DORCHESTER (_continued_)
HENCHARD’S house—“one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old
brick,” there are many such here—was in the neighbourhood of North
Street, and not far from that Corn Exchange where Bathsheba was wont, on
market days, to mingle with the burly farmers and corn-factors, like a
yacht among ironclads, displaying for inspection the sample wheat in her
outstretched palm.
Down here, too, is the gaol, whose mass is seen from the meads on
approaching the town. It has been much altered, but the heavy stone
gateway, together with the flanking walls of red brick, is very much as
of old. Happily, such things as are noticed in that gruesome short
story, _The Withered Arm_, are things only of dreadful memory. At that
time the populace of Dorchester were accustomed to wait below in the
meadows, eager to witness the executioner, the criminals—murderers,
burglars, rick-firers, sheep and horse-stealers, even down to those
convicted of petty larceny—being capitally condemned and hanged as high
as, possibly indeed higher than, Haman, whose place of suspension is
notoriously and traditionally lofty. Gertrude Lodge, coming here for the
cure of her withered arm by the agency of the dead man’s touch, observed,
as all could then not help observing, those “three rectangular lines
against the sky,” which indicated the coming execution and the morrow’s
exhibition, to be followed by the merry-makings of Hang Fair. When she
enquired the hour of execution, she was told: “The same as usual—twelve
o’clock, or as soon after as the London mail-coach gets in. We always
wait for that, in case of a reprieve.”
[Picture: Dorchester Gaol]
In Dorchester Gaol—we have no space here for those merely actual persons
of flesh and blood who have been incarcerated, or who have suffered in
it—those more real characters of fiction, Boldwood and Marston were
confined; and hence the Shottsford watchmaker of _The Three Strangers_,
lying under sentence of death, escaped along the downs to Higher
Crowstairs, where, while sheltering in the ingle-nook of the cottage, two
other strangers, one of them the hangman deputed to execute the demands
of the law upon him on the morrow, take shelter from the weather.
To follow this gloomy train a little longer, the veritable Hangman’s
Cottage, home of this erstwhile busy functionary, at a time when
Dorchester demanded the whole time and energies of a Jack Ketch, and not
a very occasional visit from one common to the whole kingdom, may be
seen, at the foot of Glydepath Lane, in a fine damp situation near the
river. It is one of a tiny group of heavily thatched old rustic cottages
built of grouted flint and chalk, faced and patched with red brick, and
held together with iron ties, so that in their old age they shall not,
some night, altogether collapse and deposit their inhabitants among the
potatoes, the peas, and cabbages of their fertile gardens. Dorchester
paid its hangman a regular salary, and in the intervals between his more
important business, he was under engagement to perform those minor
punishments of whipping and scourging, of putting in the stocks, and of
pillorying, by whose plentiful administration Old England was made the
“Merry England” of our forefathers. Let not the reader, however, seek a
covert satire here. It is not to be gainsaid that it was a “Merry
England,” for the times were so brutal that, in all such degrading and
pitiful spectacles as these, the populace took the keenest delight.
Sufficient for the day—! and those who made merry did not stop to
consider that they who were now spectators might soon very likely afford
in their own persons the same spectacle.
Miserable times! Proof of them, do you need seek it, is to be found in
the Dorchester Museum, where the leaden weights, boldly inscribed
“MERCY,” are pointed out as the contribution, years ago, of an
exceptionally tender-hearted governor of the gaol to a more pitiful
method of ending the condemned man who was to die for his crime of arson.
[Picture: The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester]
The man was of unusually light weight, and, as those were the times when
men really were slowly and painfully hanged and choked by degrees, before
criminals were given a drop and their necks broken, it was thought a
kindly thing on the part of this governor that he should have provided
these heavy weights, to attach to this particular victim’s feet and so
help to shorten his misery.
This museum it was that Lucetta, keen to get the girl out of the way,
suggested for Elizabeth Jane’s entertainment; with affected enthusiasm
and a good deal of veiled womanly sarcasm at the expense of antiquities,
describing how it contained “crowds of interesting things—skeletons,
teeth, old pots and pans, ancient boots and shoes, birds’ eggs—all
charmingly instructive.”
But enough of such things, let us to other quarters.
Looking on to the cheerful and prosperous South Street from the corner of
Durngate Street is the substantial “grey façade” of Lucetta’s house,
where lived Henchard’s lady-love, whose affections were so readily
transferable. The lower portion of this, the “High Place Hall” of the
story, has suffered a transformation into business premises, but the
resounding alleyways of Durngate Street and neighbouring lanes are as
gloomy as those spots are described. “At night the forms of passengers
were patterned by the lamps in black shadows upon the pale walls,” and so
they are still.
But the description of Lucetta’s house in those pages is a composite
picture; a good deal of it deriving from an old mansion in another part
of the town. This will be found by taking a narrow thoroughfare leading
out of the north side of High West Street, and called, in different parts
of its course, Glydepath Lane and Glydepath Street. In this quiet byway
is the early eighteenth-century mansion known as Colyton House, sometime
a town residence of the Churchill family, and so named from the little
Devonshire town of Colyton, near which is situated Ash, that old
dwelling, now a farmhouse, whence the historic Churchills sprang.
Readily to be seen, in a blank wall, is the long-filled-in archway, with
the dreadful keystone mask, alluded to in the pages of _The Mayor of
Casterbridge_.
[Picture: Colyton House, Dorchester]
“Originally the mask had exhibited a comic leer, as could still be
discerned; but generations of Casterbridge boys had thrown stones at the
mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the blows thereof had chipped off the
lips and jaws as if they had been eaten away by disease.” Its appearance
is indeed of a ghastly leprous nature, infinitely shuddery.
At this end of the town, out upon the Charminster road is the great Roman
encampment of Poundbury, or, locally, “Pummery,” where Henchard spread
that feast, deserted by those for whom it was intended, in favour of the
rival entertainment in the West Walks, prepared by the hateful Farfrae,
that paragon of all the business and higher virtues, whom the reader
perversely, but not unnaturally, detests. “Roman” it has been in this
last passage declared, but, in truth, its origin has been as widely
disputed as that of Weatherbury Castle, where the varying theories arouse
Mr. Hardy’s sarcasm so markedly. It lies without the site of the Roman
walls of Durnovaria, and probably formed some advanced outpost or great
camp in the long years of the Roman occupation of Britain, before the
establishment of security and the growth of their towns. Those Roman
walls are now for the most part gone and their sites were long ago
planted with avenues, now growing aged and past their prime, and ceased
to be that clean-cut barrier between _urbs_ and _rure_ they formed of
old, when Dorchester of pre-railway days had not grown too big for that
girdle the Romans had set about her: a girdle not too constrictive for
the needs of the Middle Age, nor even in the eighteenth century with any
suspicion of tight-lacing, but all too compressive soon after the coaches
had given way to trains, and steel rails and steam along them had sent up
the birthrate. A notable passage in _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ tells
how there were not, quite a little while ago, any suburbs here, in the
modern sense, nor any gradual fusion of town and country. “The farmer’s
boy could sit under his barleymow, and pitch a stone into the window of
the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances
standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a
sheep stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa,’ that floated in
at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”
But those bounds have in several places been leaped, and, in especial
where the South Walk runs, modern villas have redly replaced the golden
grain or the green pastures. Changed manners and customs have brought
about this alteration, quite as much as increased population. The four
old traditional streets of the town, together with their more immediate
offshoots, have been resigned more exclusively to business than of yore,
and made less a residence. The butchers, the bakers, the
candlestick-makers, who would once have scorned to live anywhere else
than over “the shop,” will now not very often condescend to make their
homes in the upper stages of their “stores” or “establishments,” or by
what other pretty names modern finesse elects to describe shops and
counters and tills and such like things by which tradespeople become
rich.
And, by that same token, the business premises thus deserted for snug
suburban villas, are themselves changing. One could never, in modern
times, have strictly called Dorchester generally picturesque, in the
prominent circumstances of those four main streets: repeated
conflagrations that destroyed most of the really old and interesting
houses forbade that, and replaced thatch and barge-boarded gables with
plain brick fronts, severe in unornamental rectangular windows, and
ending on the skyline with unimaginative straight copings. But the
latest manifestations of these times, when they say business is a
struggle and all trades alike carried on less for the profit of the
purveyor, than for the good of the purchaser, are expensive carved stone
and brick frontages, with good artistic features. As art in this country
only spells much expenditure of good money and as building operations are
always costly, it is a little difficult to square all these developments
with the talk of “hard times.” South Street, in especial, is being
grandly transformed, and “Napper’s Mite,” the crouching row of
almshouses, built from the benefaction of the good Sir Robert Napper, in
1615, made to look additionally humble by newly risen tall buildings.
But the town authorities have not yet removed the old rusticated stone
obelisk that stands in Cornhill, in the centre of the town, where High
East and High West Streets, and North and South Streets meet. It serves
the multum-in-parvo purposes of a pump, a lamp-standard, and a
leaning-stock for Dorchester’s weary or born-tired, and is moreover a
landmark. But the two dumpy little houses at the corner, which were
properly dumpy and humble and—so to speak—knew their place, and abased
themselves in the presence of their betters—that is to say, in the
contiguity of St. Peter’s across the road—have been rebuilt, with the
result that their tall upstanding pretentiousness detracts not a little
from the height of that “grizzled tower.”
And so, turning to the left at this corner, we leave Dorchester for
Bridport, along High West Street, the quietest of all these
thoroughfares, and looking rather “out of it,” and somewhat glad of that
fact, in a dignified, exclusive way, typified by its aristocratic old
houses, and its old County Hall. It is true there are a few shops in
High Street, but they are by no means pushful shops. They never make
“alarming sacrifices,” nor sell off. Indeed, were I not fearful of
offending susceptibility, I might declare a belief that they never sell
anything at all, and are kept by “grown-ups,” not grown tired of playing
at shops when they did so arrive at years supposed to be those of
discretion. Here is a quiet shop—where they will doubtless sell you
something, if you really enter and firmly insist upon it—occupying one of
the few really old and picturesque houses in the main thoroughfare; it is
the house “by tradition” occupied by the infamous Judge Jeffreys, when
visiting Dorchester on the business of that special occasion, the Bloody
Assize, holden to try the unhappy wretches arraigned for their part in
Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685. The old house bears an inscription to this
effect. Over three hundred prisoners faced the judge at that awful time,
and two hundred and ninety received sentence of death. Of these the
number actually executed was seventy-four, and, as the old gossip at the
“Three Mariners” tells, portions of their bodies were gibbeted in various
parts of the county, “different j’ints sent about the country like
butcher’s meat.”
And so we leave Dorchester and its, on the whole, grim memories, along an
avenue, fellow to that by which the town was entered.