SHERBORNE
MUCH remains in pleasant Sherborne to tell of that time when it was a
cathedral city, and when, after it had lost that high dignity, it was of
scarce less importance as the home of a powerful Abbey. It was the
pleasing, well-watered and sheltered situation, in the vale where the
little Yeo or Ivel runs—the stream which, passing through Yeovil, gives
that town its name—that first attracted the religious in A.D. 705, the
time of that now misty and vague monarch, King Ina. The Yeo had not yet
obtained that name, and was merely spoken of in descriptive and
admiratory phrase as the _Seir burne_, an Anglo-Saxon description for a
bright and clear brook which has crystallised here and at several other
places in the country, into a place-name. Even in the City of London
there is a Sherborne Lane, where no stream now flows, the successor,
however, of a pleasant lane, where in Anglo-Saxon times a tributary of
the Wall Brook flowed.
Not every one was satisfied with this choice for a cathedral site.
William of Malmesbury wrote of it as “pleasant neither by multitudes of
inhabitants, nor beauty of position.” But beauty is a matter of
individual taste. “Wonderful, almost shameful,” he continued, “was it,
that a bishop’s see should have remained here for so many years.” For
three hundred and three years it so remained, the bishop’s seat being
removed only in 1078, when Old Sarum, a much more inconvenient site,
sterile, cramped and waterless—a place that to the Saxons was Searobyrig,
the dry city—was selected, only itself to be abandoned in less than
another hundred and fifty years. In the meanwhile no fewer than
twenty-seven bishops ruled in succession at Sherborne and passed into the
Great Beyond, leaving for the most part, very little evidence of their
existence. Notable exceptions, however, were Adhelm, an early translator
of the Scriptures, and Asser, whose biography of his friend and patron,
Alfred the Great, is a monument to himself as well as to his subject. In
the choir-aisles of the existing Abbey-church are sundry relics of those
prelates, in the shape of ancient tombs with battered effigies, as near a
likeness to them as possible for the sculptors to produce; and in the
retro-choir are pointed out the spots where Kings Ethelbald and
Ethelbert, brothers and predecessors of King Alfred, lie.
After an interval of uncertainty following the removal of the bishopric
in 1078 to Old Sarum, the cathedral here was in 1139 made a Benedictine
Abbey and rebuilt by Roger, Bishop of Sarum, who although he might not
again remove the cathedral back to Sherborne, seems to have loved the
place, and certainly lavished much care and labour upon it.
Bishop Roger was a man of energy and determination. Starting in life as
a poor Norman monk, he owed his first important preferment to a curious
circumstance. None could gabble through a mass more speedily than he,
and he raced through a service before Henry I. so quickly, while the king
was anxious to be off a-hunting, that the gratified monarch put him on
the broad high road to advancement, along whose course Roger travelled
far. But, if all had liked him as little as did the censorious William
of Malmesbury, his journeys would have been short. To that chronicler he
was “unscrupulous, fierce and avaricious,” not content to keep his own,
but eager to grab the goods of others. “Was there anything contiguous to
his property which might be advantageous to him, he would directly extort
it, either by entreaty or purchase, or, if that failed, by force.” It
must have been well, therefore, to arrange terms with this masterful
personage while he was in the negotiating way, lest he took what he
wanted, without so much as a “by-your-leave.” The great Norman structure
he erected has largely survived, not only in its ground plan, but in the
essential circumstances of its walling, for although it is outwardly a
building in the Perpendicular phase of Gothic, dating from the second
half of the fifteenth century, that magnificently-elaborated external
show of nave and presbytery is but a later and more enriched surface,
daringly grafted upon the stern and solemn Norman walls of over three
hundred years’ earlier date.
The history of the great Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne very clearly
retells the old tale of Bury St. Edmunds, of Norwich, and of many another
great monastic centre, by which you see that these rich and powerful
settlements of the religious were not generally at peace with the outside
worldlings. The causes of quarrel were many. In some places the
monastery was a harsh and exacting landlord; in others the imposts and
hindrances placed upon the markets, whose tolls in many instances were
the property of the Church, aroused bitter enmity and constant strife;
and in yet more cases the maintenance of forests and game for the sport
of the Lords Abbots gave rise to trouble. Poachers we have had always
with us, and even in those times when to kill the stag in the Chases was
a crime adjudged worthy death or mutilation, men for sport or sustenance
illegally slew the game. “What shall he have who killed the deer?” Why,
an ear cut off or a nose slit, at the very least of it.
Here at Sherborne the bitterest quarrel arose from other causes. It
seems that the parish church was situated at the west end of the Abbey,
separated from it only by a door which the monks, exclusives always, had
sought gradually to narrow, with a view of eventually blocking it up
altogether. A question nearly allied with this was whether the children
of the townsfolk should be baptised in the Abbey or in the parish church,
and the disputes at last grew so raw that the Sherborne burgesses, very
wrothy and spiteful, took to ringing their church-bells so long and so
loudly that on account of the clamour, the monastic offices could not be
carried on. In 1437 the points at issue were by common consent laid
before the Bishop of Salisbury, who, siding with his own cloth, made an
award in favour of the Abbey. Regarding this decision as an injustice,
the townsfolk refused to abide by it; but there were evidently two
parties in the town, for one faction, headed by a stalwart butcher, broke
into the parish church with some of the monks and reduced the font to
fragments. Things then, naturally grew worse, until, as Leland puts it,
“The variance grew to a plain sedition, until a priest of the town church
of All Hallows shot a shaft with fire into the top of that part of the
Abbey Church of St. Mary that divided the east part that the monks used
from that the townsmen used; and this partition happening at the time to
be thatched in, the roof was set on fire, and consequently the whole
church, the lead and bells melted, was defaced.”
The Choir was so seriously injured that it was taken down and rebuilt,
but the rest was repaired, and still in some parts shows traces, in the
reddened patches on the beautiful golden-yellow Ham Hill sandstone of the
internal walls, of the conflagration.
The townsfolk were made to contribute heavily to the cost of repair and
rebuilding; works resulting in a more lovely interior, both in form and
colour, than owned by any other considerable church in the west. A
commonplace person, one no connoisseur of churches, if asked to convey a
general sense of their interiors by the medium of temperature would reply
that they were cold, for coldness is the effect most often
produced—irrespective of the degrees registered by the thermometer—by
their stonework; but here, though the mercury shrink down from the tube
into close proximity with the bulb, provocative in most places of
shivers, even the most matter-of-fact, irresponsive to the call of
soaring arches, painted windows and delicately poised fretted roof to
“lift up your hearts, O Zion!” feel a grateful sensation of warmth
pervading them, apparently radiating from these walls of richly hued
stone, whose natural colouring seems to fully furnish the place and
render it indifferent to the rigours of the season. It is a colour
compact of all the beautiful hues of this country of a rich and bountiful
Nature: of honey, of apples and pears golden and russet, of autumn
leaves, and of cider and October ale, with a glint of the sun through it
all. It gives a beautiful and cheerful tone, quick to purge melancholy
and to make the devout happier in their hallelujahs than when in the
cold, if chaste, companionship of Portland stone, the mild cream purity
of the oolite of Bath, the Gregorian richness of the building stone of
Mansfield, or the solemn satisfaction engendered by the deep red
sandstone of Devon.
The exquisite fan-vaulting of Sherborne Abbey, the finest example of that
supremest effort of the last stage of Gothic art, has no superior
elsewhere. That of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster, and that in St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor, are on a larger scale, and more daring, but,
although generally cited as representative, are not so truly artistic.
The old Pack-Monday fair, still an annual institution at Sherborne, is a
two days’ market, originating with the completion of the repairs and the
vaulting of the nave, under Abbot Peter de Ramsam, or Rampisham, in 1504.
Tradition has it that, the last stone well and truly laid and the great
church at last again in order, the masons and their kind were paid off
and bidden depart by midnight on the Sunday after Old Michaelmas Day.
Accordingly, Pack-Monday fair is opened every year at the stroke of
midnight on the Sunday succeeding October 10th, to the accompaniment of a
din of horn-blowing and the uncouth banging of tin cans.
Much of the beauty of the Abbey interior is due to the loving care of the
restoration executed by the Digbys of Sherborne Castle, between 1848 and
1858, at a cost of over £32,000. The church of All Hallows at the west
end, which caused all the trouble, was demolished after the dissolution
of the monastery, when the Abbey was sold to the town for use as a parish
church and All Hallows itself thereby became a redundancy. Its situation
and its ground-plan can still be traced on the paths and lawns and on the
ragged walls and makeshift patchwork that serve as West Front to the
Abbey.
An ancestor of the restoring Digbys is commemorated by a pretentious
mountain of marble in the south transept, with an epitaph, written by a
bishop, setting forth with much antithetical rhodomontade his many
virtues of activities and renunciations:
“Here Lyes John, Lord Digby, Baron Digby of Sherborne and Earl of
Briftol. Titles to which ye merit of his Grandfather firft gave luftre
And which he himfelf laid down unfully’d. He was naturally enclined to
avoid the Hurry of a publick Life, Yet carefull to keep up the port of
his Quality. Was willing to be at eafe, but fcorned obfcurity. And
therefore never made his retirement a pretence to draw Himfelf within a
narrower compafs, or to fhun fuch expence As Charity, Hospitality and his
Honour call’d for. His Religion was that which by LAW is Eftablisfhed,
and the Conduct of his life fhew’d the power of it in his Heart. His
distinction from others never made him forget himfelf or them. He was
kind and obliging to his Neighbours, generous and condefcending to his
inferiours, and juft to all Mankind. Nor had the temptations of honour
and pleafure in this world Strength enough to withdraw his Eyes from that
great Object of his hope, which we reafonably affure ourfelves he now
enjoys.
MDCICVIII.”
[Picture: Sherborne Abbey Church]
The surroundings of the Abbey closely resemble cathedral precincts, and
lead the well-informed stranger to remember that Sherborne cherishes
hopes of some day being again erected into the head of a bishop’s see,
when that talked-of formation of a new diocese, carved out of the great
territorial domains of Salisbury and of Bath and Wells, shall be an
accomplished fact.
The usual and properest way of coming to the Abbey, after you have
glimpsed the fine picture it makes looking down Long Street, is past the
Conduit—usually called the Monks’ Conduit—standing on the pavement of
Cheap Street, and through a time-worn archway and a narrow alley of small
shops and old houses. The Conduit, built about 1360, an open octangular
building greatly resembling a market-cross, was originally in the centre
of the cloister-garth, to the north of the Abbey, on a part of the site
now occupied by the admirable Grammar School, founded by Edward VI. from
the spoils of the dissolved monastery, and grown in these days to be one
of the foremost schools of the country.
Cheap Street, the principal thoroughfare of Sherborne, is, like similar
business streets in other West Country towns, composed of houses of many
periods and all sizes. It is built generally of that sunny Ham Hill
ferruginous sandstone, quarried for many years at Stoke-sub-Hamdon, six
miles to the northwest of Yeovil. That fine old hostelry, the “New Inn,”
now swept away, was built of it. This vanished house was the original of
the “Earl of Wessex,” in _The Woodlanders_, in whose yard Giles
Winterborne is observed by his old sweetheart from the balcony, while he
is engaged with the business of cider-making:
“The chief hotel at Sherton Abbas was the “Earl of Wessex”—a large
stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch under which vehicles were driven by
stooping coachmen to back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The
windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only
commanded a view of the opposite houses.”
The castle, some distance outside the town to east, adjoining the village
of Castleton, was originally the combined palace and fortress of the
Bishops of Sherborne. The remaining fragments, on their woody knoll
overlooking the Yeo, in what is now Sherborne Park, are those of the
stout keep built by that ambitious, and unscrupulous Bishop Roger, of
Henry I.’s time. Despite the curse, called down by the equally ferocious
and saintly Osmund, upon any who should dare to alienate the castle from
the bishops of Sherborne, it was wrested from them on several occasions,
perhaps sometimes in direct unbelieving challenge to that _quis
separabit_; at others, certainly, because, in the fashion of the times,
the bishops had taken part in the political troubles, the pitched battles
and weary sieges of contending factions, and, having the ill-luck to side
with the defeated party, suffered with them in body and estate. For over
two hundred years, from 1139 to 1355, it was thus alienated, and Osmund’s
curse slept. Those who owned the castle were not executed, or
imprisoned, or made to suffer beyond the usual mediæval average, perhaps
because it took no account of developments arising from mitred follies
and errors of judgment. At last, having been Crown property for many
generations, the stronghold and its surrounding lands were granted to
Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from whom, after a futile proposal had been
made to fight him for it, in gage of single combat—a fourteenth-century
example of Kingsley’s “muscular Christianity”—it was purchased by the
bishop for 2,500 marks; a cheap lot. Whether the earl, in Etonian
phrase, “funked it,” imagining the bishop’s steel would be fellow to “the
sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” and as invincible, who shall say? At
any rate, Bishop Wyvil, this strenuous champion, who feared neither the
ordeal of the sword nor of the purse, entered into the gates of his
predecessors of old time, and died here, after a residence of twenty
years. The brass to his memory, in the north-east transept of Salisbury
Cathedral, displays a representation of Sherborne Castle, with a figure
of the bishop’s champion armed with a battle axe, by which it will be
seen that it was not scandalously, in his own proper person, that the
bishop was prepared to fight, but by a deputy, skilled in arms, and
supported by the ghostly terrors of that ancient curse.
And so, in the possession of the bishops of Salisbury who, to all intents
and purposes, and within the meaning of old Oswald, were successors and
representatives of the Bishops of Sherborne, the castle remained until
1540, when, in the dissolution of religious houses, it was seized and
afterwards granted to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset. Then the
curse seems to have come into its own again, for Somerset ended, where
many other good and true were cut off, on Tower Hill. Although
subsequently restored to the bishop of Salisbury, it was again alienated
by Bishop Cotton to Sir Walter Raleigh, as payment for favours and
promotion received when that hero and courtier was in the enjoyment of
royal smiles. Raleigh, as every one knows, ended tragically, after
long-drawn misery, in 1618, on the same spot where Somerset had suffered
sixty years earlier. And well, the superstitious may think, was it that
by legal quirks and quibbles James I. succeeded in chousing Raleigh’s son
out of his inheritance, for the ill-omened possession continued to work
disaster. James bestowed it upon his favourite, the despicable Robert
Carl, Earl of Somerset, who, convicted of being accessory to the murder
of Sir Thomas Overbury, was condemned to die, but was reprieved, and
finally released by the timid James, to die obscurely in 1645. Something
of a blundering curse, this, one may think, to miss scoring a “bull” on
so admirable and easy a mark.
The king then conveyed the property to Digby, Earl of Bristol, the “Earl
of Severn” of the slight story of _Anna_, _Lady Baxby_, in _A Group of
Noble Dames_. When the Civil War broke out, Sherborne Castle was
garrisoned for the king by the Marquis of Hertford, and early besieged by
the Earl of Bedford, on behalf of the Parliament. It happened here—as so
often it did in their internecine strife—that there were relatives
engaged on either side in this siege. The Earl of Bristol’s son, George,
Lord Digby, was married to the Lady Anne Russell, sister of the Earl of
Bedford. She it was, the “Anna, Lady Baxby,” of the story, who rode out
secretly to her brother, and told him that if he were determined to
reduce the castle, he “should find his sister’s bones buried in the
ruins.” But the investment continued until, finding himself weaker than
he had supposed, the marquis offered to surrender on terms. If they were
not accepted he proposed, with the Lady Anne’s consent, and indeed at her
wish, to station her on the battlements, and let the enemy’s marksmen do
their worst. The Earl of Bedford was not proof against this, and it is
said, raising the siege, retired.
But this plan would not always work. Three years later, in 1645, when
Sir Lewis Dives, the Earl of Bristol’s stepson, was in command, a greater
than the Earl of Bedford appeared before Sherborne Castle, and summoned
it to surrender. This was Sir Thomas Fairfax, flushed with his
successes, and making a clean sweep of the garrisons in the west of
England. For sixteen days, his forces sat down in front of the castle,
which then surrendered, with its garrison of fifty-five gentlemen and six
hundred soldiers. With that surrender came the final ruin, for the
castle was “slighted,” or destroyed by gunpowder, its contents and the
spoils of “the lodge,” sold to the people of Sherborne. This “Lodge” was
the mansion which even then had been built near by, the castle already
proving too inconvenient for the ideas of those times. It is the
so-called “Castle” of to-day, still the seat of Digbys, collateral and
commoner descendants of the old owners. Sir Walter Raleigh built the
centre portion of it in 1594, as his arms and the sculptured figures
show, and Digbys the later wings. Their crest, the singular one of an
ostrich holding a horse-shoe in its beak, is prominent over the entrance
to the courtyard. In the park is still shown a stone seat, said to be
that on which Sir Walter Raleigh was resting and smoking his first pipe
of tobacco, when his pipe was dowsed and he drenched, by the pail of
water thrown over him by his faithful retainer, who, not unnaturally, as
tobacco was then a thing unknown, imagined his master to be on fire, and,
in the expressive words of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s reports, “well
alight.”
The Lodge, now the “Castle,” was a halting-place of the Prince of Orange
on his triumphal march from Tor Bay, in 1688. He slept here a night, and
from a printing-press in the house was issued his address to the people
of England.