WAREHAM
THAT is a straight and easy road which in four miles leads from Corfe to
Wareham, and a breezy and bracing road too, across heaths quite as
unspoilt as those of “Egdon,” but of a more cheerful and hopeful aspect.
_The Return of the Native_, whose scene is laid on the heaths to the
north-west, could not, with the same justness of description, have been
staged upon these, and from another circumstance, quite apart from this
heart-lifting breeziness, these heaths have little in common with their
brooding neighbours. They are enlivened with the signs of a very ancient
and long-continued industry, for where the Romans discovered and dug in
the great deposits of china-clay found here the Dorsetshire labourer
still digs, and runs his truckloads on crazy tramways down to the quays
upon Poole Harbour at Goathorn. Fragments of Roman pottery, made from
this clay, are still occasionally found here, but since that time the
clay has not been turned to extensive use on the spot where it is found,
but is shipped for Staffordshire and abroad. Much of Poole’s prosperity
is due to the china-clay trade, carried on by the vessels of that port,
which receive it from barges crossing the harbour. It was early used for
tobacco-pipes, and probably those of Sir Walter Raleigh’s first
experiments were made from the clay found here. So far back as 1760 the
export of Purbeck china-clay had reached ten thousand tons annually. It
has now risen to about sixty thousand.
This northern portion of the Isle of Purbeck is indeed of altogether
different character from the rugged stony southern half, beyond Corfe.
It is low-lying and heathy, and the roads are a complete change from the
blinding whiteness characterising those of Purbeck _Petræa_, as it may be
named. Here, mended with ironstone, they are of a ruddy colour.
Leaving the clay-cutters and their terraced diggings behind, we come,
past the paltry hamlet of Stoborough, within sight of Wareham, entered
across a long causeway over the Frome marshes and over an ancient Gothic
bridge spanning the Frome itself. Ahead is seen the tower of St. Mary’s,
one of the only two churches remaining of the original eight. Five of
the others have been swept away, and the sixth is converted into a
school. Wareham, it will be guessed, is not a mushroom place of
yesterday, but has a past and has seen many changes.
Wareham, “the oldest arnshuntest place in Do’set, where ye turn up housen
underneath yer ’tater-patch,” as described to the present historian by a
rustic, who might have been the original of Haymoss, in _Two on a Tower_,
is indeed of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that
attractive fact. Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of
the compass, do not perhaps afford the best evidences of that age, for
they are broad and straight and lined with houses which, if not all
Georgian, are so largely in that style that they influence the general
character of the thoroughfares and give them an air of the eighteenth
century. For this there is an excellent reason, found in the almost
complete destruction by fire of Wareham, on July 25th, 1762.
To the ordinary traveller—and certainly to the commercial
traveller—without a bias for history and antiquities, it is the dullest
town in Wessex. Not decayed, like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void
and still, and how it, under this constant solitude and somnolence,
manages to retain its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle.
Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks; but while
Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has shrunk within
them, and one who, climbing those stupendous fortifications, looks down
upon the little town, sees gardens and orchards, pigsties and cowsheds
plentifully intermingled with the streets, on the spot where other and
vanished streets once stood. That “once,” however, was so long ago that
the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and the mind
dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident in such things,
as upon the luxuriance of the gardens themselves and the prettiness of
the picture they produce, intermingled with the houses.
Wareham—“Anglebury” Mr. Hardy calls it—is, or was when the latest census
returns were published, a town of two thousand and three inhabitants.
[Picture: Approach to Wareham]
Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has lost more
than those odd three, thus coming within the fatal definition given
somewhere, by some one, of a village.
[Picture: The Walls of Wareham]
Things are in this way come to a parlous state, for this is the latest of
a good many modern strokes. One, which hurt its pride not a little, was
when, in the redistribution of Parliamentary seats, it lost its
representation and became merged in a county division. Another—but why
enumerate these undeserved whips and scorns? In one respect Wareham
keeps an urban character. It has two inns—the “Black Bear” and the “Red
Lion”—that call themselves hotels, and a score or so of minor houses
where, if you cannot obtain a desirable “cup of genuine,” why, “’tis a
sad thing and an oncivilised?”
It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to style
Wareham “Anglebury,” for that story is greatly concerned with the
settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the Kingdom
of Wessex. Conveniently near the sea, within the innermost recesses of
Poole Harbour, and yet removed from the rage and havoc of the outer
elements, it lies on the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the
two rivers Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from
where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour. In a nook such as this
you might think a town would have been secure, and that was the hope of
those who founded it here. But, to render assurance doubly sure, those
original town-builders—who were probably much earlier than the invading
Saxons and are thought to have been some British tribe—heaped up and dug
out those famous “walls of Wareham,” which surround the town to this day,
and are not walls in the common acceptation of the term, but ditches so
deeply delved, and mounds so steeply piled that they are in some places
little more scalable than a forthright, plumb up and down, wall of brick
or masonry would be, and with an “angle of repose” sufficiently acute to
astonish any modern railway engineer.
Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earthworks, was a place of
strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the bloody
tangle of its long history. Strong defences require determined attacks.
That history only opens with some clearness at the time of the Saxon
occupation, when the piratical Danes were beginning to harry the coast,
but it continues with accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays,
repeated until the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by
only a few dispirited defenders. In A.D. 876 these Northmen captured the
place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them out. Some
Saxon confidence then returned, but the old miseries were repeated when
Canute, not yet the pious Canute of his last years, sailed up the Frome
and not only destroyed this already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the
greater part of Wessex.
Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated place when
the Conqueror came; but it was made to hold up its head once more, and
the two mints it had owned in the time of Saxon Athelstan were
re-established. The castle, whose name alone survives, in that of Castle
Hill, was then built, and, in the added strength it gave, was the source
of many troubles soon to come. It was surprised and seized for the
Empress Maud in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four years later,
in the absence of its governor, the Earl of Gloucester, who returning,
recaptured the town after a three-weeks’ siege. At length the treaty of
peace and tolerance between Stephen and Maud gave the townsfolk—those few
of them who had been courageous enough to remain, and fortunate enough to
survive—an opportunity of creeping out of the cellars, and of looking
around and reviewing their position. “Hope springs eternal,” and these
remnants of the Wareham folk were in some measure justified of their
faith, for it was not until another half-century had passed that the town
was again besieged and taken. That event was an incident in the
contention between King John and his Barons, and a feature of it was the
destruction of the castle, never afterwards rebuilt.
[Picture: Wareham]
That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could possibly
have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and personal warfares, for
it rendered Wareham a place of little account in the calculations of
mediæval partisans; and then it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the
Civil War of Crown and Parliament, when old times came again, in the
bewildering circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament
against the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined
and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the property of
their friends before they could recover it, and then stormed and
surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse of History herself
ceases to keep tally. Few people looked on: most took an active part,
and the rector himself, “a stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good
things,” was wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times. The
obvious criticism here is that they must have been short sentences. The
Parliamentary commander, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was for punishing the
“dreadful malignancy shown towards the cause of righteousness” by the
Wareham people, and advised that the place be “plucked down and made no
town”; but this course was not adopted.
Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many horrid deeds.
In that castle whose site alone remains, Robert de Belesme was starved to
death in 1114, and on those walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit
and prophet, one Peter of Pomfret, who had prophesied that the King
should lose his crown, was hanged and quartered in 1213, after having
been fed, in the manner of the prophet Micaiah, with the bread of
affliction, and the water of affliction, in the gruesome dungeons of
Corfe. For King John, the Ahab of our history, had a way of his own with
seers of visions and prophesiers of disaster; and his way, it will be
allowed, very effectually discouraged prying into futurity.
Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called “Bloody
Bank,” three poor fellows who had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion
were hanged, portions of their bodies being afterwards exposed, with
ghastly barbarity, in different parts of the town.
Following the long broad street from where the town is entered across the
Frome, the “Black Bear” is passed, prominent with its porch and the great
chained effigy of the black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the
roof of it. Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a
terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered tablet,
handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we now come to the
northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to the banks of the Piddle,
may, looking backwards, see those old defences, the so-styled “walls,”
heaped up with magnificent emphasis.
They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and although it is
a drama long since played, and the curtain rung down upon the last act,
two hundred and fifty years ago, this scenery of it can still eloquently
recall its dragonadoes and blood-boltered episodes.