This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler

THE
HARDY COUNTRY

LITERARY LANDMARKS OF
THE WESSEX NOVELS

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

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

ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

1904

PREFACE

Dorsetshire, the centre of the “Hardy Country,” the home of the Wessex Novels, is a land literally flowing with milk and honey: a land of great dairies, of flowers and bees, of rural industries, where rustic ways and speech and habits of thought live long, and the kindlier virtues are not forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in towns: a land desirable for its own sweet self, where you may see the beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey of which I have spoken, and where that flow of milk is no figure of speech. You may indeed hear the swish of it in the milking pails at almost every turn of every lane.

Thatch survives in every village, as nowhere else, and here quaint towns maintain their quaintness at all odds, while elsewhere foolish folk seek to be—as they phrase it—“up to date.” It is good, you think, who explore these parts, to be out of date and reckless of all the tiresome worries of modernity.

Spring is good in Dorset, summer better, autumn—when the kindly fruits of the earth are ingathered and the smell of pomace is sweet in the mellow air—best. Winter? Well, frankly, I don’t know.

To all these natural advantages has been added in our generation the romantic interest of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels of rural life and character, in which real places are introduced with a lavish hand. The identity of those places is easily resolved; and, that feat performed, there is that compelling force in his genius which inevitably, sooner or later, magnetically draws those who have read, to see for themselves what manner of places and what folk they must be in real life, from whose characteristics such poignant tragedy, such suave and admirable comedy, have been evolved. I have many a time explored Egdon, and observed the justness of the novelist’s description of that sullen waste: have traversed Blackmoor Vale, where “the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,” but where the roads—it is a cyclist’s criticism—are always shockingly bad: in fine, have visited every literary landmark of the Wessex Novels. If I have not found the rustics so sprack-witted as they are in The Return of the Native and other stories—why, I never expected so to find them, for I did not imagine the novelist to be a reporter. But—this is in testimony to the essential likeness to life of his women—I know “Bathsheba”; only she is not a farmer, nor in “Do’set,” and I have met “Viviette” and “Fancy.” They were called by other names, ’tis true; but they were, and are, those distracting characters come to life.

A word in conclusion. No attempt has here been made to solemnly “expound” the novelist. He, I take it, expounds himself. Nor has it been thought necessary to exclude places simply for the reason that they by some chance do not find mention in the novels. These pages are, in short, just an attempt to record impressions received of a peculiarly beautiful and stimulating literary country, and seek merely to reflect some of the joy of the explorer and the enthusiasm of an ardent admirer of the novelist, who here has given tongues to trees and a voice to every wind.

CHARLES G. HARPER.

Petersham, Surrey,
July 1904.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II

WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III

WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV

STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘It hums,’ said she. ‘Hearken!’

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V

THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD

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

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

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

To the Memory of
ROBERT BROWNING,

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

He was formerly footman and butler in the
Bankes family.

“All service ranks the same with God.”

Browning.

This Tablet
was erected by some of the poet’s friends and admirers
1902.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI

THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

DORCHESTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

WILLIAM BARNES
1801–1886

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII

DORCHESTER (continued)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IX

SWANAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER X

SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And smaller fleas have lesser fleas,
And so ad infinitum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XI

CORFE CASTLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII

WAREHAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIII

WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

whose wanderings are the theme of Shakespeare’s muse.

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

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

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

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

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

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