vale lies open " a deep country, full
of pasture, yielding plenty of well-fed beeves, muttons, and
milch kine." Mile upon mile of trim rich land, mapped out
into fields like the pieces of a dissected puzzle, fall and rise
until, half a day's long walk away, they reach the central
ridge of the county, nine hundred feet high. This fertile
country stretches west and south-west almost without
bound : and the eye travels over it equably, to be arrested
only by isolated heights to the south and north : to the
south, those along which the pilgrims' track had already
curved : to the north by Shaftesbury still Shaston on the
milestones the legendary British town of Palladour.
It is this northern height which holds the attention most
magically. Here truly is a city set on a hill : neither Rye
nor Glastonbury Tor stands up more sharply from the plain.
A dark skyline of trees, a shining square tower, blue wreaths
of smoke, clustered golden houses all hung upon a green
precipice that is the city of Palladour. A city of dreams,
the perfect description by a great writer calls it : dreams of
the dead, for whom the multitudinous sad-toned sheep-
bells of the downs seem to be for ever ringing lamentably.
Men live and move and have their being in Palladour busily
enough to-day. It is as comfortable and pleasing a country
town as any in England. Its civic spirit and corporate
activities are vigorous, and its dwellers prosper. But in the
old time before them it was no mere country town. It
(THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS 81
as a city of prophets, priests, and kings, " dear for its
putation through the world," a habitation of pride and
beauty and immemorial legend : of which magnificence
to-day even the legend is only a dimly remembered
dream, recorded in a few half -buried stones. Shaftesbury
seems to stand up out of the valley mists like a city
of ghosts.
Not less aerial does it appear from within. If from the
plain it climbs skyward with a sudden gleaming aspiration,
from its own ancient terraces it is still a place apart,
hung delicately above the gross earth by the art of Merlin :
a haven of the fabled Isle of Gramarye itself.
For a thousand years Palladour was a place of reverence.
Its antiquity is wild myth. Lud built here his city Palladour,
says one monkish chronicler : and Lud was eighth in the
line from the no less fabulous Brute himself. A certain
Cicuber, says another, founded at Palladour three temples,
" and placed in them flamens " : but this scribe, rashly
precise, gives Cicuber a date many generations older than
the order of flamens. Yet a third speaks of Hudibras, and a
fourth of Cassibelan. The exact truth of such tales matters
not. They are our English counterpart of the Heracleid
pedigree the assimilation and adaptation and handing on
in their chronicles, by the conquering Saxon immigrants,
of the still dominant traditions of the conquered. It is
probable that Romans or Roman-Britons dwelt at Palladour.
It is not established that there was any town there before
them.
It is in 888 that the greatness of Shaston really begins,
when Alfred rebuilt the city and established the Abbey,
endowing it with many acres of rich land, " with the men
and other appurtenances, as they now are, and my daughter
Ethelgiva." He dedicated it to the Virgin. A century
later, when the body of Edward the Martyr was brought
hither, St. Edward was joined to St. Mary in the patronage
of the growing house. Thereafter, with the holy shrine
of the Martyr to glorify it, it increased rapidly in wealth
82 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
and power, so as to overshadow all the abbeys of South
Wessex, and give ground for the saying that if its abbess
(it was a Benedictine nunnery) could marry the abbot of
Glastonbury, " their heir would hold more land than the
King of England." But for all the nunnery's wealth, even
the King of England himself still held land upon precarious
tenure, as a gift to the Abbey shows. In 1001, when the
Danes were burning and reburning the ports of Dorset, and
holding territory far inland in other regions, Ethelred the
King bestowed on the nuns a " monastery and vill " a
dozen miles away to the north-west, to be a safe refuge
from foes he could not repel. By an irony of history,
King Canute himself died in the Abbey thirty-four years
later.
By Domesday Shaston, even then a borough, stood high
among the towns of the south. It had three mints, sixty-
six houses in the King's demesne, and one hundred and
eleven in the abbess's. That powerful lady could command
one hundred and fifty-one bordars, and owned, besides
the various Abbey buildings, " a garden, value sixty-five
shillings . ' ' With the King she halved the manor of Palladour ,
and continued in that possession till the Dissolution. Her
house ranked among the first four nunneries of England ;
within the boundaries of the borough were twelve churches,
certain chantries, two hospitals, and a small priory. The
number of the nuns ranged at various periods from fifty-
five to one hundred and twenty. At the Dissolution, the
income of the Abbey was 1300 a year : none too much for
the upkeep of such state as included, among other buildings,
" the great bakehouse, the pastry house, the breadhouse,
the Long Stable, the three great base courts, the laundry
house, the star-chamber, the wardrobe chamber, the green
chamber, the second great stable, the millhouse, the malt-
house, the brewhouse, the hay-house, the larder-house,
the wool-house, the gardens, the park, the dovehouse."
Truly, as a stout Protestant historian admits, " the town
made a very great figure in times of popery."
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS 83
Yet it may well be that such magnificence defeated its
own ends. There is hardly a word of notable events between
the Norman Conquest and the Dissolution. One Sir Osbert
Gifford was stripped and whipped in Shaston " for three
Sundays together in the market-place and parish church,"
in 1285, for stealing two nuns from Wilton. Elizabeth, wife
the Bruce, was lodged here civilly, as a royal prisoner,
1313 and 1314. And that, except the rites and levies of
ihe Church, the arrival and departure of countless pilgrims,
and the lawsuits and commerce of the citizens, seems to
be all that took place in Shaston in five hundred years.
It was a shrine of the blessed dead, and the home of plain-
living Englishmen ; no more. Its glory, when Wessex
was no longer a separate unit in the English polity, was too
great for it. Long before the Reformation its twelve churches
were too heavy a burden, and many began to fall into decay.
Not the most discreet and tolerant behaviour of the last
abbess could persuade Henry VIII that Alfred's house still
served a need. In 1553 it was dissolved, care being taken
that the nuns suffered no worldly discomfort ; and in a very
short time the fabric vanished. Its stones are the dust of
Wessex roads, or the walls of later houses ; sometimes
put to strange uses, as when a tomb canopy became a
burgher's chimney-piece. The bones of St. Edward are
lost, the gold and jewels of his resting-place dissipated over
the world. A few gravestones, the base of a column or two,
a thin layer of wall here and there, a little fragment of what
may even be the authentic record of Alfred's own foundation,
a leaden bull cast aside in a cellar, where the writ of the
Vicar of God no longer runs that is now the Abbey Church
of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Edward the Martyr in Palla-
dour. A huge wall still stands, a wonder of architecture
and strength to this day ; it is but a poor piece of the
boundary of the Abbey Park.
It was not only the great house that disappeared. The
churches, already in 1553 falling into disuse, fell also into
misuse. Of the twelve within the borough, one alone
ate
84 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
(St. Trinity) is now left to maintain continuity and celebrate
daily the religion of Western Europe. One other, a venerable
and gracious building of the fifteenth century, is preserved,
an empty but lovely shell, with a noble peal of bells still
rung upon occasion. They do their best to recall the time
when all Blackmore Vale must have resounded with the
glad sounds from the high hill ; when a man could inscribe
in the belfry his conviction that
" Of all the music that is played or sung,
There is none like bells if they are well rung."
In this desolate church are sad memorials some fine oak
and a little old glass, gravely beautiful ; recesses, doors,
pillars, now void of meaning ; and in a crypt-cellar below,
traces of a former altar. This cellar lately re-acquired
for the church not long ago belonged to a neighbouring
tavern ; and within living memory there ascended into the
church above, during the services, the fumes of ale and
tobacco.
The fall of the Abbey, though it was not, in Shaston any
more than elsewhere, the definite end of Roman Catholicism
there, or the definite birth of Protestantism, meant to the
borough an obvious depreciation of life. Thenceforth it
must live for itself alone. It became local, not national.
There was no longer any reason for travellers to visit it
except in passing. The great past was lost, whatever
memories it may have left for a few generations. Its
former splendour is to-day not so much forgotten as
obliterated. Palladour, to that extent, is not the city of
Hudibras and Alfred and Canute, but a mere market town.
A stronger thread of unbroken life, however, runs in the
families of its inhabitants, whose names have changed little
in the secular progression. One house in particular still
preserves a pure lineage. There are to-day X 's in and
near Palladour. They have a pedigree traceable beyond
doubt, step by step without intermission, to 1243. The name
ia in Domesday, and it was old then. For ten centuries
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS 85
X 's have dwelt on the same acre of England : their dust
is the very soil of Shaftesbury.
Less ancient, but not much less, and apparently not less
permanent, are other local names and usages. The non-
conforming community (now diverse, but formerly uniform)
is continuous to so far back as the reign of Henry VIII ;
it is one of the oldest in the country ; it is in a sense the
natural offspring of Alfred's Abbey. The street names in
many cases are exactly as they are in court-leet rolls of
Edward IV. The market of the borough is still held (as it
was held under Elizabeth, and before her, under that almost
queen, the Lady Abbess) on the seventh day of the week,
and on the same spot ; and still on Saturdays the awkward
kine are frightened this way and that by barbarous devices,
much as they were frightened by Britons and Saxons and
Normans. The market house, rebuilt, like most of the
habitations of corporate life in the borough, in the early
nineteenth century, stands on the site of the old stocks, the
bull-ring, the whipping-post : an evolution, if not exactly a
direct succession. It preserves, in certain features, the last
decencies of the Georgian Era pleasant domestic pro-
portions, a delicious canopy for the mayor's seat, some
portraits and records. It preserves also older things, like
the standard bushel measure of the place, dated 1670.
Best of all, it houses the byzant or besant of Shaston :
an emblem of singular suggestiveness.
Briefly and strictly, the besant a vernacular form of
" besom " is a relic of the past. This gracious object
offers to us one of those vestigial fictions so abundant in
English law and custom. It is the symbol of a practice that
died not a century ago. It must be premised that until
recently Shaftesbury was dependent upon its lowlands for
water. Geology, in giving it, by isolation, strategic and
aesthetic advantages, has denied it the office of a watershed.
So its folk must go to the springs on the lower slopes,
especially to Enmore Green, half a mile away. Within
living memory donkeys plodded to and fro with barrels,
86 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
for hire. But Enmore Green is in neither the borough
nor the manor of Shaston. The town, therefore, may not
draw water there as of right, but only upon leave given.
And that leave was formerly to be won, not by purchase
nor by service, but by the yearly ritual of a solemn dance,
wherein burgesses must move fantastically round " a staff
or besom adorned with feathers, pieces of gold rings, and
other jewels, called a prize besom." For one whole hour by
the clock " there they shall dance, with their minstrels and
mirth of game " ; and they must give to the bailiff who
witnessed this duty, a penny loaf, a gallon of ale, a
raw calf's head, and a pair of gloves ; which if they
do not, " then the said bailiff and his men shall stop
the water of the wells of Enmore from the borough of
Palladour."
What that ceremony may have meant originally is beyond
guess. In the indenture just quoted, it is mentioned as
a custom set up " time out of remembrance and mind " ;
and that document itself was signed in 18 Henry VIII.
From the day appointed for the rite, it might have been
a combination of May Day observance (itself antique
beyond the memory of man) and the rendering of symbolic
dues. It is said that two persons called the Lord and the
Lady were noteworthy figures in the procession.* At any
rate, it was a binding ceremony. Even as late as the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, a failure to carry it out
did cause the water of the wells of Enmore to be stopped
from the borough of Palladour. In 1830 the custom ceased,
by permission of the Lord of the Manor ; it had become not
merely unmeaning, but expensive the decoration of the
besom and the gay trappings of the dance alone cost the
corporation twenty pounds or more. And so another
immemorial simplicity was broken. Only the besom sur-
vives a delicious gilt pineapple on a short pole, in a glass
* I am reminded by my mother that the Lord and Lady were habitual
and^important persons in the chimney-sweep's May Day ceremony, which
personally I just remember seeing as a small boy. They accompanied the
Jack-in-the-green.
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS 87
case in the Town Hall parlour ; a more ancient emblem,
perhaps, than either of the town's superb maces.
Such, then, is the profounder past of Palladour ; a past
which many an English country town might envy, and yet
which many such towns might parallel. A birth in primal
mists ; five hundred years of a fame that spread even over
Europe ; then a shrinking to the interests of a twenty-mile
circle. From 1553 onwards the town lay outside the middle
current of great things ; seldom indeed, did even the outer
ripples touch it. Its greatest activity was typical of its
history after the Dissolution : it tried not to have any
history. Palladour was the head-quarters of the un-
fortunate Clubmen, of whom I speak later.
There was one other episode in the town's story, however,
which resounded beyond Blackmore Vale, even into West-
minster Hall itself, in 1778. Shaston decided that two
" nabobs " (persons suitably enriched at the expense of
India) should represent it in the House of Commons.
Unhappily it came to this decision upon questionable
grounds. The voters of this earlier Eatanswill were not
entirely free and independent (there were, apparently,
less than two-score freeholders). The nabobs were returned
by what was afterwards called, in Parliament, " the shame-
ful venality of this town." The procedure, it was alleged,
was as follows : " A person concealed under a ludicrous
and fantastical disguise, and called by the name of Punch,
was placed in a small apartment, and through a hole in
the door delivered out to the voters parcels containing
twenty guineas each, upon which they were conducted to
another apartment in the same house, where they found
another person called Punch's secretary, who required
them to sign notes for the value received : these notes were
made payable to another imaginary character, to whom
was given the name of Glenbucket." The affairs of the
constituency occupied the House of Commons for some time,
and the Law Courts for more : but one conclusion all the
various verdicts amounted to was that the nabobs were
88 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
improperly elected. Their exploit affords evidence, with
an interesting fulness of detail, of what the poll in a rotten
borough meant. At present, it is to be feared, Palladour
does not elect two members, nor even one ; it is but a centre
of a county division.
For the rest, it is to-day a comely town, full of that
pleasant, busy English peace which Jews might respect and
Americans adore. Men brew good ale there. They live
decently and prosperously, tilling the valley lands, pasturing
their sheep on the hills, and trafficking in cattle. Agriculture
has not changed much, even if, after God knows how many
thousand years of slowly growing experience, science may
be altering the husbandman's implements. But the soul
of a people changes. Perhaps some day Palladour will
lose the world and regain its soul. Perhaps it will remember
the sundial motto translated on one of its own house -walls
Pereant et imputantur ; "So speed we, but the reckoning
bideth." In the twentieth century the old faith has gone,
with all its monstrous abuses ; but there is no new faith in
its place no common hope that can make Everyman's
spirit fill the whole world and rejoice that the stars are his
jewels. In Palladour there is no vision, save perhaps one
that was given me by the eyes of a man of the Naval
Division, trained hard by, who told me, with a face of horror
that had got past grief or fear, of what he had seen at
Gallipoli. Yet hither to Shaftesbury, if ghosts could dream,
their thoughts would surely wander, till the gleaming hill
became populous with the innumerable dead. Here they
would stand looking out, south, and east, and west, as of old
they stood, watching for the dim hope or danger or the
departing joy far below in the weald. There is no scene
which the imagination may not readily picture, whether it
be Alfred coming from Wareham in triumph to found his
Abbey ; or the hasty messenger from Corfe with tidings
that a king was murdered ; or the sad and splendid cavalcade
of the martyr's reinterment ; or that other mourning
procession that bore away the great Danish king to his tomb
THE HEATHEN CONQUERORS 89
at Camelot ; or tithe-waggons creeping up to the rich
Abbey, summoners jingling forth to expedite the reluctant ;
pilgrims as gay as Chaucer's climbing the last slope of their
journey, the black mud of the valley on their feet now
chequered with the white of the hill ; mirth and solace at
the many inns. So might our forefathers renew old laughter
and old tears ; saddened, perhaps, and yet rejoicing that
Palladour still stands, that still in their hill- town human
hearts, their sons' hearts, beat with the same frailty, the
same strength, the same eternal striving.
VI
If any person wishes to know what kind of man he was, or what honour
he had, or of how many lands he was lord, then will we write about
him as well as we understood him ; we who often looked upon him,
and lived somewhile in his court. This King William then that we
speak about was a very wise man, and very rich ; more splendid and
powerful than any of his predecessors were. He was mild to the good
men that loved God, and beyond all measure severe to the men that
gainsaid his will. . . . Amongst other things is not to be forgotten
that good peace that he made in this land ; so that a man of any
account might go over his kingdom unhurt with his bosom full of
gold. . . . Assuredly in his time had men much distress, and very
many sorrows. Castles he let men build, and miserably swink the
poor. The king himself was so very rigid, and extorted from his
subjects many marks of gold, and many hundred pounds of silver ;
which he took of his people, for little need, by right and by unright.
He was fallen into covetousness, and greediness he loved withal.
He made many deer-parks, and he established laws therewith ; so that
whosoever slew a hart or a hind should be deprived of his eyesight.
As he forbade men to kill the harts, so also the boars ; and he loved
the tall deer as if he were their father. Likewise he decreed by the
hares, that they should go free. His rich men bemoaned it, and the
poor shuddered at it. But he was so stern that he recked not the
hatred of them all ; for they must follow withal the King's will, if
they would live, or have land or possessions, or even his peace."
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE.
' ' Mr. Clare is one of the most rebellest rozums you ever knowed not a
bit like the rest of the family ; and if there's one thing that he do
hate more than another 'tis the notion of what's called a' old family.
He says that it stands to reason that old families have done their
part of work in past days, and can't have anything left in 'em now.
There's the Billetts, and the Drenkhards, and the Greys and the St.
Quint ins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands
for miles down this valley ; you could buy 'em all up now for an old
song a'most. Why, our little Betty Priddle here, you know, is one
of the Paridelles the old family that used to own lots o' the lands
out by King's -Hintock now owned by the Earl o' Wessex, afore even
he or his was heared of. Well, Mr. Clare found this oat, and spoke
quite scornful to the poor girl for days. " Ah ! " he says to her,
" you'll never make a good dairymaid ! All your skill was used up
ages ago in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand
years to git strength for more deeds !" ' "
THOMAS HABDY,
Teas of the D' Urbervilles.
VI
THE CHRISTIAN CONQUERORS
THE great and famous Mr. John Durbeyfield, of
Marlott, in the county of Dorset, was led to believe
that his family reached " all back long before
Oliver Grumble's time," even to the very days of " King
Norman." I have heard the walls of Wareham ascribed to
this same potentate, acting in collusion, apparently, with
Queen Elizabeth and King Napoleon. Such is the deep,
blurred impress of a great personality.
It is beyond doubt that John Durbeyfield's singular
boast of high lineage and low fall therefrom could be upheld
no less justly by many Dorset peasant families. In the
lowlier classes, and among the yeomanry above them, even
more than in the higher ranks of to-day, names are found
which go back, discontinuously, yet persistently, from
generation to generation, from century to century, to the
Conqueror's time. A few stretch yet further into the waste
93
94 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
of Saxon years. But that year of climacteric, 1066, is a
real turning-point in English life. Duke William was the
last great racial whirlwind to set in turmoil this troubled
island.
Yet conquest is always a relative thing. Except by sheer
annihilation or expulsion, a conquered race is not blotted
out. The language we speak to-day the language which
can still be heard in strong and simple purity in the Dorset
villages is English,* not French nor Scandinavian :
the victims have passively conquered the victors. And even
at the moment of conquest the invaders did not set up a
completely new fabric of life. The towns of England, for
the most part, were towns before the Normans came. The
humbler folk lived on in their squalor and hardship, less
free, politically, but in material circumstances not very
differently placed. It was a chief concern of the Norman
kings to assert that the laws and customs of England
should be as they were in the time of King Edward the
Confessor, in whose amiable and cultured half-Norman
reign the Saxons were thus led to perceive the hitherto
unrealized perfection of their own social order.
The stir of this new governance of England, however,
must have been tumultuous in detail. Even in the negative
picture of Dorset's share in it the shadows of the great
change can be discerned.
So far as Dorset is directly concerned, after Hastings
there is a brief darkness. Fifteen months later, Western
England rose, and William, who " let his men always
plunder all the country that they went over " marched to
Devonshire and beset the city of Exeter. No doubt the
non-combatant folk of Dorset then saw for the first time,
in many a hamlet, what conquest meant. But there seems to
be no definite groundf for Freeman's belief that the towns of
Dorset (especially the four royal boroughs) banded themselves
* Barnes pointed out that only the choice of London as capital instead
of Winchester prevented it from being Dorset's English.
t See Exton on the Dorset Domesday and Round's Domeeday Studies.
THE CHRISTIAN CONQUERORS 95
together at the call of Exeter, and were ruthlessly despoiled.
They were to suffer in time of peace. " Between the Con-
quest and Domesday (1086) more than half the houses in
Wareham and in Dorchester were utterly destroyed." And
the majority are stated to have been destroyed " since the
time of Fitz Grip " Hugh, son of Grip, a sinister figure
who, with his wife, stands rather for the predatory than the
civilizing aspect of the Norman Conquest.*
The division of the spoils was not without significance.
Thirty-six and a half parts of the county were taken by the
King (who seized Harold's estates " by escheat ") ; one
hundred and two belonged to Sarum and the monasteries ;
ninety-eight to Earls, Barons, and the greater lords ; and
only twenty-eight and a half to lesser men. Out of one
hundred and twenty pre-Conquest landholders only twenty
continued in possession. The English, however, were for
the most part bound to the soil, not to the soil's lord ;
they became in fact what the poorer of them had already
tended to become immovable forced labourers paid in
kind. The whole population of the county is estimated at
about nine thousand.
The Turbervilles of Wool and Bere Regis, the de Claviles
(Clavells) of Smedmore, the Trenchards, the Martins, the
Gollops of Strode, the Mohuns of Blackmore Vale, de
Aquila of Wynford Eagle, and many another family rich
and powerful in the generations to come, were among the
newcomers, in William's reign or a little later. They were to
hold their lands till the days of the nouveaux riches till the
Wars of the Roses had worn them out and the Tudor
* The wife of Hugh may perhaps have been the more voracious, but they
both appear (with mysterious frequency) in Domesday as acquisitive.
"To this manor (Abbotsbury) belongs one virgate of land which Hugh,
son of Grip, unjustly took ; and his wife still holds it by force. This, in
King Edward's time, was for the sustenance of the monks. . . . Hugh
held this land of the Abbot of Abbotsbury, as his vassals say, but the
Abbot denies it. ... With this manor (Winterbourne), the same Hugh
holds one virgate of land unjustly, which belongs to William de Moione
(Mohun). . . . Hugh gave this hide (at Orchard) to the Church of Cran-
borne for his soul, it is worth twenty shillings. Put the wife (widow) of
Hugh holds the half hide."
96 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
tradesmen bought them up. The old names, as Hardy
says, lasted on. There was a Norman Bonvile de Bredy
(Bridport) : a prosperous garage at Bridport to-day is
Bonfields. A Norman, de Moulham, was granted quarrying
rights in Purbeck. It was a quarry man of Swanage who
in the nineteenth century founded the great contracting
firm of Mowlem. ,
To the peasant, perhaps, except for the severity of the
forest laws, life under the new lords was not much more
unpleasant than before. To the former free Saxon land-
holders, if the chronicles are a true guide, the impression the
conquerors gave was one of ruthless strength, of controlled
and controlling force as well as of extrusion. As the Nor-
man architecture was stronger and more spacious than the
Saxon, though akin to it in essentials, so the Norman rule
was stronger and more capacious than that which it succeeded
and developed.
There is to me a human quality in the majesty of Norman
architecture, and conversely something impressive in the
often crude humour of its details. The beautiful little
Norman church at Studland still seems to breathe its
builders' steady purpose. The leaden font at Wareham,
the arches at Wareham and Whitchurch Canonicorum and
Iwerne, the victorious horseman in Fordington porch, the
grotesques on the pillars at Bere Regis, are evidences of a
simple sincerity which was itself strength. And in the
transition arches of Wimborne and Bere Regis (so alike
that they might well be by the same architect) there is
what almost appears to be a weakening into beauty.
There is much of that architecture in the county. To me,
apart from the places already named, there seems always to
be something left of the Norman spirit, and, most of all,
of the spirit of the Conqueror's great peace, in the country
between Maiden Newton and Power stock.
" Waleran himself holds Maiden Newton. Alward held it
in King Edward's time, and it was taxed for six hides.
There is land to seven ploughs. Of this there is half a hide
THE CHRISTIAN CONQUERORS 97
in the demesne, and therein two ploughs and five bondmen :
and seven villeins and fourteen bordars with five ploughs.
Two mills pay twenty shillings : and there are eighteen
acres of meadow. Pasture fourteen quarentons long, and
seven quarentons broad. Wood five quarentons long, and
three quarentons broad. It is worth ten pounds."
So there were no free Englishmen in Maiden Newton in
1085. Where was Alward ? Dead at Hastings ? Fled
overseas as many Saxons are said to have fled ? Or had he
become one of the villeins, working perhaps half the year
for Waleran the Norman, and the rest of the year toiling
for himself on the land to which he was bound ? Even so,
he would be better off than the bordars, his own former
underlings, who might swink three quarters of their lives
for their conquerors.
It is a long stretch from that abjectness, in which arose
the fine Norman arch of Maiden Newton church, to the
gild of bell-ringers whose rules and rhymes are to-day in
the church tower. The coming of the Normans to some
extent stabilized and strengthened the one agency in England
which, whatever its faults in the direction of repression,
gave men hope and beauty. This village church is full of the
purposefulness of Holy Church herself. The Norman arch
was part of a strong house of God. The double " squints "
of two centuries later, cut through the Norman work, let
more peasants approach Him than ever before. The fine
Perpendicular porch, with its wonderful gargoyles, gave a
new entrance into the invisible Church through the visible.
The Faith is seen growing as the building and the people
grow.
There is only one mill at Maiden Newton now. But it
has one of the comeliest mill-houses imaginable, lying on
arches across the smooth Frome, whose waters, full of trout,
tempt the back doors of half the village. If you follow that
gracious stream you will come (but few know it) to another
Norman arch, in the tiny little church of Frome Vauchurch,
which might well join the company of claimants to the ex-
H
98 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
treme of smallness. With its early English work, its Norman
font and door, its fine modern copy of a Dutch painting, its
sense of confined intimacy, it seems almost to boast that
there always have been and always will be two or three
country folk gathered together in that same spot at hours
of worship.
There are two Fromes in Domesday, but it is not
clear which is Frome Vauchurch, Frome St. Quintin, Frome
Belet, or even Chilfrome. But " Alward held it in King
Edward's time, and it was taxed for four hides." Alward
again. . . . He held many lands in Dorset, and every one
a Norman holds in Domesday. The Earl of Moreton* held
this Frome, one Bretel holding a hide of it from him.
Formerly the land was worth forty shillings : " now sixty
shillings." Who created and who earned that increment in
the rich pastures where now the lovely dairy farms of Notton
and Cruxton lie ? Alward, or the Earl, or Bretel ?
All round here the Normans were populous. At Wynf ord
Eagle was that de Aquila whom Mr. Kipling has rightly
placed at Pevensey also. At Toller (whether of the Brothers
or of the Pigs is not clear : Pig Toller has a Jacobean manor-
house, Brother Toller an alleged Roman but probably Saxon
font). The Earl of Moreton held Toller also, and Drogo
held it of him. " Almar held it in King Edward's time."
But Waleran also held a Toller, and Olger held it from him.
" Alward " he too held land in this Toller in King
Edward's time. " It was worth three pounds : now four
pounds." The same story.
And it is the same story at the other Frome. William de
Mohun held it, and Robert held it of him. " Alward held
it in King Edward's time. ..." Three thanes also had held
land there in King Edward's time, but two of William's
vassals held their lands in the Domesday record.
As you leave Maiden Newton behind and across the
stream (where eels congregate and trouble the water), and
* William's half-brother : "a man of crass and slow wits," according
to Will '.i m of Malmesbury.
THE CHRISTIAN CONQUERORS 99
climb the hill past the manor-house, you come into a deserted
" forest " that can have changed little in the last thousand
years. Pasture land lies on its fringes, where it slopes down
to the many brooks. But the uplands are much as they were
when King John hunted here : a waste of gorse, heather,
broom, and bramble, aflame in due season with foxglove
and loosestrife, yellow iris and scabious, filled with gigantic
blackberries, the home of innumerable birds and rabbits.
You will not meet a soul as you go along the bypath from
one Toller to the other. There may be a few people in the
straggling street of Toller Porcorum (Great Toller : great
as compared with Little Toller, Toller Fratrum, where are
but five or six houses). But as you go deviously back into
the " forest " and climb towards Eggardon, the loneliness
descends again, and a serene desolate beauty meets the eye
on all sides.
Even Eggardon fell into other hands under the Conqueror.
William de Braose held the cultivated lands under the great
hill, and Hunfrid held it from him, and there were six villeins
there, instead of the five thanes of Edward's time. As you
stand once more on the hill and look west, you face other near
hamlets where the old order changed. William de Mohun
held South Mapperton, with six bondsmen, six villeins,
seven bordars. " Elmer held it in King Edward's time."
Further on is Broadwindsor, under the same William :
" Alward held it in King Edward's time." Mapperton itself
was held by Ernulf de Hesding, instead of seven thanes :
and he held likewise North Poorton, in place of other seven
thanes (the Abbey of Tavistock held land there also, and at
Askerswell). At Loders again was the Earl of Moreton,
with lands that in Edward's time had belonged to Brihtric :
and the wife of Hugh, son of Grip, held a hide there in place
of two thanes.
But there is a pageant of other things in Power stock,
a village visible only from Eggardon, and hard to discover
even to those who know the country. From the camp
there are two secret lanes to it, high-hedged winding tracks
100 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
such as lovers use. One of them goes past the station,
where a beautiful golden cottage crouches under the embank-
ment. Take the path in front of the cottage, cross the rails,
and you will see a path leading into an orchard, a path of
eternal peace.
In the season of apple -blossom that path is the loveliest
in the world. It winds among the trees, streams tinkling
alongside, the rich grass consecrated to the calm horned
sheep, a few golden cottages asleep by little footbridges.
It is like that orchard of ecstasy in Virgil's eclogue :
" Jam fragiles poteram a terra contingere ramos . . .
Ut vidi, ut peril, ut me malus abstulit error ! "
High above, on the right, is a steep hill. On top of it are
mounds and trenches upon which you can look down from
Eggardon. " Roger Arundel holds Poorstock, and Hugh
holds of Roger. Ailmar held it in King Edward's time. . . .
There are two ploughs and a half in the demesne, and five
bondsmen : and two villeins and nine bordars with two
ploughs and a half. Two mills pay three shillings. ... It
was worth four pounds : now six pounds." Those mounds
are all that are left of Roger Arundel's pride of power.
He or one of his immediate successors built a towering
motte-and-bailey castle there, to which in due time King
John repaired when he came to hunt in the forest. Now
the village children play on the grass-covered founda-
tions.
You have touched the Roman road on Celtic Eggardon :
you have crossed to-day's railway, you have seen an outpost
of monasticism at Toller Fratrum turned into a squire's
manor-house, you see the broken Norman strength above
your path. The track widens into a little open meadow,
and the secret village lies before you, on a terrace, as it
were a battlemented City of God, with its bright walls of
golden stone, its roofs of thatch of paler gold, its gay gardens
slipping down to the silver stream, and in the midst the yellow
tower of the church.
THE CHRISTIAN CONQUERORS 101
The church itself, on a platform covered with trim grass,
is one of the most attractive in Dorset. It has a handsome
Early English tower, and a porch. Inside the porch,
over the door into the church proper, are niches wherein
still stand golden images images not of gleaming metal,
but of the gentler rich-hued stone of West Dorset. By some
chance, like the more numerous sculptures at Beaminster,
these figures have escaped the " slighter " : no Puritan
Dowsing come to Poorstock to cast down idolatry. One or
two other shapes are missing, but there remain two royal
saints, and above them the Queen of Heaven bearing the
infant Christ. Time and the generous stone have mingled
to give the Virgin an exquisite grace and simplicity. She
has stood there, I suppose (for the niches appear to be
Perpendicular work), for four or five centuries, her form
growing ever more tender, her mien more kindly, as the
observances of faith, and perhaps faith itself, grew colder
and more cold. " Books for the simple people," an inquisitor
of Spain called images to a stout Protestant English prisoner
with whom he was arguing. This book may still be
read.
Within the church are other memories. Once, clearly,
there was a rood loft. There is a double " squint," and in a
pillar or buttress between the tower arch and the south
aisle a curious door-opening which now serves no purpose,
leading nowhither, unnecessary. If these vestiges of
architectural creation could be deciphered, and the minds of
builders and the defacers known, we should, it may be,
learn much of the English religious temper. Who thought
it would be a good thing to have that little door, and to
what did it give special access ? In what state was the rest
of the church at the time ? Who consented, whose feelings
were hurt by the innovation that is now so old ? Every
church in England, almost, asks these riddles ; seldom
are .there documents enough left even for a conjectural
answer.
Inside the tower is an old memorial slab, commonplace
102 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
enough in its pathetic claim upon generations unborn, yet
equally suggestive by reason of the things it cannot
tell us :
" Here lyeth the body of Thomas Larcombe of South
Porton, desesed the 31 Day of August anno 1610
(1670 ?)
* All those that turne aside my tombe to see,
Think of your end and warning take by me.' '
It is easy to read between the lines of pompous falsehood
in an eighteenth-century epitaph, or to realize a life from the
account of a soldier's death : but Thomas Larcombe has
not even a character in the census of the dead.
But the chief glory of this perfect little church, apart
from the images, is the Norman chancel arch. It is very
heavy, almost as if it had once supported a huge strain :
and it is all askew not, it seems, from pressure, but because
Roger Arundel's humble architect could not achieve the
pure arch, and built, as his best, this lopsided curve that even
mathematics could not name. It has four layers of decora-
tions loops, spirals, chevrons, and leaves : all perfectly
preserved.
Bowed and twisted, yet beautiful in a strangely intimate
way, this homely arch in a tiny parish church seems to
speak like a sudden voice in a still place. Here is something
of the Norman secret. We English, when William came,
were no mean race. After the Roman peace, we had had
six centuries of strife and hardship to make men of us :
and yet these fierce kinsmen of the Dane could conquer us,
and write our possessions in a book, and make our laws.
We swallowed them up : English prevailed. But sometimes,
as in an old legal phrase, or a piece of land tenure, or a few
well-mortared walls, the masterful Norman lives again with
startling clearness. Here in the stones of Poorstock church
there is much later history written : but the Norman stands
out, unique, plain, individual : a step in the succession, but
not native to it. The ideals and the splendour of a race are
THE CHRISTIAN CONQUERORS 103
revealed ; and while here the castle, in its pride of strength,
has perished, beauty and faith endure.
Opposite the church is the inn, a place of good local
cider.* It is the only modern building in the village the
only unsimplicity. But the hearts of those who use it
are simple. An old blind bob-tailed sheep-dog blundered in
one day as I sat there : he stumbled against chairs. " Poor
old dog," said the landlady ; "I want Dad to shoot 'un,
but he won't. He says he can't lift his hand to a maimed
thing like that." " You gi' I the gun, Mother," said an old
labourer ; " I'll shoot 'un for 'ee." " It do seem hard," she
continued, " life is sweet, we know that, but I wouldn't want
to go on living if I went blind." " No : I'll shoot 'un for
'ee. Life is sweet, so we do know, but I'd shoot mysen if
I went blind " he looked out at the bright sunlight
" after seeing that."
Life is sweet, even to the hardest-worked class on earth ?
Is that the faith that the Conquerors bequeathed to us ?
Or did the people of England hold it even then ?
* If you wish to injure the feelings of the kindly landlady, ask her if
it is Netherbury cider Netherbury being a noted cider village a few miles
away and hear her indignant reply.
VII
" O God of battles ! steel my soldiers' hearts ;
Possess them not with fear ; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. Not to-day, O Lord,
O, not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown !
I Richard's body have interred new ;
And on it have bestowed more contrite tears
Than from it issued forced drops of blood :
Five hundred poor have I in yearly pay,
Who twice a day their withered hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood ; and I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard's soul."
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
The Life of King Henry the Fifth.
A.D. 1137. . . . They had done him [Stephen] homage, and sworn oaths,
but they no truth maintained. They were all forsworn, and forgetful
of their troth ; for every rich man built his castles, which they held
against him : and they filled the land full of castles. They cruelly
oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle -works ; and when
the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men.
Then took they those whom they supposed to have any goods, both
by night and by day, labouring men and women, and threw them into
prison, for their gold and silver, and inflicted on them unutterable
tortures ; for never were any martyrs so tortured as they were. . . .
When the wretched men had no more to give, then they plundered
and burned all the towns. . . . After a time, they spared neither
church nor churchyard, but took all the goods that were therein,
and then burned the church and all together."
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE.
11 Indeed, it had been no error to say that this building was one that
appealed to the imagination ; it did more it carried both imagina-
tion and judgment by storm. It was an epic in stone and marble,
and so powerful was the effect it produced on me, that as I beheld it
I was charmed and melted. I felt more conscious of the existence
of a remote past. One knows of this always, but the knowledge
is never so living as in the actual presence of some witness to the life
of bygone ages. I felt how short a space of human life was the period
of our own existence. I was more impressed with my own littleness,
and much more inclinable to believe that the people whose sense of
the fitness of things was equal to the raising of so serene a handi-
work, were hardly likely to be wrong in the conclusions they might
come to upon any subject."
SAMUEL BUTLER,
Erewhon.
VII
THE GREAT ABBEYS AND THE AGE OF FAITH
THE period between the Normans and the Tudors,
from a purely historical point of view, is full of
important details ; and historians look at those
details with different aims. The older school saw most
prominently the romantic flight of Matilda, the Crusades,
the wars in France, the long War of the Roses. The stern
political historians are interested in the relations of the
sovereign to his nobles, the evolution of Parliament and the
judicial system. The economist dwells on the Black Death,
the Statutes of Labourers, the Peasants' Revolt ; while the
modern religious historian laments to-day's loss of the rever-
ence that built the great abbeys and beautified the many
churches that now are seldom filled.
This book would be too long if I were to attempt a con-
tinuous chronicle of each of these four branches of progress
(if progress there was), or to divide the Middle Age centuries
107
108 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
into more than one period. My reason for keeping them in
one is that the Conquest ended one quite clear and separate
chapter of English history, and the Dissolution of the
Monasteries began another equally distinct and new : in
between was constant and perplexing change. So I shall
only string together a few typical events in the life of Dorset
within those years before turning to some of their vestiges.
And first of war. Wareham, the often-sacked, fared ill
in the collapse of order which followed soon after the
masterful hand of William was withdrawn by death. Bald-
win de Redveis landed there in 1139 " with a full and strong
host of soldiers," and went to Corfe. In 1142 Robert of
Gloucester besieged and took Wareham castle, and " did
other annoying things " ; but Stephen came and " ravaged
cruelly with fire and sword, plundering and carrying off all
he could lay hands upon." Four years later Prince Henry
made it his port for escaping to France. And then there is
comparative silence until John's fondness for Dorset made
him discover the value of Corfe Castle. Here he imprisoned
and let starve twenty-two noble knights of France ; and
here too lay the wretched Peter of Pontefract :
" Here's a prophet that I brought with me
From forth the streets of Pomfret, whom I found
With many hundreds treading on his heels ;
To whom he sung, in rude harsh-sounding rhymes,
That, ere the next Ascension-day at noon,
Your highness should deliver up your crown."
King John imprisoned him at Corfe ; and when the
prophecy came true, the wretched man was drawn on a
hurdle thence to Wareham, and back again, and hanged.
The story of the twelfth century is almost a repetition of
the grim record of the Saxon invasion. " At this time
(1143) England was troubled in many diverse ways ; here
sorely straitened by the King and his partisans, there
suffering grievously from the Count of Gloucester ; ever and
always commotion and desolation. Some, their love of the
fatherland turned to bitterness, sought distant lands ;
THE AGE OF FAITH 109
others round the Churches, in the hope of sanctuary, built
lowly huts, to lead a life of fear and misery. Food ran short
(for famine spread terribly over all England), and some
lived on the forbidden and unwonted food of horses and
dogs, while others were driven to subsist on roots and grasses.
Hosts died of want. Old and famous towns, all the in-
habitants of every age and sex dead, lay desolate and empty.' 1
" If ever upon the way one spied another, he feared and fled
into a wood or other by-way."
On the other hand, these centuries also saw events that
are a faint prelude to Dorset's long connection with English
sea power. By 1300 or so Wareham was declining from its
position of one of the chief towns of the county ; but Poole
and Wey mouth wei e rising. They were opposing forcibly
the Cinque Ports' quasi-monopoly of English shipping.
The next century produced the singular naval happening
of Poole's private war, conducted by an almost fabulous
hero. Arripay thus does a Spanish chronicler, as it were
a Cockney, render the great name of Harry Page was a
seaman of no common mould. In the naval warfare of
Henry IV a mere matter of piracy and resolution, as a rule,
but calling for a proud heart if it was adopted as a profession
he harried Flanders and Brittany and Spain with address,
pertinacity, and even fury. He was at first the lieutenant
of the hardly less bellicose Lord Berkeley ; but he appears
speedily to have become lustrous as an individual. Poole,
said a gentleman of Spain, " belongs to a knight named
Arripay, who scours the seas, as a corsair, with many ships,
plundering all the Spanish and French vessels that he could
meet with. This Arripay came often upon the coast of
Castille, and carried away many ships and barks ; and he
scoured the channel of Flanders so powerfully, that no
vessel could pass that way without being taken. This
Arripay burnt Gijon and Finisterra, and carried off the
crucifix from Santa Maria de Finisterra, which was famous
as being the holiest in all these parts (as in truth it was,
for I have seen it), and much more damage he did in Castille,
110 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
taking many prisoners, and exacting ransoms ; and though
other armed ships were there from England likewise, he
it was who came oftenest " (Sydenham, History of Pooh).
The Dons liked him so little that, upon opportunity, they
paid a special visit to Poole, and slew Arripay's brother ;
but they were forced to retreat. In token also of their
opinion of Page, they on this occasion suspended for the
time being whatever of international law was then operative
that a Christian soldier was not to murder prisoners, nor
injure refugees, nor rob churches, nor burn houses or crops,
nor do violence to women : " these rules Pedro Nino ordered
to be observed everywhere, except in Arripay's country,
because he had burnt houses in Castile."
There is not much information of a definite kind about the
Dorset seafarers of this period, except for that vivid little
chapter of truculence. Inference from a few recorded facts,
however, shows living and active continuity. John ordered
rope in a hurry from Bridport in 1213. He and other kings
demanded ships for the French and Scottish wars. Lyme
(its Cobb, built in Edward I's reign, a wonder to all, and its
standing enhanced by his charter of 1284), Weymouth and
Melcombe, Poole and Wareham furnished vessels from time
to time, just as the abbeys and landowners furnished land
service and gave hospitality to the King's horses, men, and
prisoners. There were raids and counter-raids from France
and Spain and even visits from Barbary pirates. A system
of beacons a natural anticipation of 1805 and 1914 was
set up to guard against invasion.
In the midst of the foreign and domestic tumult kings
came to and fro. The strategy of castles bade them keep
a watchful eye on all parts of their kingdom, and Dorset
was still something of a sea-gateway from France and Spain
to the West and Middle -West of England. There were
castles at Corfe, Portland, Lulworth, Sherborne, Wareham,
Powerstock, and possibly three or four others of less im-
portance. The King constantly addressed to his Dorset
officers and subjects open letters letters patent of favour,
THE AGE OF FAITH 111
of armistice, of protection : " The King to all his bailiffs
and faithful subjects, greeting . . . know ye that we have
taken under our safe conduct " some fortunate person who
could produce this document. Often enough he warned the
guardians of his coasts to be watchful and responsible, or
ordered his bailiffs " to select immediately the best and
strongest men of your ports, and those who are well armed,
to man our vessels, at our cost and for our service."
John visited the county with some frequency. He
afforested* the whole of Purbeck wrongfully, so the monks
of Cerne claimed : they owned rights in the isle, already
mentioned. In almost every year from 1204 to the end of
his reign he lay a night or two at some Dorset manor or
castle Dorchester, Bridport, Gillingham (the ruins of his
house there are but green mounds), Powerstock, Corfe,
Bere Regis, Sherborne, Cranborne, and other places all
saw him : Corfe and Gillingham most often. Powerstock
Castle was either rebuilt or reinforced : there is an entry
of 104 spent on it, and of 100,000 nails brought thither for
the work. There is, too, a suggestive entry in the Patent
Rolls about Corfe :
" Teste 11 July, at Corfe. Know, that we received at
Corfe on Tuesday, the Translation of St. Benedict, in the
18th year of our reign, from the hands of Agatha Trussebut,
wife of William de Albeny, and her chaplain William,
500 marks for the ransom of this said William de Albeny."
Poor Agatha ; and poor tenants of Agatha and William !
Edward I was another frequent visitor to much the same
places as John, except that he seemed to be specially fond
of Bindon Abbey, which William of Newburgh had re-
founded in 1 1 72. Piers Gaveston was thought to be a refugee
in the county in 1311, and Edward II was imprisoned at
Corfe before he was removed to his murder at Berkeley
Castle ; while Margaret of Anjou, befriended by Cardinal
Moreton of Bere a former monk of Cerne rested at Cerne
* Put under the Forest Laws : not planted trees.
112 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
on one of her vain attempts to secure the crown for
her son.
The Dorset abbots and friars who took so large a share
in the public life of the country, in service to the King, in
education and in improving the land, have left, thanks to the
Dissolution and the passing of the monastic buildings into
the hands of Henry VIII 's favourites, few visible remains
of their greatness, except in three glorious buildings still in
use Wimborne Minster, Sherborne Abbey, and Milton
Abbey. Wimborne a royal chapel and college of secular
canons contains not only Norman and Transition work,
but an Early English east window of great beauty, and the
grave of Athelstan. Milton has some splendour of the
Decorated period, and keeps a little of the gay hues that once
made the great churches a marvel of rich colour : while
the fan-tracery of Sherborne is an unsurpassed glory.
Cerne like Abbotsbury, Sherborne, and Milton, a
Benedictine house is but a fragment : Abbotsbury, save
for the noble barn, little more : Shaft esbury not as much :
while Bindon, a Cistercian foundation, is the most pathetic
forlorn ghost of grave beauty imaginable. Of it Mr. Moule,
the Dorchester antiquarian, wrote feelingly : " You cannot
wall in the free heart : you cannot wall out the world ; but
the place where the effort was made is no common ground."
It suffered a curious irony in its death. It was dissolved
among the smaller monasteries in 1536, refounded by
Henry VIII himself in 1537, and again dissolved in
1539.
The priories, minor houses, and hospitals there were
many lazar houses have almost entirely vanished.
We can, however, guess at a little of the local vigour
and sincerity of that life when religion was real and vital
to conduct as well as to salvation. Much of the beauty of
Sherborne is due to a desperately earnest quarrel. The
people of the place in 1436 had a bitter dispute with the
monks about the position of the font and their own entry
into the church. They came to blows, a riot ensued, and the
CERNE ABBEY GATEWAY
Engraved from a drawing by J. W. Upham
THE AGE OF FAITH 113
old fabric was very seriously damaged by fire : the rebuild-
ing gave us much of to-day's loveliness.
That was a case of religious ardour. On the other hand,
the abbot of Abbotsbury of a century or so before, Walter de
Stokes, behaved like the traditional predatory abbot of
fiction, and a long enquiry into his conduct would probably
have ended in scandal but for his death.*
Of the glories of Shaftesbury I have already spoken. In
contrast to that world- wide fame is the gentle seclusion of
the Cistercian nuns at Tan ant Keynes, to whom a famous
treatise in Middle English was probably addressed the
Ancren Riwle, or Anchoresses' Handbook, said to have been
composed for them about 1200 by Richard Poore, Bishop of
Salisbury. The Abbey was but a little house : at the
surrender in 1539 it contained an abbess and eighteen nuns.
When the Riwle was written, it was the refuge of three
sisters of gentle birth, with lay sisters and servants. Among
the reasons why they fled the world the writer gives these :
" It is a proof of nobleness and liberality. Noblemen and
gentlemen do not carry packs, nor go about trussed with
bundles, nor with purses. It belongs to beggars to bear bag
on back, and to burgesses to bear purses, and not to God's
spouse, who is the Lady of Heaven. Bundles, purses, bags,
and packs are all earthly wealth and worldly revenues. . . .
Ye take no thought for food or clothing, neither for your-
selves nor for your maidens. Each of you hath from one
friend all that she requireth ; nor need that maiden seek
either bread, or that which is eaten with bread, further than
at his hall. . . . The sorcerer would fain with flattery render
you perverse, if ye were less gentle and docile. There is
much talk of you, how gentle women you are ; for your
* The last abbot also is alleged to have given offence, according to a
document quoted by Hutchins : " Whereas the Abbot taketh to his own
use and hath made great waste of wood sales wrongfully sold from his
brothers and their tenants, and also hath sent out of the treasury certain
jewels more than half (whereas we cannot judge the true value of the same)
and hath sold it. . . . He hath an abominable rule with keeping of women,
not with i, ii, or iii, but with many more than I do write of, and also no
religion he keepeth nor by day neither by night." Not proven, says the
Victoria County History, in effect.
114 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
goodness and nobility of mind beloved of many ; and sisters
of one father and one mother ; having, in the bloom of
your youth, forsaken all the pleasures of the world and
become anchoresses."*
All their daily customs, religious and lay alike, were
expounded to them in this generous-minded homily ; how
they were not to be liberal with other people's alms ; not
to buy nor sell ("a buyer and seller selleth her soul to the
chapman of hell ") ; not to use too harsh a discipline of
their bodies ; to have blood let four times a year (thereafter
resting : " talk with your maidens, and divert yourselves
together with instructive tales ") ; and " ye shall not possess
any beast, dear sisters, except only a cat."
That fine piece of South-Western dialect English gives
some hint of what was coming to pass in England. The nation
was becoming English, and so was its language. The
peasants saw the world in the great wars : they learnt at
Agincourt and Cregy their own strength. The men of Dorset
fought on St. Crispin's day under their own banner of a
silver tower on a red ground. They had come gradually to
be part of an organism not merely local, their terms of
service secured by national, not local justice. But until the
long wars brought their inevitable penalties on Europe,
the English peasant had no real chance of freedom. It
was in Dorset, through the seaport intercourse with France
and the Channel Islands, that the greatest economic change
of this long period commenced. The Black Death broke out
at Melcombe Esgis in 1348. Within three years " the
inhabitants remaining are not sufficiently numerous to
protect (the coast) against our foreign enemies." j*
It was upon the poor, living in squalor, that the plague
fell most heavily. But it had its compensations. In a
short time, instead of being bound ineluctably to forced
toil, the peasants, through the reduction in their numbers,
could sell their labour at a high price, and employers had to
compete for it, and did compete for it, in spite of the
* Camden Society's translation. f Gasquet, The Black Death.
THE AGE OF FAITH 115
successive Statutes of Labourers which tried to fix the con-
ditions.* The wages system had arrived, though with
many local variations and survivals of the old tenures and
compulsions. And one result of this weakening of com-
pulsion was that within two or three generations English
was perforce the common language of all classes.
Whether the wages system made for the real happiness
of the poorest labourers, or not, can be better judged when
we come to the revolts of five centuries later. A hundred
small hardships and injustices, not easily remedied when all
the real force was in the hands of those who wore armour,
embittered the relations between the villagers and the lords ;
and in 1381 the Peasants' Revolt flamed out. It was easily
put down, after a dangerous but sporadic success. Dorset
seems to have taken no great part in it, unless a reported
local increase of crime is an outer ripple of the whirlpool.
It is in walking through a tract of deserted churches and
lonely villages, it seems to me, that something of the multi-
farious, excitable life of this time (Chaucer's pilgrims were
always at the zenith of their personalities) can be recaptured.
Start again at Maiden Newton, from what was once the
revered village cross : it is now a centre of children's
games and a leaning-post for those who await the opening
of licensed houses. Hither came the Abbot of Milton's
corn to market, borne by his forced labourers ; and Cerne
Abbey held a third of the manor. Go past the station by
the white track, steeply uphill. Near the top cross the
fields to the left : you will walk over a British village : if
haply you have a dog, he will go down to the annals of
innumerable rabbits as a sudden piratical raid which caused
great terror. A little further west, you cross the Roman
road from Dorchester to Ilchester, a lovely grass-grown
straight track filled with eternal peace. Down a path
* Some striking but not always exact parallels may be found between
these Statutes (and their intentions) and the arguments in use at the
present moment in regard to the deceased Agricultural Wages Board.
Prof. Oman, in his standard work, makes a quotation from Piers Plowman
about the greedy labourers which might come from a retrograde farmer
to-day.
116 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
westwards which hardly exists,* you come to an odd hedged
lane leading nowhere, with a private walk alongside : some
vanished or disused idea never fully carried out : and so to
Sydling St. Nicholas, where are a fine Tudor barn and a
sturdy church and as many Georgian houses, deliciously
spaced, as could well be desired ; and streams and ducks all
down the wide pretty street.
The church itself is curiously impressive in its historical
gaps. It is an immensely strong building, shored up by
very heavy buttresses, and mostly Perpendicular in style.
It has large grotesque gargoyles, a fine tower and inside,
a number of monuments to eighteenth and early nineteenth
century London aldermen and their families. On the tithe
barn are cut the initials of the wife of Elizabeth's Secretary,
Walsingham, who held the manor from Winchester College.
Imagination tends to dwell on what is not there, rather than
on what is. The village is so neat, so quiet, so primevally
domestic, that there ought to be visible evidence of the
period when the church was first built.
Sydling may well claim to be one of the half- dozen most
beautiful villages in Dorsetf or even in England. It lies
in a deep valley in the chalk, well watered, full of sheep.
North there is a noble walk to the main ridge. But the way
now lies past a well, where it is good to sit and hear running
water, and over the high hills again. And as at last you
descend, you see on a hill opposite the Cerne Giant.
When I last sat on the slope and looked at the Giant, I
felt myself back in a scene of a year before. I was then
in the Town Hall at Dorchester. It was full, quite full, of
farmers, with a sprinkling of gentry and humbler folk, and
a few obvious agents : a gathering huge by the side of the
coteries of Sotheby's or Christie's. I had in my hand a
monstrous fine folio book about Cerne, which the auctioneers
* Across the Roman road, immediately opposite your track : close along
a hedge which must be kept on the right.
t Other claimants in Dorset are Corfe Castle (without recent additions),
Affpuddle, Burton Bradstock, Rampisham, Chideock (except the inn and a
building opposite), and Milton Abbas, and Hammoon, and Okeford
Fitzpaine, and but this is becoming a gazetteer.
THE AGE OF FAITH 117
had bestowed upon me for nothing. An austere man with
a little white pointed beard and a monotonous voice was
saying, " Any advance on 700 ? 750. Any advance on
750 ? Going at 750 . . . going. . . . Gone at 750. Mr. X.
Bought by the tenant." There was hardly even an inflexion
in his colourless voice as he asked " any advance ? " But
in the audience there was a subdued undercurrent of feeling
which could not be mistaken : it broke out in cheers when
a tenant bid successfully.
For a whole village was changing hands. I had been into
some of the cottages a few days before. There were holes
in almost every ceiling : most of the walls were perishing :
slugs of the Giant's kin were in many rooms they were
exhibited with a kind of pride. The Abbey Farm was shut
and deserted :* the lovely orchard behind it many feet deep
in grass and nettles, the little fabric of beauty in the old
gateway and the oriel window in the barn losing its mortar
and drawing still nearer to final decay.
If Goldsmith wanted to write a new Deserted Village, or
W. H. Hudson an even more sombre Shepherd's Life, Cerne
Abbas might be the inspiration. The wide street is always
empty, save when charabancs vomit incongruous crowds.
There seems to be hardly even the ordinary tiny activity
of a general shop though there are several shops, in point
of fact. I doubt if a man could get drunk in the inns : they
are too desolate. If anyone lives in the two or three comely
private houses, it must surely be some aloof Mrs. Sparsit.
Even on the streams of the village, to which I was told
(my informant wearing an air of shy half -credulity) the
Giant came down to drink at nights, there are few ducks, and
those meagrely loquacious.
The church is a beautiful skeleton. Outside it has little
flying pinnacles of a lovely design, in yellow stone, niches
with some saints still inhabitant, a fine tall tower. Inside
* I should like to say here that the present tenant of the farm, who is
working strenuously with his own hands to repair the property, very
rightly resents wholesale intrusion on his orchard and field. The Gateway
ruin can be seen by decent people who ask decently and behave decently.
118 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
it is as frigid as a neglected museum. There were at one
time recently no less than three fonts in it : one venerable,
of the Middle Age (so simple in design as to have no marked
characteristic) ; one modern, of which the less said the better,
for it is ugly ; and one delightful absurdity of the Georgian
era a sort of small hand-basin on a leg, composed of wood
or some composition painted to look like marble. As at
Batcombe, there is a stone rood-screen. As at Abbotsbury,
there is a good seventeenth-century pulpit. There is a decent
pompous wooden screen, also, at the west end of the nave.
The Perpendicular east window is remarkably large. The
church is a spacious building.
One of its exhibits (I must use the word : the church does
not " show off," but it is not instinct with any reality) is a
stone coffin. There are plenty of others in Dorset. But I
cannot quite conceive the mind which thus preserves a
void grave, out of its designed place, and insignificant, in
an edifice dedicated to public worship. It can hardly be
doubted that some successor of ^Elfric, some abbot or high
officer of Cerne Abbey, lay in this massive bed : dead, in the
faith of Christ. We know that stone was used for coffins,
and we know (at least, we are always told so) that churches
are places of worship, not museums. We should inspect
empty stone coffins, therefore, as exhibits, in a real museum :
not at the spot where their vanished tenants were once
buried with the rites of Holy Church. Would any vicar, any
parishioner, prop up to-day against a wall, for a show, the
empty oak box that recently held his grandfather's decaying
flesh and bones ? Antiquity is no defence. What do a few
centuries matter to the principle ? It might be argued that
the remains of the pious dead, or their relics, should abide
at or near the place where they were committed to the mercy
of God. But their mortal bodies, in such cases as this, are
not there to await the resurrection. The " sad and solemn
priests " sing no longer for their souls. The tomb or chantry
of a dead man, his perpetual ornament, a piece of architecture,
remains rightly part of the church in which he worshipped,
THE AGE OF FAITH 119
was buried or commemorated. But here the empty re-
ceptacle of his person is made a show.
I think the most human thing in Cerne church is one of
its two or three interesting epitaphs. " Here lies the body
of Robert White, who died Jan. 6th, 1753, aged 46 : having
been upwards of 20 years in Antigua in South America,
and returning home with a good character, which is well
known by the best sort of people in that island." The exile
from the little village, with a good character vouched for by
the best people ... I am sure his character was truly good.
Yet life here must have been real once. Consider the
legend of the name Cerne Abbas. You will find (if you go
about it in the right way), near the gate-house of the
old Abbey and the orchard, a well St. Austin's or St.
Augustine's well. A stone step of its superstructure, in
Hutchin's time, bore five Latin words " Of Thomas Corton
thirty-fourth abbot." Corton was the last Abbot of Cerne.
He preserved a continuity which by tradition went back to
him after whom the well is named. St. Augustine is said
to have come hither and to have been mocked by the
inhabitants. They tied fishes' tails (some say the tails of
cows) to the skirts of himself and his followers and drove
them out. But the saint immediately in a vision saw their
destiny, and called out, in a loud voice, " I see God (cerno
Deum), Who will pour into them a better spirit." The men
of Cerne in a short time repented and asked him for forgive-
ness and begged him to return. Cerne is the place of the
vision of God.
There arc other explanations, not less credible, of the
founding of the Abbey. It is probably at least a ninth -
century creation. It owned many manors. To-day there
are left of it some stones in the dead village, many in the
fine Abbey Farm, an oriel in one of the farm buildings, and
the lovely gate-house. But like Bindon Abbey, it holds the
soul of man. When at one time before the farm was re-
occupied I went through its empty deep-grassed orchard,
saw the ever-running well-stream, the dim green lines
120 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
behind the Gate-house which showed where once the
structure of beauty and worship had confronted the world,
the place seemed populous with futile, baffled ghosts. It
was a little house, maybe, as abbeys go.
The Giant " ithyphallic and clavigerous " may have
watched with a cynical eye many generations of peasants,
and a few great men. He saw if the explanations of him
are true he saw the Romans on the hills near him, and the
Celt driving the Iberian out of the dens that mottle the
green turf still. He saw Brichtuin holding the land in the
Confessor's time, and under William : and no more than the
Giant was Brichtuin allowed to " depart from the land."
He saw the monks at work upon their famous Book and
Cartulary. Even when there was a fanatical Protestant
or a no less fanatical malignant swaying the village, humble
lovers must still have looked with a curious wonder upon his
shameful form. The coaches of the turnpike era let inquisitive
passengers ask questions about him. The smugglers ex-
changed their goods in his secret mart : and if he had not
preferred the village streams, so numerous and pretty, the
Giant might here have quenched his thirst with " a beer
superior perhaps to any liquor of the kind ever known ":
so its fame ran of old.
From Cerne go up over Black Hill to Piddle trenthide,
by a lovely road giving wonderful views. Piddletrenthide
is a long village of pleasant houses and cottages. In its
church, more beautiful without than within, is a modern
window showing a figure of a man in khaki the earliest
I have seen to perpetuate thus the Great War. I wonder
why (colour apart) the uniform looks so ignoble by that of
the saints and other warriors in the same window ? Is it
the humbug of ancientry that makes armour seem more
beautiful ? It was a clumsy garment at best.
Follow still the byroad, due south. You will come shortly
to the straggling village of Piddlehinton. The church here
has that curious thing, a palimpsest brass or rather, one
which has been used on both sides. There is also a remark-
THE AGE OF FAITH 121
able brass of a vicar with a walking-stick : he is Thomas
Browne, " parson of this place seven and twenty years,"
who died in 1617. The registers of the church contain much
interesting matter which has not been published : how
stranded sailors (so far inland) were relieved, how a grocer
of London whose house had been burnt was given a small
dole, and the like. Oddly enough, I met that grocer long
ago at Oxford : it was exactly the same yarn.
From here the road curves south-east to Piddletown.
And here the church again is to be venerated. It contains
all the life of England, and that not, in its atmosphere of
preservation, in the manner of a dead survival. The font
is Saxon or possibly Norman, with a fine interlacing design.
It stands under a seventeenth-century gallery, from whose
floor depend canvas buckets of 1805, the property of a
Bath insurance company. The east end has been altered ;
but the roof is good. There is the greater part of a carved
three-decker pulpit. And if you go through the Martin
chapel, in the south aisle, into the vestry, you will find the
flutes of the village choir of a generation ago.
The Martin or Athelhampton chapel is a glory of the
county. Here are buried knights and ladies of that notable
family, the colour still rich on some of their tombs, the
supine figures still little harmed by the slighter. " Pray
for their souls," one inscription bids us, " with hearty
desire, that they both may be sure of eternal light."
This little homely chapel holds some of the last enchant-
ments of the knightly years. It is impossible here not to
believe that the Faith was real. Those who wrought the
Purbeck stone into shapes so enduringly gracious, those who
touched them with gay blue and red, those who engraved so
carefully, with so sure a sense of proportion, the strong
brass, had some quality few possess to-day. I think the last
of the Martins preserves it in an epitaph of 1595 now lost
(recorded by Hutchins) : " Nicholas ye first, and Martin
ye last. Good night, Nicholas." A long night, whose dawn
may never break.
122 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
Piddletown church, it also seems to me, is one where
the past and the present veritably overlap from day to
day, even to our own time, and are not cut off, shut apart,
one from another. Its simplicity and its beauty have always
belonged to this one village, grown with it, formed part of
its people's lives. Here, more certainly than in any glorious
abbey or cathedral, the Word of God might remain flesh.
From Piddletown follow byroads or paths, which the map
shows adequately, to the three divine villages hidden a
little way from the main road three river hamlets, Aff-
piddle, Turner's and Brian's Piddle. You can, if you
prefer, go along the main road to Tolpiddle and turn off
there. You will see a handsome church, the " martyrs'
tree," and a monument to those martyrs, of whom I speak
later (see Chap. XIII).
Affpiddle has a very handsome church very beautifully
situated. It was built, probably, at any rate so far as the
tower goes, by the same monk-artist who designed the tower
at Cerne. It has the same lovely little flying pinnacles,
the same lofty grace. The interior contains splendid wood-
work a pulpit and a number of carved pew-ends also
by a Cerne monk : one of the pew-ends and the pulpit are
dated 1547.
The village is pure Dorset : low thatched cottages of
yellow mud and plaster, with a little wood and stone :
jasmine and fuchsia and veronica creeping shaggily round
the windows and doors : unexpected little streams and
patches of grass. A few years ago it was more beautiful
than encouraging : for the cottages were in grievous dis-
repair, the mud walls often gaping or falling, the timber
rotting in the damp valley air. But Mr. Debenham has done
wonders of restoration of late, and has added, to the ex-
cellence of model farming, a striking new farm-cottage
architecture which deserves to live alongside the old.
Bryant's Piddle the Piddle manor of Brian de Turber-
ville is much the same as Affpiddle, but smaller. The
THE AGE OF FAITH 123
last of these three villages is the most exquisite. Toner's
(Turner's) Piddle was once the manor of the Toneres, or
de Toneres, Norman lords of whom little is known : they
rendered service to the crown of Edward I, and that is
about all their history. If their lives were as retired and
obscure as their record, they can have chosen no more
satisfying place of retreat than this tiny hamlet. To-day
it consists of a little gracious farmhouse, two or three
cottages, and a toy church, so small and compact and neat
that it should hardly be more than a cathedral for Lilliput.
Small though it is, it yet contains a Norman font a last
relic of departed strength.
There is no Norman air about Toner's Piddle. It is just
a little farm set in rich deep water meadows below the huge
brown heath which breaks out immediately behind the
barton. It is in a place of streams, a maze of fords and foot-
bridges : bright with yellow iris and meadowsweet, willow-
herb and loosestrife, a haunt of moorhens and herons.*
Take the sandy path alongside the farm, up the hill.
You will come out on one of the noblest stretches of
" Egdon " Heath. From its height Corfe Castle can be
seen guarding its gap, Pur beck keeping back the sea, the
chimneys of the secret war -factory at Holton Heath, and
of the pottery works not far away : between you and the
horizon the grim brown waste undulates in big and little
hollows, a few firs here and there, a copse in a valley, the
light ever changing.
That is the best way to come to Bere Regis : most of all
if you can contrive to reach your end about dusk. You
come from the mysterious glooms of the Heath down into
a little leaf-hedged path, past a modern cemetery whose
stones in the crepuscular half-light are white ghosts ; over
a little bridge where all day long you can watch the fat voles
* I think the most startling event in Nature is the sudden unexpected
uprising of a heron a foot or two away from one. The enormous spread
of wing, the first heavy uplift, the long clattering beak, all seem exaggerated,
as if the thing were a pterodactyl. So my dog thought on his first putting a
heron up at Turner's Piddle, for he ran away for dear life.
124 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
at play, or washing their comfortable persons. And so to
the imminent church standing up, from there by the bridge,
like a glorious cathedral, hanging over the stream and the
few cottages by its side with a dominance of both power
and beauty.
The tower is finely decorated : the body of the church
has excellent gargoyles. But it is the windows which,
if you come from without when they are lit up from within,
will stab your imagination. At the east end the light shines
through three beautiful Early English lancets (inside they
are framed in slender dark Purbeck columns). On the
south wall the Turberville arms glow in the many panels
of a perfect window in the Perpendicular style. At the east
end of that aisle is a glorious little flowing Decorated frame-
work ; an easy, sinuous rhythm in stone that the light
transforms into a flower.
There is the whole peace of humanity here. Here, among
the works of men, as amid the work of God on Eggardon
Hill, I can find the ultimate rest. There is nothing in the
church itself which does not suggest a permanent ideal of
life. The Turberville aisle has those Decorated and other
empty tombs where once poor Tess took refuge. The old
local ironwork in the squint has a peculiar homely beauty.
The Tudor squire and his wife in the chancel ought to be
buried there : it is theirs. The " puzzle " brass, in some
sort of dog English-Latin, is a proper idiosyncrasy of a
little secluded civilization. The pages from the records
(showing the authentic Turberville signature), the old and
lovely font, the late Norman arches, the grotesque faces upon
them, the ancient local tiles and woodwork, the myriad
pottery vases for to-day's floral services there is a chain of
life more continuous here than even at Piddletown.
The roof is the wonder of the place. It was brought from
Flanders by Cardinal Moreton, it is said. It is a noble
arrangement of beams from whose every end juts out a
gaily painted figure severely humorous like the Norman
faces in the arches below. The central boss said tradition-
THE AGE OF FAITH 125
ally to represent John the Baptist carries a vast round
bearded face, like a Cruikshank illustration to " Jack the
Giant Killer." They keep the colours fresh. The roof
remains eternally young, eternally real : witnessing to the
simple sincerity of a faith that was confident enough to
laugh at itself ; witnessing to a temper of mind that was
not too self-conscious to mind ridicule if it were in
earnest.
When I was last in the church, during the war, the altar
bore no flowers ; instead, there were set up small flags of
all the Allies Japan, Serbia, the United States, France,
and all of us. I was reminded by them of a war-time scene
a friend had described to me.
It took place at the cross-roads at Bere. My friend was
staying at the admirable inn there in the summer of 1915,
to complete some work and recover his health. He heard
the usual noise of passers-by, farm-carts, motors : but it was
suddenly broken, in the late afternoon, by a more tumultuous
sound. After a time he looked out. A flushed woman of
thirty or so, once very pretty and still not wholly unbeautif ul,
was leaning against a cottage wall opposite. Round her,
at some distance, were the louts of the village. They were
all arguing angrily. The woman obviously of a certain
profession, a " leaguer-wench," and rather drunk was
taunting them for not going to the front. In that respect,
they were good lads : they had tried, and had been for-
bidden ; farm-labour was too precious. Many of their
friends had gone and fallen ; they themselves were to be
scraped off the hungry land later. They, on the other hand,
starting by jeering at her drunkenness, had come to inflame
their jeers with anger at her profession, which they soon
guessed. They would not leave her alone. She was afraid
to turn her back and go on. Their numbers increased,
until perhaps a couple of hundred people men had now
joined the group stood in a menacing circle round her.
No one yet offered active violence, but the temper of the
crowd was clearly ugly. My friend went out and spoke to
126 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
the seeming chief man there. He got nothing but angry
words. He spoke to the woman ; she said, sobbing in a
horrible drunken way, " I daren't turn my back on them
they'll stone me." She was now pretty nearly sober and
ready to moderate her bitter tongue : but he felt her words
were true. He turned and talked savagely to the crowd at
large ; a mistake, for their anger was not abated by shame.
Then he tried persuasion. He spoke to the senior men
quietly and said he would take the woman himself to the
constable's house three-quarters of a mile away if they
would keep the crowd in order. They agreed, and he told
the crowd what he meant to do, saying that it was the
right way to deal with such a person. Then the wretched
woman was induced to cling to his arm and turn her back
and he turned his, not without genuine fear and they
went off on the long street, the crowd following ten yards
or so behind, watching, it seemed, for a moment's lapse or
weakness. Several times the woman broke down and
refused to go any farther, and he had to prevent her reviling
the people incoherently ; often there were sinister cries
of opprobrium behind his back ; until at last they came to
the constable's cottage, and gave the poor wretch to his
kind wife for a night's lodging. She was following the camp
from Weymouth to Blandford : she could not have walked
another mile.
It was not her profession, nor the precise exchange of
taunts, that interested my friend. It was the fear he himself
felt, " in his bones," of the crowd. It seemed like a recrudes-
cence of mediaeval horror of witch-hunting, heresy-hunt-
ing, torture, all the animal ferocity of man let loose.
There was a force here that the modern mind might not
be able to tame : a morality (resentful and perverted,
doubtless) that would stick at nothing. He had been lately
in that calm and beautiful church, where all the ages, even
to-day's, seem to be in happy communion. Here in the twilit
village street, with the rough threatening pleasantries, the
hysterical woman's sobs, in his ears, he seemed to have
THE AGE OF FAITH 127
reached a dreadful continuity of evil in man ; or not so
much of evil as of cruel faith in an unreal good.
They burnt a woman in Dorchester in 1706. They
ducked scolds there in 1630. They branded a woman in
London in 1751. In my own life-time, not a quarter of a
century ago, I have heard " rough music " administered,
and the skimmity -riding of " The Mayor of Caster bridge "
is only just obsolete. I have seen an otherwise humane
fisherman in the last year or so set his dog to worry live
crabs, and laugh hilariously when a claw or leg was tugged
off. Perhaps eternal beauty needs that face-to-face know-
ledge of beastliness. " God of battles, steel my soldiers'
hearts.
VIII
" In this channel under a marblo stone doe lye the bodies of Francis
Chaldecot Esq., and Edith his wife, younger daut r . and coheire of
William Chaldecot of Quarrellston, in Dorset, esq., who were liberal con-
stant housekeepers ; bountiful releivers of the poore ; carefull breeders
of their children in piety and. vertue ; diligent and devout comers to
the church, though it were very painfull unto them in their latter
times, by means of age and other infirmity : 53 yeares and upwards
they lovingly lived in chast wedlocke, and had issue 15 children,
whereof 3 sons and 7 daughters came to mature age, and were most
of them in the life times of their parents matched into ancient families
of worship, most of them having fayre issues.
" Thus having lived to see their children to ye third generation, they
meekly dyed in ye feare and favor of their God.
"He on Thursday ye 19th of May, 1636, aged 85. She on Thursday ye
23 August, 1638, aged 75."
Epitaph in Steeple Church, Isle of Purbeck.
"A.D. 1588. A letter to Sir Richard Rogers, Knight, and others the
Commysion(ers) appointed for the Musters in the Isle of Purbecke,
that where (as) their Lordships are given to understand that divers
persons of habylytie that have landes in the said Isle had of late
absented them selves from thence, and did dwell uppon their own
livinges in other partes of the Realme, whereby bothe that Island
(being a place of no small importance) was unfurnished of men of
habylytie and calling, and did want the succor of that necessary
contrybucion for publique services : therefore they were required
and aucthoryzed by vertue hereof to cause such a reasonable taxe
and chardge to be laied and levyed upon the landes of soche persons
so absenting them selves and not resydent there, as should be fytt
to be imployed uppon musket tes and other necessary provysion."
Acts of the Privy Council of England. New Series, Vol. XVI.
" O eloquent, just and mighty death, whom none could advise, thou hast
persuaded ; what none hath presumed, thou hast done ; and whom
all the world hath nattered, thou hast cast out of the world and
despised ; thou hast drawn together all the extravagant greatness,
all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered all over with
two narrow words : Hie jacet."
SIR WALTER RALEIGH,
The History of the World.
VIII
THE NEW RICH
THE Cardinal Archbishop who set up the bright-
hued roof in Bere church was in many ways like
great men of other times. He had eminent
virtues of statecraft and administration. He brought two
sovereigns Margaret and Henry VII to England from
overseas : he was the rightly trusted adviser of each. He
encouraged the young Thomas More, and saw in him signs
of future greatness. He held many livings (several at once,
as a rule) and filled many high offices. But the life he had
lived in Dorset was soon to vanish and not return. If he
could have looked into the future, he might have said, with
Mr. Turveydrop, " We gentlemen are few : I see nothing to
succeed us but a race of weavers."
It would have been a curiously apt statement. For one
great change in country life that came in with the Tudors
was due in a large measure to the development of the cloth
131
132 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
industry. It was due also to other causes which will be
mentioned. But under Henry VIII the sheep emerged to
give rural England wealth, and to consolidate the growing
tendency to the holding of private property in land.
Henry VIII himself took note of that tendency. In the
preamble to an Act of his twenty -fifth year of rule, he
complained of the way in which his subjects were scheming
" how they might accumulate and gather together into few
hands, as well great multitude of farms as great plenty of
cattle, and in especial sheep." A few years earlier he had
observed that " vagabonds and beggars have of long time
increased and daily do increase," and he initiated the long
series of vagrancy laws.
It is not certain that the noble creature of the Dorset
hills to-day was itself one of the agents of this change.
But the Dorset Horn sheep the Dorset Down being appar-
ently a later breed is as least very ancient, very famous,
very strong ; so strong and fierce-looking, at times, that
delicate females have been observed to show fear in the
presence even of the ewes. The lady sheep has horns and
a Roman nose, and a great thickset body. See how haughtily
she looks down that nose at you, with what menacing pride
she draws herself up to confront you. She fears nor man
nor dog. Let the terrier approach, she stands superb :
she frowns, she stamps her foot : she stamps it again.
If the terrier quails, she chases him. But if, after the manner
of terriers, he blench not. . . .
I once saw about three hundred of these gracious dames in
a big green valley. They were fussing together like a swarm
of ants. I could not understand why, until I caught sight
of what looked like a bright brown leaf blown about round
the flock. The leaf danced methodically ; and when its
caper ings had got the sheep neatly herded in a dense mass,
it stood at the end of the valley and regarded them triumph-
antly, its plumed tail waving over its back like a banner ;
for it was a small and infinitely pugnacious Lion Dog of
Pekin.
THE NEW RICH 133
No, the Dorset ewe is not really braver than other sheep,
though handsomer. But the ram is another matter. He is
a great barrel of a fellow, with a head like a bull's. And he
is not content with the simple Ionic curve of his spouses'
horns : he has coil upon coil gloriously wreathed.
The offspring of these mates (whose hardy vigour often
produces two families in a year) are perhaps the most
interesting lambs known to our fortunate isles. Not only
are they delicious food ; they are Nature's most successful
attempt to live up to Art. The ideal lamb of Art, of course,
is the woolly toy of the nursery. The Dorset lamb is an
excellent imitation of it. Its nascent horns give it the
breadth of forehead necessary to make the features at once
perfectly innocent and perfectly foolish. Its eyes are small
and properly overshadowed by wool, its nose a mere pink
speck in a white plain. It ought to be mounted on a little
crimson stand with wheels, and to squeak when pinched.
I have never pinched one, but its bleat is thin, in contrast
to the deep poignant voice of its mother.*
But the land-grabbers of the sixteenth century were not
concerned with the aesthetics of sheep -keeping. They had
too many interests for that. The Dissolution of the
Monasteries brought wealth to many of the sovereign's
supporters ; and they had a very good idea of business.
I do not find the days of great Elizabeth particularly
spacious : as a rule they are intensely concentrated, and
often narrow. What an Elizabethan Englishman did was
usually for his own advantage, and he did it with all his
might. And he certainly, if he had the means, was " a
liberal constant housekeeper," like Chaldecot of Steeple.
I am not sure that the Elizabethan and Jacobean manor-
houses are not finer survivals of the best Me of the time
than all but the greatest of its literature.
Dorset is peculiarly rich in such houses. Of those not
to be dwelt upon much hereafter Athelhampton (begun
perhaps in 1503), Cranborne, the house of the Cecils (of much
* Cf . Elizabeth Prig.
134 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
the same period), Melbury, whose builder is shown in a brass
of 1532 in the church close by, Poxwell (Jacobean), Mapper-
ton (late sixteenth century a most lovely secluded house),
Parnham (one of the largest and most beautiful buildings
in the stone and red-brick Tudor style), Chantmarle (1619
lately restored to its old perfection), and Bingham's
Melcombe (Henry VIII, for the most part, but older in places)
rouse feelings much like those Butler experienced, in a
different way, in the presence of the cathedrals : their
builders must have been right in any conclusions they
reached about life. And scores of little hidden farms, of
the same period and of the same inspiration, but now en-
joying no manorial rights, add to the conviction that nothing
in the way of the adaptation of beauty to the then domestic
life remained to be learnt by the Tudor landowners.
It is a reflection on our life of to-day that whereas a
house built by a newly enriched person at any time in the
present or just past generation is more than likely to be
vulgar, the homes built by the new rich of Henry and
Elizabeth and James cannot have seemed seriously in con-
trast with the abbeys out of whose stones they were so often
constructed. The monastic buildings were noble models.
The stone was good and well cut. It was put to many
uses, for habitations of all kinds, as has been said already.
I wonder what sort of queer pride a man who had made a
fortune felt when he saw the material of the former sacred
foundation rising, block by block, into the cosy mansion
in which he and his wife (or his second or third wife) would
eat their enormous rich spiced meals and beget their ten
or twenty children ?
Yet when the first vigour of our renaissance had gone, the
uglier side of it shows. A Dorset parson throws a little
personal light on the change. Thomas Bastard, born at
Blandford in 1566, Vicar of Bere Regis and Rector of Aimer
for most of his adult life, wrote a book of epigrams
Chrestoleros of more than average merit. He suffered
himself, it seems, from poverty : an epistle of 1603 (accord-
THE NEW RICH 135
ing to his admirable editor, Dr. Grosart) addressed to King
James I, speaks of his " extreme poverty and toiling
wretchedness." In an epigram on a chance meeting with a
" wantcatcher," he puns upon the double meaning of the
mole's old name :
" ' Then you have left no more ? ' ' No more ? ' quoth he,
' Sir, I can show you more : the more the worse.'
And to his work he went. But 'twould not be
For all the wants were crept into my purse.
' Farewell, friend wantcatcher, since 'twill not be
Thou canst not catch the wants, but they catch me.' "
In another he speaks of his needing 100, and being
unable to make it by his books.* There may have been
good reason for his poverty. Dr. Grosart thinks he was " a
genial, not to say jovial parson, after the type of Robert
Herrick." He seems to have been unhappily married, and
his end was lamentable : " being towards his latter end
crazed, and thereupon brought into debt, (he) was at length
committed to the prison in Allhallows parish in Dorchester,"
and what that means the baiting of the alleged lunatic
Malvolio may suggest " where dying very obscurely and
in a mean condition, he was buried in the church-yard
belonging to that parish on 19th April, 1618." An unkind
brother epigrammatist wrote to him that :
" Preaching would do more good
If preachers wallowed less in flesh and blood."
And as a young man he got into trouble at Oxford and had
to resign his fellowship of New College, " being much guilty
of the vices belonging to poets, and addicted to libelling."
But whatever his virtues or vices, he loved Dorset and
its " green joy," and above all the good trout-fishing at
Bere.f And he evidently was on intimate terms with the
* On Feb. 6, 1922, a single copy of the first edition of Chrestoleros, one
of four or five known copies, was sold at Sotheby's to the representative
of a great American book collector for 155.
f " My little Bere dwells on a hill,
Under whose foot the silver trout doth swim."
136 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
local gentry Strangways and Moretons. He saw little
good in the new order : he foresaw a wonderful scarcity
" Of bankers and bakers, of all such as brew
Of tanners, of tailors, of smiths and the rest
because they would all have become gentlemen. And
again :
" Never so many masters any knew,
And so few gentlemen in such a crew,
Never so many houses, so small spending,
Never such store of coin, so little lending.
Never so many cousins, so few kind,
Goodmorrows plenty, good wills hard to find,
Never so many clerks, ne'er learning less,
Many religions, but least godliness."
The words have a curiously modern ring. And again,
he complains of the multitude of usurers yet not enough,
for they were all so busy lending to " gentlemen, merchants,
nobles of the land " that poor men got no chance to deal with
them. He found it hard even to write consistently ; for
" How shall men's or manners' form appear
Which while I write do change from what they were ? "
Not that one need seriously regret the disappearance of
the great religious houses and the established order of which
they were part. They stood for a certain dependence of
life which was becoming foreign to the English temper.
As a consequence, the Dissolution shared with the wool
trade the responsibility for the increase of vagrancy. Not
only were hundreds of monks and nuns and servants of
the religious houses deprived of occupation it should be
remembered, by the way, that many were pensioned but
the whole administration of charity and much of the
organization of agricultural work vanished when these
centres were destroyed.
The direct result was the Elizabethan Poor Law, of which
we are not yet rid. I am not going to argue for or against
the various proposals for dealing with the problems the Poor
Law was meant to solve. The effect, so far as the country
THE NEW RICH 137
labourer in Tudor times is concerned, was to keep wages low
because the parish could be brought in to supplement
them and to tie to the parish the worker who at the time
almost seemed, by the process of economic evolution, to
have got free of the chains that bound him to the soil.
But to dwell on purely agricultural questions alone
would be to ignore a large part of the bustling Tudor life.
The increased responsibilities of the parish involved cor-
porate labour for many purposes. A famous statute of
Philip and Mary charged the parish with the upkeep of its
roads ; and many of the beautiful bridges of Dorset those
at Wool, Holme, Spettisbury, for instance were either
built or restored in this period. The building activities
of the new men, setting up their comfortable houses, must
have provided a good deal of employment, as must also
their business enterprises, like Clavell's undertaking at
Kimmeridge. Their sports and pastimes were numerous.
Perhaps George Turberville, himself of the great Dorset
family, had the profiteer sportsman in mind when he wrote
his Book of Falconry (1575) and Book of Venerie or Hunting :
though after all many of them were country born, and could
feel sincerely, as he did, that " a good Spaniel is a great
jewel, and a good Spaniel maketh a good Hawk."
Turberville, indeed, is an interesting example of an
average Elizabethan of the better classes, not so rich or
so able as to be eminent, but versatile and eager in all he
did. It is hard to know whether he was a genuine outdoor
man or not. He went to Russia apparently because he
was crossed in love with the mission to Ivan Vasilivitch
(Ivan the Terrible), so vividly described in Hakluyt. But he
was only thirty-five or so when the Privy Council were told
that he " hath been always from his youth, and still is, given
to his book and study, and never exercised in matters of
war." He had an epitaph of his own. " Ding, dong, cease
now the bell he loved a pot of strong ale well." Perhaps
it has some connection with his advice to the huntsman :
" When he is up and ready, let him drink a good draught.
138 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
. . . And let him not forget to fill his bottle with good wine."
These admirable sentiments are followed by a luscious
description of the most enormous cold luncheon of which
any human being could be capable.*
And here it may be convenient to insert, by way of con-
trast, a brief mention of another Dorset man Arthur
Gregory of Lyme Regis. His gift to the Tudor polity was
a peculiar skill in opening even sealed letters, in such a
manner that the recipient could by no means detect the
interference. Walsingham, perhaps through the Dorset
connections already mentioned, heard of this attractive
artist, and conveyed him to London for suitable employ-
ment in the Civil Service.
The ordinary town life was likewise varied and vigorous.
A few extracts from the account books of the Mayors of
Weymouth (quoted by Mr. H. J. Moule in his excellent
survey of the Borough records) suggest more than any
description. These are expenses incurred :
s. d.
(1596) Conveying a mad man out of the Town . 3
A shroud for a poor man that died in John-
son's porch, and to the woman that
shrouded him . . . . . 34
(1597) Wine bestowed upon the lieutenants and
the captains at times in their lodgings .150
(1606) Sending into Portland about the pirates . 3
(1611) Paid H. Tuckey for whipping a sailor . 4
(1615) Given the Queen's players for not playing
here, by order of the Aldermen . . 1 10
9 dozen of lobsters Jno. Poop at Mr. Re-
corder and 2 dozen of crabs, which cost 816
* The legend of the Turberville coach is referred to in Tess. It is
said to drive out of an evening from the beautiful Jacobean manor-house
at Wool (an old Turberville dwelling), where the pictures on the walls
still there so frightened Tess. Only Turbervilles can see the coach. A
writer in the Dorset Field Club's Proceedings has this curious story :
" A gentleman whom I have the honour to know was passing near here
fashioned, but handsome affair, with outriders.' ' No,' they said,
one here keeps such a turn-out, but you've surely seen the Turberville
coach.' Now he is akin to the old Turberville race."
THE NEW RICH 139
" Sending into Portland about the pirates " the Privy
Council sent into Weymouth itself often enough " about
the pirates." The predatory instincts of the Dorset mariners
were apt to get England into trouble with other nations.
In 1546 " all the men of war adventurers " in the Dorset
ports had to be ordered not to put out to sea ; and the same
year an enquiry was held at Weymouth about a certificate
for cargo landed :
" The captain of a pinnace called the Mary Grace of
Saltash . . . did enter into Weymouth Haven, and dis-
charged out of her goods to the value of sixty pounds ;
forasmuch as in the said certificate no mention was made
where the ship that the goods were taken out of is become,
nor what was done with the mariners in her, which made
the matter savour somewhat of a piracy. ..."
The result of the enquiry is not given. It is clear that
there was a thoroughly well-organized system of receiving
and distributing the booty obtained by these means. The
ransom of prisoners was a common transaction on ordinary
hard business lines. There are constant complaints and
enquiries about piracy all through the reign of Elizabeth
and James. In 1582 a Weymouth man, newly turned
pirate, landed at Studland with his companions, and there
cut down the gallows on which men of his trade were hanged.
But the luck was not all on one side. In that same year the
Mayor of Weymouth was the accuser, not the accused :
he wrote to the Privy Council that " four ships have been
taken by the Turks and are sunk, to the value of more than
2000." In the later abortive attempts, in 1619-20, to
suppress the Barbary corsairs, Weymouth was also keenly
interested.
The great impetus to seafaring and oversea trade given by
the discovery of America, especially after the destruction
of the Armada, affected the Dorset ports. It was at this
time that the country's close connection with Newfound-
land was established. Poole boats were certainly going to
the Newfoundland fisheries as early as 1583. Early in
140 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
1588, when a general embargo was laid on all foreign-going
boats in view of the Spanish preparations, it was worth
the while of certain " contemptuous persons " in the ship
Primrose of Poole to risk breaking the embargo and sail
for the Banks. In 1618, the Privy Council were informed
that " the adventures of this town (Poole) are not in any
staple, but in fishing voyages for the New Found Land, and
so home." By 1628, according to the Victoria County
History, Poole used to send twenty boats a year to the
Banks ; in 1622, Weymouth, which had previously sent
thirty -nine, sent eleven. They sailed in spring and returned
late in the summer. The trade continued to grow for two
centuries : it was at its highest in 1813 ; then it waned, and
Poole sent only seventy vessels west in 1839 which is
estimated at a fifth of the 1813 tonnage. The fishers had
gradually taken to setting up huts to cure the fish on the
spot ; and then huts for their own lodging : and so to
complete settlement.*
It is in those daily events which go to the making of a
livelihood that life continues. Three and a half centuries
later we are apt to think of the climax of Elizabeth's reign as
* There were risks about the voyage. " And when the sixteen were
in the boat, some had small remembrance, and some had none : for they
did not make account to live, but to prolong their lives as long as it pleased
God, and looked every moment of an hour when the sea would eat them
up, the boat being so little and so many men in her, and so foul weather
Thus while we remained two days and two nights . . . there was in our
company one Master Hedly that put forth this question to me the Master.
* I do see that it doth please God that our boat liveth in the sea, and it
may please God that some of us may come to the land if our boat were not
overladen. Let us make sixteen lots, and those four that have the
shortest lots we will cast overboard, preserving the Master among us all.'
I replied unto him, saying, * No, we will live and die together.' . . .
Thus we continued the third and fourth day without any sustenance,
save only the weeds that swam in the sea, and salt water to drink. The
fifth day Hedly died and another moreover : then we desired all to die :
for in all those five days and five nights we saw the sun but once and the
stars but one night, it was so foul weather. Thus did we remain the sixth
day." They reached land the seventh day. The narrative is by Richard
Clarke of Weymouth, Master of the Delight : the date 1583.
It may be interesting here also to enter the name of another Newfound-
land-Dorset man Captain Robert Abram Bartlett, whom Peary left at
the end of the last stage on his journey to the North Pole. Captain
Bartlett's ancestors, of Poole, settled in Newfoundland three generations
ago. He is proud of his Dorset lineage, and is an overseas member of the
Society of Dorset Men in London.
THE NEW RICH 141
the few years which produced Shakespeare and the defeat
of the Armada. I must deal with Shakespeare as Wey mouth
dealt with him : the Queen's players shall not enter here.
I am inclined to think that except for a week or two
of excitement just before and after the battle with Spain,
local feeling was likely to be chiefly concerned with local
men, of whom there is evidence to indicate " a certain
liveliness." Of course, the defeat of the Armada the main
encounter began off Lyme, and filled the Dorset ports with
prizes was a national affair. But it was probably looked
upon locally through short-distance glasses, in which the
hero of Poole or Weymouth or Lyme would stand out as
through a stereoscope. Even so, he often had a wide
background. Consider the arrival at Poole in 1582, in the
ship Landret, of Miles Philips, after sixteen years in the
power of Spain. This is a little of the story he had to tell
Poole of his adventures after the Spanish treachery at San
Juan de Ulloa. When Drake and Hawkins escaped so nar-
rowly from the consequences of their filibustering, Philips
and others were perforce put ashore in Mexico, and duly
captured by the Spaniards, and taken to Mexico City and
tried by Inquisitors. " Then did they proceed to demand
of us on our oaths what we did believe of the Sacrament,
and . . . whether we did not believe that the host of
bread which the priest did hold up over his head, and the
wine that was in the chalice, was the very true and peifect
body and blood of our Saviour Christ, yea or no : to which
if we answered not yea, then there was no way but death.
. . . About the space of three months before they proceeded
to their severe judgment, we were all racked, and some
enforced to utter that against themselves, which after-
wards cost them their lives." They were taken out publicly
for the delivery of sentence, " every man alone in his yellow
coat, and a rope about his neck, and a great green wax
candle in his hand unlighted. . . . The first man that was
called was one Roger the armourer of the Jesus, and he had
judgment to have three hundred stripes on horseback, and
142 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
after condemned as a slave to the galleys for ten years."
Others got less, but enough. Philips was awarded no
stripes, but " to serve in a monastery for five years, and to
wear a fool's coat, or San Benito, during all that time."
He made various escapes and attempts at escape : and at
last, after almost incredible hardships, reached Spain itself,
and so to Majorca, where " I found two English ships, the
one of London and the other of the West Country, which
were ready freighted and stayed but for a fair wind." That
little ship of the dear West Country which had ventured
so near to the Barbary coast carried him safely back to Poole.
But though the great event was at hand, and Dorset
knew it for in 1586 two Liverpool men fresh from Bilboa
landed at Weymouth with news of 700 sail and 280,000 men
being prepared against England when it arrived, there was
not overmuch eagerness to serve, or having served, to do it
again. Sir George Trenchard, of the Commission for the
county, was pressed to expedite the despatch of 1000
footmen, for the national forces, to " Stratford of the Bow,"
by July 29, 1588, and lancers and light horse a week later.
The county armour had to be looked up, men pricked and
mustered (Falstaff and Mr. Justice Shallow no doubt took
a hand), defences over which for two or three years there
had been argument hastily put into some sort of order,*
ships furnished at the county's expense. Eventually,
though they did their best to get out of paying for it, Poole
provided one ship and one pinnace, Weymouth and Mel-
combe two ships and a pinnace, and Lyme (with Chard and
Axminster contributing) two ships and a pinnace. Even if
they had been able to evade the levy, they could not have
used the ships; for on March 31, 1588, by order of the
Privy Council, a total embargo was laid on all shipping.
I am not to describe the great fight. The Dorset ships
* Sometimes at the enemy's expense. The Privy Council commanded
Trenchard "to deliver unto Carew Rawleigh, Esquire, [elder brother of
Walter] or his deputy, six port pieces of ordnance, being demi-culverins,
of those that were taken hi the Spanish ship lately brought into Wey-
mouth, for the provision of Portland Castle."
THE NEW RICH 143
were there. One was the Revenge of Lyme, which later under
Grenville was to engage a whole Spanish squadron without
assistance. " The Spanish Fleet, came, went, and was
vanquished. . . . The magnificent, huge, and mighty fleet,
such as sailed not upon the Ocean Sea many hundred years
before, in the year 1588 vanished into smoke."
I have said those times were not altogether spacious ;
but that is unfair when one looks at the Armada fight from
a national point of view. It is at close quarters at home that
the Elizabethan loses the grand air. And yet a Dorset
leader and his companions gave the age a spaciousness that
will live for ever. The " still- vexed Bermoothes," the
Bermudas, were in 1609 rediscovered discovered, so far
as the New World matters by Sir George Somers of Whit-
church Canonicorum, M.P. for Lyme Regis in 1603-4, and
Mayor in 1605. And the account of that voyage, written
by another Dorset man, is as certainly as may be the
foundation of much of The Tempest.
By a queer coincidence of our English contradictions,
it was the austere Milton's secretary, Puritan of Puritans,
who translated into liquid golden verse the historian's
splendid catalogue of the wonders Somers found in the
remote Bermudas :
" Where He the huge sea-monsters wracks,
That lift the deep upon their backs. . . .
He gave us this eternal Spring,
Which here enamels everything ;
And send the fowls to us in care,
On daily visits through the air.
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranate close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows 5
He makes the figs our mouths to meet,
And throws the melons at our feet ;
But (with ?) apples, plants of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice ;
With cedars, chosen by His hand,
From Lebanon He stores the land ;
And makes the hollow seas that roar
Proclaim the ambergris on shore."
144 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
Andrew Mar veil got his enthusiasm, doubtless, from his
friend Oxenbridge, who visited the Bermudas after Somers :
but he got his language except the glorious couplet about
the orange direct from Somers' fellow- voyager, Sylvester
Jour dan,* whose account of 1610 is dedicated to a Dorset
Justice of the Peace. The Bermudas had been called
" An Isle of Devils," " a most prodigious and enchanted
place, affording nothing but gusts, storms, and foul winds "
watched by God Setebos, inhabited by Caliban and
Sycorax ; maybe by Prospero also, for it was an isle of
voices. Somers, in the Sea Adventure, bound for Virginia,
was wrecked. " For three days and three nights together "
he sat on the poop, guiding a ship whose crew, fearing no
better fate than a " more joyful and happy meeting in a
more blessed world," were as drunk as Trinculo and Stephano.
They " fell in between two rocks " in the Bermudas, whence
they could land, and built from their materials a new ship.
The island, instead of being peopled by devils, was found to
be a paradise. " Fish is there so abundant that if a man step
into the water they will come round about him ; so that men
were fain to get out for fear of biting." Somers with a hook
took enough in half an hour to feed the whole company for
a day. A thousand mullet could be taken at a draught
with a seine ; and anyone who knows the subtlety of the
netted mullet will appreciate that plenty. " Infinite store
of pilchards . . . great abundance of hogs, as that there
hath been taken by Sir George Somers to the number of two
and thirty at one time " (by another odd coincidence
Somers died there of a surfeit of pig the next year !) . . .
" great store of tortoises (which some call turtles), and those
so great that I have seen a bushel of eggs in one of their
bellies . . . one of them will suffice fifty men a meal at
the least. . . . Fowl in great number, that there hath
been taken in two or three hours a thousand at the least.
Great store and plenty of herons. . . . Prickled pears,
* Jourdan is a name constantly recurrent in the municipal records of
Dorchester. Sylvester was a Lyme man.
THE NEW RICH 145
great abundance, great plenty of mulberries white and red.
. . . And there is a tree called the Palmito tree, which hath
a very sweet berry upon which the hogs do most feed ;
but our men, finding the sweetness of them, did willingly
share with the hogs for them, they being very pleasant and
wholesome, which made them careless almost of any bread
with their meat. . . . An infinite number of cedar trees
(the fairest I think in the world). . . . No venomous
creature so much as a rat or mouse. . . . Great store of
pearl. . . . Some good quantity of ambergris . . . Great
plenty of whales."
The fortunate isles. ... No wonder that
" Thus sung they, in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time."
When they had rebuilt that happy boat rebuilt ; and yet
people wonder that the Swiss Family Robinson could tame
ostriches, or Crusoe build a hut ! they went on to Virginia ;
and from there " being willing to do service unto his Prince
and Country, without any respect of his private gain, and
being of threescore years at the least, out of his worthy and
valiant mind," Somers undertook to go back to Bermuda
for the hogs Virginia needed ; and so died.
It is really in the villages and towns of to-day, as secluded
and forgotten as Somers' birthplace, that the historical
vestiges can give out the breath of life. Walk from Burton
Bradstock to Sherborne, and let the Tudor folk speak for
themselves of their own greatness and pride and cruelty and
ambition.
Start from Burton Bradstock, not only because it is a
good place, but because the church contains the old clock
of the only institution where the Elizabethan dress is to-day
in daily use the clock from the old Newgate Street build-
ings of Christ's Hospital. Proceed thence along the Bride
valley. You will come near Bredy Farm to the disused
stone pillars of a gateway. It is the entry to the Bedford
146 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
Estate, for here at Berwick manor (now a farm) were founded
the fortunes of the Duchy of Bedford. A little of the old
house is left, and a small barn to the north-west looks as
ancient as the Duchy.
The Russells were a Dorset family established at Kingston
Russell further east two hundred and fifty years before
John Russell of Berwick, a member of that house, saw and
seized his opportunity of fame. The Archduke Philip and
his wife Joan, daughter of the King of Castile, were driven
by a storm in 1506 to land at Weymouth, and were enter-
tained not, perhaps without some neutral vigilance by
Sir Thomas Trenchard at his new-built manor-house,
Wolverton, near Dorchester. They needed a man of
" habylytie and standing " to make the commerce of
hospitality smooth. John Russell had lately returned
from travels abroad, and was summoned in aid : he spoke
Spanish. He was so efficient and companionable that he
accompanied the guests to London when Henry VII de-
sired to be their host. He obtained a post at court and
improved it under the eighth Henry. He fought brilliantly
in France, held the position of ambassador at Rome, became
a privy councillor and at length the first Baron Russell,
Warden of the Stanneries, Knight of the Garter, Lord
Privy Seal, and Earl of Bedford.
" He had a moving beauty that waited on his whole
body, a comportment unaffected, and such comeliness in his
mien as exacted a liking, if not a love, from all that saw him.
... In dancing " one of Henry VIII 's delights " ho
was not too exquisite, for that is vanity : but his dancing
was a graceful exercise wherein ho was carelessly easy,
as if it were rather natural motion than curious and artificial
practice which endeared his severer virtues. . . . Though
Mr. Russell brought himself into court by what did humour,
he kept himself in there by what obliged ; standing not so
much upon his prince's pleasure as his interest, and adding
to his more airy courtships the solidity of serviceable
actions."
THE NEW RICH 147
With Russell's marriage to Anne Sapcote of Chenies,
and his later grant from Henry VIII of the Cistercian Abbey
of Woburn, his illustrious family passes out of close con-
nection with the county of Dorset, except in so far as the
holding of various high offices brought its members into
touch with local government. They retained the greater
part of their Dorset estates till recently, however, and Lord
John Russell, when he accepted his earldom in 1861, took
the title of Earl Russell of Kingston Russell.
That is the foundation of one great family, though the
founder came of a good enough line originally. Take the
footpath across country from Berwick to Swyre and see how
a deal in fish founded another. In the plain little church
(now too often locked) is commemorated James Napier
(the name is also spelt Napper, as in Napper's Mite, the
Dorchester almshouses). He was a capable Scot, who
" came into England in the reign of Henry VII, settled here,
and supplied the adjacent abbies with fish, from whom are
descended the Napiers of Dorset and Scotland." It seems
a surprising origin : but the panegyrist is careful to
exclude the fish by mentioning that James was the brother
of Sir Alexander Napier, Knight, and that James I (his
kinsman) commanded Sir Robert Napier, " on creating him
Baronet, A.D. 1612, to send for his pedigree out of
Scotland."*
Hutchins' editors mention another remarkable inhabitant
of Swyre churchyard who died in 1613 a Bridport doctor,
Walter Gray. He " was a little desperate doctor commonly
wearing a pistol about his neck." He had a bodyguard of
the younger gentry, whom he called his " sons," and was
apparently always in debt. He would prophesy with
accuracy the date of the death or recovery of his patients :
but it is not clear how he so far evaded the Sheriff's constant
attention as to have any patients.
I like better than James Napier that Sir Robert who is
* The trade in the huge mackerel catches of this part of the coast passed
under George V to another great merchant whose title is also new.
148 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
buried at Puncknowle, a mile away to the north-east,
across the fields. His epitaph he died in 1700 is simple :
" 2/aas ovap a
(Man is the dream of a shadow)
Non magna loquimur, sed vivimus.
Reader, when as thou hast done all thou canst, thou art
but an unprofitable servant ; therefore this marble affords
no room for fulsome flattery or vain praise. S r> R.N."
The helmet and gauntlets of one of his ancestors rest
above the slab. The carver of the inscription may have
been nearer in spirit to James Napier of Swyre and Scotland.
At any rate, he appears on the epitaph as prominently
as Sir Robert : " Johannes Hamiltonus, Scoto-Britannus,
fecit."*
The whole of this church is interesting. The key to be
obtained at the vicarage is a massive and complex piece
of Tudor work. The font seems to be Norman. The
Bexington aisle or chapel forms a curious little domestic
enclave to the south, and there is another large Napier tomb
of the seventeenth century. The lychgate has a fine roof
of Dorset stone tiles.
In the village (" William holds Puncknowle of the wife
of Hugh, son of Grip : Alward held it in King Edward's
time . . .") may be found a cosy inn where the landlady
* The Napiers or Nappers, like the Strangways, Digbys, and Shaftes-
burys, were great figures in Dorset for many generations, and sometimes
in English life also. This modest Sir Robert sat in Parliament for Wey-
mouth and Dorchester successively. He was son of an untitled Robert,
who was Receiver-General, and brother to Sir Gerard, a comparatively
temperate Royalist who sat for Melcombe Regis and won the favour of
Charles II. A Sir Nathaniel begat Sir Gerard, and another Sir Robert
begat Nathaniel, being in his lifetime M.P. successively for Dorchester,
Bridport, and Wareham, and Chief Baron of the Exchequer in Ireland.
The aforesaid Sir Gerard begat a Sir Nathaniel (" dilettante " proh
pudor !), and he yet another Nathaniel : from whom, collaterally, are
descended the Sturt or Alington families of to-day. A miraculous draught
of fishes. The first Lord Alington bequeathed a set of waistcoat buttons
to King Edward VII : he was the owner of St. Blaize, Common, and much
property in Hoxton and Dorset. I still like the self -concealing Sir Robert
best. (The above statements are taken from the Dictionary of National
Biography and G.E.C.'s Complete Peerage.)
THE NEW RICH 149
sits weaving nets a local industry with a shuttle that
flies so quickly in her skilful hands that you can hardly
see it ; the remains of the stocks ; a pleasant drinking
trough carefully shaded ; and behind the church stands the
most compact and charming of all the Dorset manors, a
tiny gabled Jacobean house of grey weathered stone,
exquisitely proportioned.
From here there is a footpath directly across the water-
meadows to Litton Cheney : but it is very difficult to trace
at times, and if you miss it you will be lost in a maze of
little brooks. There is a slightly longer path, through
Look Farm (" William holds Lahoc of the Earl of Moreton.
Aluric held it in King Edward's time ") ; and this is worth
following, for the early eighteenth -century house has a
demure comfortable beauty not soon forgotten. (The track
lies through the farm barton and then to the left, not past
the front of the house.)
A former tenant of Look had an epitaph (at Litton
Cheney) which is in keeping with the gracious house :
" Beneath this stone in a darke dusty bed,
lamented much a virgin rests her head ;
And such an one who (dying) hath bereft
the world of that worth as scarce in it is left.
Of a sweet face, but of a sweeter minde,
and a sweet fame (dying) shee left behinde.
Smitten by death even in her blooming age,
and height of beauty, shee went off ye stage
Of this frail world ; this with grief wee see
that such rare creatures seldom e aged bee.
For why, the Angels want such company
to joyne with them in heavenly melody.
With whom in Heaven she doth now possess
the fruit of vertue's lasting happiness."
Litton Cheney (save for an episode to be recorded later)
is remarkable only for loveliness. Down each side of the
street runs a silver stream between the road and the golden
houses ; and argosies of silver ducks float garrulous upon
their waters, or stand, dibbling snakily with their long
150 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
necks, on the massive stones that serve as footbridges for
each house. Right at the top of the village, on its own
knoll, rises the church, a plain building with a handsome
tower and an oldish painting of David playing the harp in
a theatrical ecstasy.
A byroad leads from Litton, past a comely eighteenth-
century house, to Long Bredy, a pleasant hamlet of no
great interest. Here once more you are in the kingdoms of
the dead. There is a long barrow just above the village
and tumuli all around. The stone circle called the
Grey Mare and her Colts is in the parish, and other
Neolithic remains. The ruins of Kingston Russell House
(where Admiral Hardy lived and J. L. Motley died) are
also in the parish.
The way lies now across country utterly desolate. Take
the footpath past the church over the hill, cross the main
road, and go by other faint tracks straight to Compton
Valence, three miles away. In the valley leading down to
that hamlet, traces of the Roman water supply for Dor-
chester have been found. The little village takes its second
name from the Earls of Pembroke, but they did not succeed in
giving it any history. It must have slept among its trees
undisturbed since Hugo de Forth received the manor from
the Conqueror, in lieu of Bundi the Saxon.
Another winding track, also in places undiscoverable,
leads to Grimstone, in the- cool spacious Frome valley.
There is nothing of note here. But it is necessary now to
choose between two routes to the next objective Batcombe,
on the edge of Blackmore Vale. You can get on to a pretty
byroad by Grimstone station and go along past Sydling
Water to Sydling St. Nicholas, and through Up-Sydling to the
hills. Or you can follow the Roman road. The first four
miles are utterly deserted and very beautiful ; then it
becomes the main Dorchester-Yeovil road, and there is more
traffic. A little before the fourth milestone (fourth from
Maiden Newton, twelfth from Dorchester) turn to the right,
and you will come to the same point as by the Sydling route.
THE NEW RICH 151
Or by adding an extra mile or so to your walk you can
combine the best of both routes ; go three miles or more
along the Roman road and then take the track already
mentioned* down to Sydling.
Certainly Up-Sydling (a form of name similar to that seen
in Up-Cerne, Up-Lyme, Up-Wey) should not be over-
looked. It has a charming little farm-manor-house, and the
way to it lies alongside streams at many points. Behind it
rise the great hills, and the path climbs through a glorious
wooded valley to the summit, nearly 800 feet up.
This is the best approach to almost the best view in the
south of England ; for you come to it quite unexpectedly.
But I shall speak of that later. For the present, do not wait,
but go down the steep track to Batcombe Church. As you
stand on the top of the hill, you look right on to the build-
ing, and its seems almost as if you could leap over it with a
little effort. Indeed, a less desirable person than the reader
of this book is said to have done so. It was anciently a
custom of the devil to exercise his horse in this manner.
A former vicar of Batcombe (the living goes with that of
Frome Vauchurch, five steep miles away) told me that when
he first went to the place, a generation ago, one of the pin-
nacles of the tower had fallen and was lying in the church-
yard. He had great difficulty in replacing it ; for the
villagers insisted that the devil's horse had knocked it off
with his hoof as he leapt in derision over the holy building,
and to restore it would be to their hurt.
The devil was not the only wizard in Batcombe There are
strange tales of one Conjuring Minterne, who lived in the
seventeenth century John Minterne, of a well-known
local family. Sir Frederick Treves recalls these stories.
Formerly, according to Hutchins, half his gravestone lay
in Batcombe churchyard. Like another Dorset man of the
same century, he would be buried neither in nor outside the
church, and had his tomb placed in the wall.
The church itself has a simple slab recording his death.
* Pages 115, 116.
152 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
It has also that rare thing, a stone screen, of plain good
design. It is a little unpretentious place of worship, suitable,
somehow, to this village lost between the great hills and the
great valley.
Lost ? No : not entirely. Batcombe was the town of
the Little Commonwealth ; a penal settlement for children,
on advanced and successful lines. Hither came little
delinquents from the London Police Courts, and learnt by
experience the duties of freedom. They were their own
governors, held their own law courts, under wisely veiled
supervision. There were incorrigibles among them, run-
aways, idlers, of course, but on the whole the place made for
a real reform of the spirit, a genuine application of the theory
of social punishment which does not try to penalize but to
change the soul. It was closed during the war, for reasons
unconnected with its ideals. And then it had another ideal ;
it became a farm settlement for ex-service men. But that
too has perished.
So down into the Vale of Blackmore, a great weald
formerly closely wooded, and once called, according to
Coker of Mappowder in the Vale, the Forest of White Hart;
for a gentleman of that district killed, at King's Stag Bridge
over the Stour (the name still stands), a white hart which
Henry III, hunting there, had spared ; " but he soon
found how dangerous it was to be twitching a lion by the
ears," for the King imprisoned him and exacted a yearly
fine called White Hart Silver.
Except in May, this weald country is not of great beauty
or interest as compared with the hills or the heath. The
road runs quietly to Leigh. Here there is a miz-maze or
curiously wrought earthwork, the meaning of which is not
certainly known : formerly in spring the young folk used
to scour it every few years, with mirth and cheerful ritual.
There is another at " Troy," not far from Dorchester, to the
east, and there used to be one at Pimperne.
Hence, still by road, either to Lillington or Long Burton,
and so at last to Sherborne, the old seat of the bishopric,
THE NEW RICH 153
the capital of Western Wessex, " the most frequented town
in the county " in Elizabeth's day.
I have spoken of Sherborne Abbey and its glorious fan
tracery, and of Aldhelm its great first bishop. I will not
now dwell on the school, with its splendid buildings, new
and old, its library, its high traditions ; nor upon the con-
duit in mid-town, nor the " hospital " whose residents are
so anxiously eager to show its treasures ; nor upon the many
old houses, nor upon the unseemly architecture and solid
comfort of the chief inn : nor even at any length upon the
Castle, except to mention that its central portion was built
by Sir Walter Raleigh, who here, it is said, first performed
the miracle of smoking, and caused his servant to try to
extinguish him with a bucket of water.*
It is in the fate of Sherborne Castle as Raleigh's possession
that the Tudor spirit seems to me to stand out most vividly.
" Great Raleigh," he was called : a man of imagination
and high courage, a writer of noble English, a sanguine
discoverer : I wonder if he was great.
He desired the manor of Sherborne exceedingly. It
belonged to the bishopric of Sarum. His biographer says
that " his eagerness to improve his own position came into
happy conjunction with a strong opinion, which he shared
with a large body of contemporaries, that Bishops and
Church dignitaries ought not to be too heavily weighted
with secular wealth." The bishopric opportunely fell
vacant. It was a more than hinted condition of the appoint-
ment of a successor to it that he would convey the Castle
estate to the Queen for Raleigh. " I gave the Queen a
jewel, worth 250, to make the Bishop." She made the
Bishop. Raleigh got Sherborne.
His life there was simple. He liked the place. He was
concerned chiefly with domestic affairs. One Meeres,
bailiff of Sherborne, was always plaguing him with writs
* In testimony whereof it may be observed that forty years after
Raleigh's death Sherborne possessed a presumably well-to-do tobacco-
cutter, Robert Wyer.
154- THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
and Meeres had married a kinswoman of Lady Essex,
" a poor man's wife of this country, but too good for such a
knave." He hawked. He looked after Cecil's son. He had
the inconvenience of learning that his wife and son had (in
his absence) to flee in different directions because " the
plague is in the town very hot." He could easily get to the
coast to look after his shipping monopoly. He met with
annoyance once at Weymouth in that connection ; one
Gilbert had landed a cargo of sassafras wood : "I have a
patent that all ships and goods are confiscate that shall
trade there without my leave, but whereas sassafras was
worth 10s., 12s., and 20s. a pound before Gilbert returned,
his cloying of the market will overthrow all mine, and his
own also."
From these little things he went to the Tower and lay
under sentence of the grim and clumsy block for alleged
treachery, never proved. He wrote distractedly to his wife
at Sherborne, when he could no longer endure the suspense,
and believed his doom certain : he had resolved on suicide.
But even then he cared for the Dorset and Devon men who
had trusted him : he asked his wife to sell his possessions,
" and let the poor men's wages be paid with the goods, for
the Lord's sake. Oh, what will my poor servants think,
at their return, when they hear I am accused to be Spanish
who sent them at my great charge to plant and discover
upon his [the King of Spain's] territory."
A little later he was in a greater mood, and would fain
leave the world as a gentleman, and lie last of all in the place
he loved : (l You shall receive, dear wife, my last words in
these my last lines. My love I send you, that you may
keep it when I am dead ; and my counsel, that you may
remember it when I am no more. I would not, with my last
will, present you with sorrows, dear Bess. Let them go to
the grave with me, and be buried in the dust. And, seeing
it is not the will of God that ever I shall see you in this life,
bear my destruction gently, and with a heart like yourself.
."" . Beg my dead body, which living was denied you ;
THE NEW RICH 155
and either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue, or in
Exeter church, by my father and mother. I can write no
more. Time and death call me away. . . . My true wife,
farewell. Bless my poor boy ; pray for me. My true God
hold you both in His arms.
" Written with the dying hand of sometime thy husband,
but now (alas) overthrown.
" Yours that was ; but now not my own,
"W. RALEIGH."
But there remained the last reprieve for the unhappy
expedition to Guiana : James I was ready to pardon one
who might make him rich. Raleigh's letters to Sherborne
on that voyage are uneven ; as a rule he is uncertain and
despondent, but occasionally he says a word which must
have sounded exotic to quiet Dorset. " To tell you I might
be here King of the Indians were a vanity ; but my name
doth still live among them. Here they feed me with fresh
meat, and all that the country yields ; all offer to obey me."
His son died while he was on the voyage : "I shall sorrow
the less, because I have not long to sorrow, because not long
to live. . . . My brains are broken, and it is a torment for
me to write, and especially of misery."
He failed ; Eldorado was not to be discovered by him,
and he came back to pay the penalty of failure. He knew
how to die : " He was the most fearless of death that ever
was known ; and the most resolute and confident, yet with
reverence and conscience. . . . He gave God thanks that
he never feared death, and much less then, for it was but
an opinion and imagination." ..." He was very cheerful
that morning he died, ate his breakfast heartily, and took
tobacco, and made no more of his death than if he had been
to take a journey."
" At Sherborne, if the land continue . . ." As soon as
Raleigh was dead, King James clutched at the estate for
his favourite Robert Carr : "I mun ha' it for Robbie."
Carew Raleigh, the son, remonstrated in vain : " they
called the conveyance of Sherborne in question, in the
156 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
Exchequer," he wrote to the House of Commons, " and for
want of one word (which word was found notwithstanding
in the paper-book, and was the oversight of a clerk) they
pronounced the conveyance invalid, and Sherborne for-
feited to the Crown : a judgment easily to be foreseen
without witchcraft ; since his chief est judge was his greatest
enemy, and the case between a poor friendless prisoner and a
King of England."
IX
" . . . for the deliverance of King James I, the Queen, the Prince, and
all the Royal Branches, with the Nobility, Clergy, and Commons of
England, by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter,
in a most barbarous and savage manner, beyond the examples of
former ages."
The Book of Common Prayer.
" During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all
in a 76, they are in that condition which is called War ; and such a
war as is of every man against every man. . . . The nature of War
consisteth not in actual fighting ; but in the known disposition
thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All
other time is Peace.
" Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every man
is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein
men live without other security than what their own strength and
their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such conditions,
there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain ;
and consequently no Culture of the Earth ; no Navigation, nor use
of the commodities that may be imported by sea ; no commodious
Building ; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as
require much force ; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth ; no
account of Time ; no Arts ; no Letters ; no Society ; and which is
worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death ; and the
life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
THOMAS HOBBES,
Leviathan.
" The sons of Belial had a glorious time."
JOHN DRYDEN,
Absalom and Achitophel.
IX
PKINCES IN FLIGHT
BEAMlNSTEin
I HAVE said more about economic and social changes
than political, hitherto, because, on the whole, political
ideas were hardly so diffused as to be the property
of more than a limited class of Englishmen. The people in
general felt the incidence of the policy informed by such
ideas ; but except for the brief outburst of the Peasants'
Revolt, their concern with the state of society was material
rather than reflective. In the seventeenth century, however,
they tampered actively with the State machine. All classes
were, at least potentially, property owners ; all paid
national taxes, received national justice or injustice, did
national service through their local agency, the parish.
Newspapers were started. A king was beheaded, his elder
son chased, his younger son, also a king, exiled, his bastard
grandson beheaded.
159
160 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
There is a famous passage in the first Lord Shaftesbury's
autobiography which gives a lively picture of one side of
Dorset life in that century. The gentry used to meet once
a week (usually at Handley, on the edge of Cranborne
Chase) to play bowls. There were notable men among them :
Lord Bristol (Charles I's Secretary of State), for instance,
and the Denzil Holies, who in 1629 held the Speaker in the
Chair to prevent the House from adjourning at the King's
command.* They were not to be all on the same side in the
Civil War ; and the most brilliant of them all, Shaftesbury
himself, was the least stable in principle and in fact :
" A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay, . . .
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease,
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state."
It is impossible, nevertheless, for all his " close designs
and crooked counsels," not to be fascinated by Shaftesbury's
restless, versatile, indomitable spirit and fine mind. Frail
of body, in constant pain, he showed high courage all his
life, from the day when, as a freshman at Oxford, he put
down the barbarous custom of " tucking," to the time when,
dying a refugee in Holland, he was brought back for burial
in the county of which he had been so great a part.
But not all the people of Dorset were occupied in the
manner of the Handley company. At the very time of
Shaftesbury's account, the Rev. John White (an Oxford-
shire man) " held a strong sway " in Dorchester. " A grave
" God's wounds ! " cried Holies, " you shall sit till we please to rise ! "
It is interesting to find so lively a figure commemorated at Dorchester in
a panegyric exceptional in an epoch of complacent epitaphs : I may quote
a sentence or two : it is very long :
" All that Denzil's wit or courage, probity or industry, presaged in his
youth, he made good and exceeded when grown a man, for, as excellent
endowments and abilities made him early known to his prince and country,
so he could, by his eloquence and valour, intrepidly defend the liberty
of the last without refusing the obedience that was due to the former."
Two of the chubbiest possible cherubs shed frozen marble tears before the
effigy of Denzil posed very uncomfortably in the costume of a Roman
senator^
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 161
man, without moroseness, as who would willingly contribute
his shot of facetiousness on any just occasion. A constant
preacher. ... A good governor, by whose wisdom the town
of Dorchester (notwithstanding a casual merciless fire)
was much enriched ; knowledge causing piety, piety breed-
ing industry, and industry procuring plenty unto it. A
beggar was not then to be seen in the town, all able poor
being set on work, and impotent maintained by the profit
of a public brewhouse, and other collections. He absolutely
commanded his own passions, and the purses of his
parishioners, whom he could wind up to what height he
pleased on important occasions. He was free from covetous-
ness, if not trespassing on the contrary ; and had a
patriarchal influence both in Old and New England."
Thomas Fuller, from whose Worthies the quotation comes,
possibly knew White personally, for from 1634 to 1641
(and perhaps again at the end of his life) he held the Dorset
living of Broadwindsor, where his pulpit is still in use.
White, however, was more than the parson of the county
town. He was a leader of the West country Puritans, and
it was largely due to him that the non-conforming party
formed the Massachusetts Company (often called the Dor-
chester Company), and in 1628 founded (or rather, organized)
a settlement in that colony. A monument to John Endicott
or Endecott, the first governor, was unveiled at Weymouth
in 1914 by Endicott 's descendant, the wife of Joseph
Chamberlain. Endicott is said to have been a Dorchester
man. The first colonists sailed from Weymouth in the
Abigail on June 20, 1628.
It seems probable that the idea of this settlement arose
out of the Dorset fishing " adventures " oversea. The
boats in that trade sailed with double crews, to expedite
the catch and packing. " It was conceived," says an
authoritative pamphlet on the New England traffic, almost
certainly written by White himself, " that, the fishing
being ended, the spare men that were above their necessary
sailors might be left behind with provisions for a year ;
M
162 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
and when that ship returned next year, they might assist
them in fishing, as they had done the former year ; and
in the meantime, might employ themselves in building, and
planting corn, which, with the provisions of fish, fowl, and
venison that the land yielded, would afford them the chief
of their food." They raised " a stock of more than 3000,
intended to be paid in five years, but afterwards disbursed
in a shorter time." But it was found (" which experienced
fishermen could easily have foreseen beforehand ") that
good fishermen do not necessarily make good land settlers,
nor a fishing ground an earthly paradise. They wanted shoe-
makers, vineplanters, " men skilful in making of pitch, of
salt," a barber-surgeon, mining experts, and so on. It
needed Endicott's arrival with new settlers not bound to
the fisheries, but akin in their desire for religious liberty,
and amenable to the governor's genuine powers of organiza-
tion, to set up the new colony on a sound footing ; though
even so the sort of practical difficulty that had to be faced
can be gathered from a letter to White, of 1632, about a
Dorset man : " I have much difficulty to keep John
Galloppe (Gollop ?) here by reason his wife will not come.
I marvel at her woman's weakness, that she will live
miserably with her children there, when she might live
comfortably with her husband here. I pray you persuade
and further her coming by all means ; if she will come let
her have the remainder of his wages, if not let it be bestowed
to bring over his children, for so he desires. It would be
about 40 loss to him to come for her."
Moreover, in addition to this vigorous undertaking of
White's, the Puritan movement had long had a strong
support in Dorset in the increasingly numerous non-con-
forming churches. Poole, possibly, was the earliest Dorset
centre of dissatisfaction with either the Roman Catholic or
the Protestant organization. One Thomas Hancock of that
place was in the first year of King Edward VI " called to
be minister of God's word at the town of Poole, which town
was at the time wealthy, for they embraced God's word,
PRINCES IN FLIGHT
163
they were in favours with the rulers and governors of the
realm, they were the first that in that part of England were
called Protestants : they did love one another ; and every
one glad of the company of the others ; and so God poured
His blessing plentifully upon them."
The domestic life of the period was largely a matter of
small beer laced with spite. Individualists of to-day are
rather apt to call upon the past to support their cries for
liberty. They would find it hard to appreciate a condition
of things in which the community as a whole had so much
power as it had in Stuart times. A genuine conservative
might indeed feel sympathy with the examiners of Roger
Honiborne of Dorchester, who in 1630 affirmed that Robert
Hoskins and Thomas Waite " were in Mr. Angell Greyes
grounds of Kingston and fished in his waters and tooke
fishe there," and wouldn't put them back again when
Honiborne (who seems to have been a keeper of an early
type) " willed " them to do so. But some of the more
socialistic interferences with the liberty of the subject might
prove displeasing. You were liable to be examined by the
magistrates or " presented " to the parish or the justice
for any trivial offence and that before the Puritans held
the reins : and your examiners, the authorities of the
community, had full power to do justice upon you. " Mary
Tuxbury, for scolding at the sergeants ... is ordered to be
plounced when the weather is warmer." Justice, but mercy
. . . plouncing is ducking in the Frome. " Hugh Baker,
carrier of this Borough, was complayned of to Mr. Maior that
he went out of church yesterday at Morning Prayer before
prayers were ended, and confesseth to the same, and is
censured to sit in the stocks two houres for his misdemeanor "
(1629). John Gape was summoned for playing " at the
ball " in the prison court : Anthony Wood for saying to
Matthew Swaffield " that his heart was so hollow that the
Divell might dance in it." In 1630 the Justices had to hear
this terrible story : " John Graunt upon oath. Yesterday
coming from Weymouth, [Robert] George demanded of
164 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
Pouncy where he beloed like a calfe ; he said he was a man,
and George said he was a puppy ; then Pouncy alighted
from his horse and after divers speeches George strake
Pouncy with a Cudgell." No wonder that in 1632 the sons
of Roger and Thomas Pouncy (" greate boyes ") were fined
12d. apiece, with others, for being absent from church and
playing " at Nine Holes for money, a farthing a game.'*
Yet one of them was put in the stocks for doing it again a
few months later ; and Thampson Pouncy, " the wife of
Thomas Pouncy the elder," shortly afterwards was plounced
" three several times " as a common scold : and Thomas
Pouncy the younger was charged in 1637 with being at the
bull-baiting and " breaking the bullkeeper's head with
his cudgell." A spirited family.
And while I am dealing with names so well known still in
Dorset and Dorchester, here is yet another of 1632. " William
Hardy, gent, dwelling everywhere (as he said), charged
with swearing eight oathes, and abused the constables,
saying : ' that he durst say they weare all a company of
dampned creatures and the divell would have them all, and
called them cod's heads and sheepe's heads.' ' It cost him
eight shillings and a day in gaol, from which he was released
on " plenary confession."*
I do not propose to dwell in detail on the historical events
of this period. The county was fairly evenly divided in the
Civil War. Like other counties, it had its grievances,
particularly the extraction of shipmoney, the administration
of the forest and highway laws, and the billeting of soldiers.
No great battle was fought within its borders, but it was in a
constant state of warfare. Corfe and Sherborne castles were
duly besieged and " slighted."
* The quotations are from the Dorchester Municipal Records, edited
with loving care by Charles Herbert Mayo and Arthur William Gould
(Exeter, 1908). That great Dorset antiquary, Mr. H. J. Moule, aided the
project of publication. But it is clear from Mr. Gould's modest preface
that most of the cost (apart from all the toil) of production fell on the
Editors. This is a most valuable social document. When will the greatest
country in the world be able, or feel able, to do for its local records what
it has done for its State Papers ?
A strange picture of the equally squalid party strife of this period is
contained in the annotated edition of James Strong's Joanereidos.
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 165
Lyme withstood a memorable siege. It was of high
importance to Charles to win it ; Blake, who afterwards
defeated Van Tromp off Portland, was one of the defenders.
It is difficult to understand to-day how a town so situated
at the very bottom of a steep cup could not be taken
with some ease. But the defence was determined. The
great historian of Lyme, Roberts, from whom Macaulay
drew, without excessive acknowledgment or accuracy, his
picturesque information, says that " the resistance of the
townsmen was most obstinate : their courage was increased
by the vehement harangues and violent rhapsodies of
twenty-five puritanical preachers, who confidently assured
eternal salvation to those who should fall in the contest."
The women joined valiantly in the struggle. One lost a hand
in conflict. All she said was " Truly, I am glad with all my
heart I had a hand to lose for Jesus Christ, for whose cause I
am willing to lose, not only my other hand, but my life also."
Fairfax on the one side and Goring on the other encamped
often within the county borders ; and Wareham and Poole
Roundhead, in spite of an offer by the Marquis of Hertford
to spend 200 a week there if it would change sides had
their usual full share of any available fighting. William
Wake, rector of Holy Trinity, Wareham (grandfather of
a Dorset Archbishop of Canterbury), suffered exceptionally.
He was first shot by a Parliamentary agent ; then cut over
the head and left for dead : then sent prisoner to Dorchester,
where he caught the plague. Meanwhile his family were
turned out of doors and his goods seized. He was set free,
joined the Royalists, was captured at Sherborne, stripped
and paraded naked through the town, and sent prisoner,
first to Poole, where plague was raging, and then to Corfe.
When the main fighting was over, he retired to Blandford,
but the Parliament men " kept him, a very infirm man, on
their guards, and daily moved him with them as they were
commanded from place to place." " He was nineteen
times a prisoner in the time of the rebellion, and all that
time under sequestration."
166 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
The Bridport records contain a valuable document on the
realities of the taxation Charles I found it desirable to im-
pose. It requires Dorset to provide a man-of-war of four
hundred tons, one hundred and sixty men, guns and equip-
ment, and victuals for twenty-six weeks : six or eight
assessors were to supervise the levy. The alleged cause
was " that certain pirates and sea robbers, both Mohametans,
detesters of the Christian name, and others," had " collected
together, robbing and spoiling the ships and goods not only
of our own subjects but of the subjects of our allies upon the
sea, which had been formerly accustomed to be guarded
by the English nation." The order in which the municipal
authorities of Dorset were addressed in this writ is curious,
and perhaps significant : the towns run thus Poole,
Dorchester, Wey mouth and Melcombe Regis, Bridport,
Lyme Regis, Corfe Castle, Shaftesbury, Blandford, " the
good men of Poole and of the Isle of Purbeck, of the Vills
of Portland, Burton, Sherborne, Cranborne, and Stoborough,
and all other places " : no Vareham, no Wimborne.
There was, however, one feature of the war in Dorset
which deserves special notice : the rising of the Clubmen.
This is sometimes spoken of as though it were the work of a
rabble of irritated peasants, who simply desired to live and
let live, and to keep their fields free of bloodshed. It was
at least serious enough to cause both Fairfax and Goring
to pay attention to it. It occurred in 1645. In that year,
on May 25, a meeting of men from Dorset and Wilts was held
at Badbury Rings ; neither the first nor the least resolute
gathering in that ancient fortress. There were present
" near 4000 armed with Clubs, Swords, Bills, Pitchforks,
and other, several weapons, etc." The meeting declared, in
resolutions read by one Thomas Young, that " our ancient
laws and liberties . . . are altogether swallowed up in the
arbitrary power of the sword," and covenanted, among other
things, " to join with and assist one another in the mutual
defence of our Liberties and Properties against all Plunderers,
and all other unlawful violence whatsoever." Their
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 167
immediate concern was to prevent violence. In every parish
there was to be a committee of three, " for assistance and
direction," with two constables to raise the alarm at any
sign of tumult ; and all were to " furnish themselves with
as much, and good, arms, weapons, and ammunition as they
can procure."
A few weeks later the inhabitants of Dorset petitioned
the King himself ; " the petitioners, since these unhappy
Civil Wars, having in a deeper measure than other subjects
of this kingdom, suffered by means of the many garrisons
within this little county (they being ten in number) and the
armies partly drawn into these parts by reason thereof."
Charles, in a statesmanlike reply filling several pages of
print, said that the matter was receiving attention. So did
Fairfax, when a deputation waited upon him also, and asked
" that all laws not repealed be in force, and executed by the
ordinary officers : that all men who desire it may lay down
arms : and others, who have absented themselves from their
homes, may have free liberty to return and live at home."
Fairfax knew what civil war meant : he found at Dorchester,
for instance ("a town famous for piety and good affection "
to his cause), that " divers of the best inhabitants being
forced from it, the beauty of the town is much impaired,
and many houses empty." But how could he maintain
an army, he asked in his reply, and so attain his just
aims, if everyone went home ? Necessity . . .
The deputation to him was led by men of good name.
It contained a Trenchard and a Holies : John St. Loe,
Peter Hoskins, Esquire, Master Robert Paulet, gent ; and
" Master Thomas Young, an attorney, more eloquent
than honest." I should like to know more of Master
Thomas Young, the orator of Badbury : but history
is silent.
The chief recorded motto of the Clubmen was on one of
their banners :
" If you offer to plunder our cattle,
Be assured we will give you battle."
168 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
The London news-sheets of the time regarded them as
both partisan and dangerous ; but the alleged partisanship
depended on the journal. " The Clubmen speak altogether
the royal language, however they may seem to be neuter,"
says the True Informer. " The most eminent gentlemen,
and others, for the King in those parts, are their leaders :
neither are they without some from Oxford, the most notori-
ously profane and noted wicked persons in that county and
Wiltshire are among them, and but few either of seeming
civility or religion." " There are Knights among them,"
cried the Moderate Intelligencer ; " they are armed very
well." But the Scottish Dove said that " these men (as they
first resolved, hold perfect neutrals) oppose free quarter by
both sides, and yet accommodate either with provisions for
money . . . which assures me their affections stand right
to the Parliament."
The elementary Soviet system did not live up to the hopes
or fears formed of it. Cromwell himself arrived in August,
1645, and persuaded one section to go quickly home. The
rest encamped on Hambledon Hill, above the Stour. Crom-
well demanded surrender, which was refused. Major Des-
borough was ordered to approach and prepare to charge.
The Clubmen fired, whereupon Desborough " got in the
rear of them, beat them from the work, and did some small
execution upon them ; I believe killed not twelve of them,
but cut very many, and we have taken about 300 ; many
of which are poor silly creatures, whom if you please to let
me send home, they promise to be very dutiful for time
to come, and will be hanged before they come out again."
Cromwell, who wrote this, was made for larger wars
and greater policies. It is suggestive to notice how intimate
and petty and personal all the Dorset connection with the
Civil War is. The county seems only to touch larger issues
in a venture like White's, or in the supreme tragedy of
" King Monmouth " ; though by a curious chance it may
have had a vision of what was to come in the great world.
It is recorded that " a very learned pious man," Mr. John
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 169
Sadler of Warmwell, in 1661 prophesied to his Rector :
he said a " Someone " in the room in which he lay ill told
him " that there would die in the city of London so many
thousands, mentioning the number, which I have forgotten,
and the time that the city would be burnt down. . . . That
we should have three sea-fights with the Dutch. . . . That
afterwards there would come three small ships to land in
the west of Wey mouth, that would put all England in a
uproar, but it would come to nothing. That in the year
1688 there would come to pass such a thing in this kingdom
that all the world would take notice of it." It was, as the
gentleman in Martin Chuzzlewit says, " a prediction cruel
smart."
But for one strange alarm Dorset had little to do with
great events between the Restoration and the coming of
Monmouth. That alarm was experienced at the time of
the Gates affair. One Capt. John Laurence of Grange, in
1678, reported that he had seen " a vast number of armed
men, several thousands, marching from Flowers Barrow
over Grange Hill ; and a great noise and clashing of arms
was supposed to have been heard." People on the hills
and the heath fled hastily to Wareham, which was barricaded.
The militia were called out. And nothing was ever seen of
the phantom army, to whose existence Laurence and his
brother subsequently swore on oath before the Privy Council.
Hutchins ascribes it to the effect of mist on the Purbeck
rocks.
It is not difficult to follow on foot the path of the two
princes, father and son, who made Dorset notable in this
seventeenth century. Charles II tried to leave England by
way of the county in 1651. Monmouth entered England
through it in 1685 and was captured within its borders a
few weeks afterwards.
The flight of Charles II through Dorset is adorned with
many picturesque details. It was from Boscobel that he
came to Col. Wyndham's house at Trent, a village near
Yeovil, now part of Dorset. Mrs. Wyndham wrote the
170 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
fullest of the accounts of his stay " in that Ark in which God
shutt him up, when the Floods of Rebellion had covered the
face of his Dominions." He arrived on September 17,
and a secret chamber was kept in readiness for any
emergency. His purpose was to take a boat from some
western port to France. Apparently he was unaware that
the western ports were full of Parliamentary troops preparing
for an expedition to Jersey. He knew, of course, that there
was a hue and cry after himself ; and at Lyme, there had
just been set up a proclamation, dated September 10, in
which " a heavy penalty was thundered out against all that
should conceal the King or any of his party," and a price of
1000 set upon Charles's person.
At Trent, however, he seemed to be reasonably safe, and
it was within easy distance both of the Dorset ports and of
the Bristol Channel. His adventures in Dorset begin with
a visit which Col. Wyndham paid to William Ellesdon of
Lyme, one of a family long of repute in that town. Ellesdon
was a known Royalist, and, as he himself says, " would with
the utmost hazard of my person and whatsoever else was dear
to me strenuously endeavour " to serve the King. Wynd-
ham asked him to find a vessel for France, telling him the
truth about the proposed passengers (Lord Wilmot was with
Charles). Ellesdon had a sea captain, Stephen Limbry,
as tenant of a house of his at Charmouth, and they rode over
to see him. Limbry agreed to do the business for sixty
pounds, payable on completion of the undertaking. He was
master of " a small vessel of about thirty tons."
Here there is some room for geographical conjecture.
The arrangements made provided for embarking for Char-
mouth " by the seaside." " Indeed," says Ellesdon, " a
more commodious place for such a design could hardly be
found, it lying upon the shore a quarter of a mile from any
house, or footpath." Charmouth village was and is a quarter
of a mile from the sea a peculiarity of distance shared in
various degrees also by Abbotsbury, Swyre, Burton Brad-
stock, Bridport town, and Chideock, along this coast. On
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 171
the other hand Limbry's boat was moored off Lyme Regis
Cobb, from two to three miles away. A little before the time
appointed for departure, Limbry took the boat out " to
the Cobb's mouth for fear of being beneaped." The Septem-
ber neap tides are usually the lowest of the year, as the
spring tides of the same month are the highest ; and at a
neap tide all along that coast from Axmouth to Burton the
moorings can hardly be reached or quitted because of the
low water.
Further, Ellesdon, riding back with Wyndham to Lyme,
" chose the land road . . . that upon the top of a hill
situate in our way betwixt these two towns, upon a second
view he might be more perfectly acquainted with the way
that leads from Charmouth to the place appointed for His
Majesty's taking boat." The whole coast has altered since
then : it has altered even so recently as 1921 ! The cliffs
have fallen. The land where twenty-four years after Charles's
flight Monmouth enrolled his poor peasants at Lyme is now
beneath the sea. The road now known as the Devil's
Bellows was not in existence in 1651. Charmouth stream,
maybe, ran openly to the sea instead of burying itself in the
shingle bank.
I think that Charles was meant to be rowed from Char-
mouth beach to Cobb's mouth, a stiff pull ; and that Ellesdon
took Wyndham up to the still existing old high road, an
inflexible steep track from which not only Charmouth but
Lewsdon and Pilsdon and Marshwood Vale, and far more
distant hills, and the most glorious curve of coast in England,
are seen spread out in a magnificent pageant. There
(among the bracken and blackberries which would conceal
him as well as any Boscobel oak) well might the King of
England look out over his realm with pride and love.
The course of English history was very near deflection
in the next few hours. Wyndham rode back to Trent. He
sent a servant, Henry Peters, to the Queen's Arms at
Charmouth to bespeak rooms for the fugitive while he waited
for the boat. He was to represent Charles as a runaway
172 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
lover eloping with his lady (who was to be played by Juliana
Coningsby, Wyndham's niece). This was satisfactorily
arranged over a glass of wine with the hostess.
They set out in due course, Miss Coningsby riding pillion,
Wyndham in front as guide, Wilmot and Peters a little
way behind, " that they might not seem to be all of one
company." Ellesdon met them, and took them to his
brother's house at Monkton Wyld, a village to-day very
beautifully placed among trees, just off the road from Char-
mouth to Hunter's Lodge. (The brother is said in one account
to have been " a violent Oliver ian.") It is impossible to
tell, among the many lanes of Marshwood Vale, what roads
were then in existence for them to follow, in the days before
the main highways of the present time were even thought of.
They may have gone along something like the present
main road round the top of the vale, or even through
Axminster.
The king gave Ellesdon, for remembrance, a gold coin,
" which in his solitary hours he made a hole to put a ribbin
in." There were more solitary hours to come, but some
of them full of fears lest the solitude be broken. At dusk
they moved to Charmouth. The Queen's Arms is now
a private house, marked by a commemorative tablet.
Ellesdon had told Limbry, for the benefit of the crew, that
his friend " Mr. Payne," a merchant Lord Wilmot and his
servant (the King) wanted to sail by night because, " Lyme
being a Town Corporate," " Payne " feared an arrest in his
sudden voyage to St. Malo to recover property from a dis-
honest factor. Limbry seems to have swallowed this tale.
Unfortunately for the King, however, he did not warn his
wife of his intended voyage till the last moment, when he
went home to get some linen. Now she had been at Lyme
Fair that day, and had read the proclamation of September
10th : and she was not minded to lose her husband. She
suspected his alleged cargo to be refugees from Worcester,
to say the least ; and she locked her Stephen in, and " by
the help of her two daughters kept him in by force."
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 173
Limbry seems to have done his best. He " showed his
wisdom," Ellesdon said, " by his peaceable behaviour, for
had he striven in the least it is more than probable that His
Majesty and his attendents had been suddenly seized upon
in the inn." But later on, apparently, he got some mitiga-
tion of his duress ; for Wyndham, watching, in the moon-
light, on Charmouth beach, for the boat that was to save his
King, " discovers a man coming, dogged at a small distance
by two or three women. This indeed was the master of the
vessel, who by this time had obtained liberty (yet still under
the eyes of his over-zealous keepers) to walk towards the
seaside with an intention to make known to those that waited
for him the sad tidings of this disappointment together with
the causes." Wyndham thought the figure was Limbry 's,
but was not certain, and dared not question him because
of the women.
It was one of many curiously suspicious mischances
in Charles's flight. Half a dozen incidents seem to hint that
everyone knew who he was, and many would help towards
his capture, but none would commit the direct act of
betrayal.
One or other of the party waited on the beach all night
for the boat which never came. Their horses were kept
saddled, their gear not unpacked. In the morning Peters,
Wyndham's servant, was sent to Ellesdon at Lyme to
enquire what had happened. Charles and Wyndham and
Miss Coningsby set off towards Bridport : Lord Wilmot was
to follow them and meet them at the George in that
town (now the frequented and pleasant shop of Mr. Beach)
as soon as Peters came back with news.
The news might well have been even more disturbing
than, 'in the end, it was. The hostess of the Queen's
Arms had lately taken on as an ostler an ex-service man
(as we should say to-day) " a notorious knave," who,
" perhaps inspired and prompted by the devil," called her
attention to the strange behaviour of her guests. Ellesdon,
in his narrative, half hints that she herself had some know-
174 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
ledge of their identity. But she would not listen to Henry
Hull the ostler. Henry, however, had to take Lord Wilmot's
horse to be shod that morning ; and when Hammet the
smith saw the hoofs, he exclaimed, " I am confident these
shoes were made and set in the north." Thereupon Hull
goes " to one Wesley, the puny parson of the place, and a
most devoted friend of the parricides, to ask his advice."*
Wesley was praying and could at first take no heed. But
when his " long-breathed devotions " were over, he went at
once to the host of the inn and " with most eager blattera-
tions catechiseth him " ; and from him to Robert Butler, a
justice, and a member of the Dorset Standing Committee,
for a warrant to set people on to apprehending the King.
Butler, it is said, refused. But Captain Massey or Macey,
in charge of troops at Lyme, to whom Wesley then repaired,
set off posthaste along the Bridport road with as many men
as he could get together.
I said " the host " was interrogated by Wesley. That
is one account. Another is that the parson went to the
hostess and said, " Why, how now, Margaret, you are a
maid of honour now ! " She asked what he meant. " Why,
Charles Stuart lay the last night at your house and kissed
you at his departure, so that now you can't but be a maid
of honour." Whatever Charles did or said, the hostess,
according to this story, was on his side : " if I thought it
was the King, I would think the better of my lips all days
of my life ; and so, Mr. Parson, get you out of my house,
or else I'll get those shall kick you out."
Something of all these suspicions how much is not
evident must have come to Wilmot's ears, for he and
Peters set off in haste after Charles. The Charmouth-
Bridport road in its present state was not constructed till
* Bartholomew Wesley or Westley, John Wesley's great grandfather.
"This Westley," says the author of Miraculum-Basilicon (1664) "is
since a Nonconformist, and lives by the practice of physic in the same
place. He told a good gentlewoman that he was confident, if ever the King
did come in again, he would love long prayers ; for had he not been longer
than ordinary at his devotions, he had surely snapped him."
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 175
over a century later, but doubtless followed much the same
natural lines up the long slow hill to Morecombelake,
round the curve of Har Down (most unexpected and lovable
of the sudden shaggy Dorset hills), down to little Chideock,
up again, and down over the bridge past Allington into
Bridport town, where the then George is almost at the
main cross roads.
In the paved yard which is still behind Mr. Beach's shop,
Charles in his character of servant was tending his mistress's
horse. The place was full of soldiers preparing for the
Jersey expedition. To him one Horton the ostler, " Ho,
friend ! I am glad to see thee here. I know you well ! "
Charles did not accept the recognition. Horton explained
that he had met him at Exeter, where he had been at an inn
eleven years with one Mr. Porter. " And I likewise," said
the prince, readily, " did serve Mr. Porter. I am glad that
I have met with my old acquaintance ; but I see now thou
art full of business, that thou canst not possibly drink with
me ; but when I shall chance to return from London, we
will talk more freely concerning our old affairs."
Fortunately Lord Wilmot arrived with Peters just
afterwards, and, spurred by his alarming news, the fugitives
set forth again at once, taking the Dorchester road. They
met many travellers, and among them one who was for-
merly a servant of Charles I. One account puts this meeting
between Charmouth and Bridport. But at any rate the
risk of recognition was becoming menacingly real, and they
resolved to take the next turning off the main road, " which
might probably lead towards Yeovil or Sherborne," and so
back to Trent.
Mr. A. M. Broadley was instrumental in placing a stone
slab to commemorate this " miraculous divergence." I
cannot feel sure that his choice of the lane or of the quotation
on the stone is correct. He cites Fuller's doggerel :
" At Worcester great God's goodness to the Nation
It was a Conquest Your bare Preservation.
When midst Your fiercest foes on every side
For your escape God did a LANE provide."
176 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
It is quite true that Fuller, as rector of Broadwindsor,
might know the more intimate details of Charles's adven-
tures in Dorset. But it seems to me more likely that
the " Lane " is not a road but a person Jane Lane, by
whose aid he got safely away immediately after Worcester
fight.
Mr. Broadley insisted that the Lane is Lee Lane, a by-
road running down to his own house at Bradpole. But that
would not take the fugitives to Yeovil or Sherborne, except
very indirectly even if the road then existed. It would
take them into marshy ground north of Bridport. What
looks like an older track, however, diverges from the main
road at the same place, in a much more promising direction
a disused broad path between hedges, which may well
have been an ancient bridle track, pointing (and in fact
leading) direct to the great land-mark of Eggardon which
is on the way to Yeovil and Sherborne.*
What is more, had they taken Lee Lane they would have
found themselves almost immediately in Bradpole village ;
whereas Mrs. Wyndham's account says they reached a
village " after many hours' travel." The village was Broad-
windsor. By following the track I have mentioned they
would have come out on higher ground near Power stock,
and might easily have wandered through the desolate
wooded country near Hooke and Wraxall, as certain eminent
* Ogilby's Traveller's Guide, a " description of England undertaken by
the express command of King Charles II," describes (I quote the 1699
edition) the road from Exeter to Dorchester. " At the end of Bridport an
indifferent straight way by Walditch and Lytton Churches on the right,
Long Lother and Askatham on the left." Long Lother is Loders ; and
Lee Lane can only reach Loders deviously, whereas the deserted track I
have mentioned goes close by Loders almost in a straight line. It is true
that Denzil Holies in 1651 held the manor of Loders ; but he was not
necessarily there, and Charles was not necessarily to know it if he was.
Bradpole is not mentioned by Ogilby. Askatham I take to be Askerswell.
The turning for Loders is given as at three furlongs from the bridge at
Bridport ; that for Askerswell at two miles three furlongs. A hundred
and more years later, the turnpike roads that still endure began to be
constructed, and the mean byroads of to-day lost their then importance.
It is much more likely that a track disused to-day is an old road of the pre-
turnpike era than that a better engineered one now in use is of continuous
ancestry. The present stretch of main road from the top of Chilcombe
Down to Axminster was built in 1754.
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 177
gipsies did later, without meeting a soul or seeing a house
till they fetched up at Broad Windsor inn.
At any rate, they found the inn in safety. If they had
kept to the Dorchester road, Captain Macey would have
caught them up. He was close upon their heels ; but he
followed the main road, up over Askerswell Hill and on all
the way to Dorchester, where, " with the utmost haste and
diligence, he searched all the inns and alehouses " in vain.
It chanced that the host of the George at Broad-
windsor was an old servant of Wyndham's, one Rhys Jones.
He gave them a private room. But they were not wholly out
of danger. Many houses round Char mouth were being
searched ; apparently it was common knowledge that Charles
was somewhere in the neighbourhood. One party of soldiers
came as near to Broad Windsor as Pilsdon Manor (owned by
Wyndham's uncle), where they offered much indignity to
the daughter of the house, believing that she was the prince
in disguise. Gregory Alford (of whom more shortly) says
that Ellesdon himself was in charge of this party, and was
eager for the 1000 reward ; the assertion is hardly con-
sistent with Ellesdon's own account, for he says that he
knew from the first who the fugitives were ; and if so, he
need not have postponed the betrayal. Alford hints at a
possible reason for disloyalty : " Ellesdon was newly
married to a very rich but rigid Presbyterian." Alford him-
self was vigorous against Dissenters.
But there was danger even nearer than Pilsdon. They
had not been in the George long when the village con-
stable arrived with forty soldiers for the Jersey expedition,
whom he billeted on the inn. With them was a " leaguer-
wench," a camp-follower so far gone towards motherhood
that she bore a child in the inn that night. This " made the
inhabitants very ill at ease, fearing the whole parish should
become the reputed father, and be enforced to keep the
child." Their uneasiness was fortunate, because it led to a
hot argument between the parish and the troops, and allowed
the royal party to relax their vigilance and consider their
178 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
position. They thought it " very hazardous to attempt
anything more in Dorsetshire " ; and after resting, left the
house quietly at dawn and returned without mishap to
Trent. Charles remained there undisturbed save for one
alarm about some mysterious troops at Sherborne till
October 6th, when he set out for the coast again : this time
more successfully, for he sailed from Brighton for France
on October 15th.
I have mentioned Gregory Alford. He is a Dorset link
between this flight of Charles II and the adventures in the
county of his wretched son, James Scott, Duke of Mon-
mouth, at this time only a year-old baby. When the
Dorset plan was first mooted, Col. Wyndham rode off
to Giles Strangways at Melbury Sampford, thinking him
a knowledgeable person who could find a boat, and also
a financial supporter. But Col. Strangways' father was
still living.* " He had no great command of money."
Moreover, most of his seafaring acquaintances were " for
their loyalty banished." He managed, however, to furnish
100 for the King's use, and he advised Wyndham to try
either Gregory Alford or William Ellesdon, both of Lyme.
But Alford was in Portugal, " forced," he says, " to be
abroad by reason of his loyalty."
Now Alford had married the daughter of one George
Potter of Exeter ; and the Bridport ostler Horton had been
in George Potter's service. It was in that service, Horton
said to Charles in the yard of the George inn, that they had
formerly met !
Gregory Alford prospered, it seems : and he was able to
show his loyalty to the Stuart dynasty later, for it was he
who, as the zealous mayor of Lyme, did so much to frustrate
* John Strangways, buried with others of his notable family in the
little church at Melbury Sampford, close to the great house. His Latin
epitaph records that he was " faithful to the King for whom he stood up,
boldly and continuously, throughout the severest hardships, while the
internecine conspiracy was at its height ; suffering the loss of his private
possessions, imprisonment, and every indignity, with the greatest fortitude,
and now " at the date of his death, at the age of eighty-two, on December
30, 1666 " beholding the restoration of King Charles II."
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 179
Monmouth's rebellion by sending early word of his landing
to London.
It was on June 11 (June 21, " N.S."), 1685, that "a
ten-oared boat landed three gentlemen [from three ships off
Lyme] at daybreak at Seatown [under Golden Cap]. They
asked some fishermen, while they treated them with bottles
of Canary and neats' tongues, what news there was ; who
said they knew none, but they had heard there was a
rebellion in Scotland by the Earl of Argyle." Two went
towards Taunton, and the third Colonel Venner, who
appears at Bridport a few days later re-embarked.
The local surveyor of customs heard of it, and became
suspicious. He told the mayor of Lyme, Alf ord. The surveyor
of Lyme had already put off to examine the vessels, and
had not returned. Later in the day, towards evening, a
newsletter from London arrived with the intelligence that
three boats well armed had sailed from Holland, ostensibly
for the Indies, but probably in reality for England, bearing
the Duke of Monmouth.
Gregory Alf ord and his friends were uneasy. They would
have summoned the boats to salute if there had been any
powder for the town guns ; but there was not. Suddenly
they saw seven boatloads of men fully armed rowing ashore.
The town drums were beaten, and the deputy-surveyor
with a few seamen ran to the Cobb, procuring a little
powder on the way from a West India merchant, and hand-
ing it over to a magistrate. He was too late for any resist-
ance. The Duke's men were ashore, escorted by townsmen
crying, "A Monmouth! a Monmouth the Protestant
religion ! "
They proceeded to enlist men in a field on the Church
Cliffs. " The Duke was in purple, with a star on his breast,
wearing only a sword." He said he had arms enough for
twenty or thirty thousand men. A long and wordy Declar-
ation was read, calling King James " a murderer and an
assassin of innocent men; a Popish usurper of the Crown;
Traitor to the Nation, and Tyrant over the People."
180 THE MARCHES OF WESSEX
The Duke's welcome was of a mixed character. A good
number of peasants joined him at once ; by June 12 he
had 1000 foot and 150 horse. He does not seem to have had
arms for more than twice that number at most (he had
to turn hundreds away), and he was not well provided with
money. Nor did the gentry join him as he hoped ; James
had been vigilant : some were arrested, some fled. In the
meantime the mayor of Lyme also fled : Lyme was now
hardly safe for him. But before he fled he despatched the
active deputy-surveyor of customs to London with a letter
to the King, reporting the invasion.
The next day men still flocked in Daniel Defoe was one
of them and there were soon sufficient for the formation of
four regiments, the Blue, the Yellow, the White, the Green.*
Then came a futile reconnoitring visit to Bridport, and
" Edward Coker, Gent, second son of Captain Robert Coker
of Mapowder, was slain at the Bull Inn, by one Vernier," as
the brass in the parish church and a rubbing of it at the
Bull testify. The fighting is said to have been very hot
while it lasted, but it seems to have been purposeless and
indiscriminate. Local tradition says that the invaders
pushed James's men up the steep Bothenhampton Hill
(above the present village, to the north and east of it), and
fought so fiercely that the lane up which they struggled a
narrow path between hedges now ran with blood. It is
called Bloody Lane to this day. But after a short time
both sides, according to the written accounts, seem to have
lost their heads. Lord Grey and his horsemen " ran and
never turned till they came to Lyme." Venner, being left
in command, was wounded, and rode after Grey. But Wade
continued an intermittent attack, gradually retreating,
while, on the other hand, " the militia remained contented
with having reoccupied the centre of the town, and shouting,
out of musket shot, at Monmouth's men."
* Their memory lived long. Roberts, the historian of the rebellion,
writes : " the generation has passed from us, whose countenances glowed
at any mention of the Blue and the Yellow regiments, in which their
fathers and grandfathers served with their darling Mon mouth."
PRINCES IN FLIGHT 181
On June 1 5th the little army left Lyme and Dorset ; many
to return only to the justice of Lord Jeffreys. The inept
manoeuvres and fighting which ended miserably 
