WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY
(_continued_)
ONWARDS from Sturminster Newton the road comes into the rich Vale of
Blackmore and traverses levels watered by the Lidden, in addition to the
Stour. Turning here to the right-hand and avoiding the way to
Stalbridge, we follow the steps of Tess to her home at “Marlott,” a
village to be identified with Marnhull.
Could we associate any cottage here with the birthplace of Tess, how
interesting a landmark that would be! But it is not to be done.
“Rolliver’s,” the “Pure Drop” inn, may be the “Crown,” but you who call
there to wet a particularly dry whistle on a scorching day will not find
the name of Rolliver over the door, either of this house or of another,
with the picture-sign of a dashing hussar outside. As to whether either
or both of them keep “a pretty brew,” as we are told Rolliver’s did, I
cannot tell you, for when dry, I drink ginger-beer if it is to be got,
and, if it isn’t, go thirsty, refusing alike malt-liquors and the
abominable gaseous compounds made cheaply of harmful materials, sold
expensively, and rather thirst-provoking than quenching.
Marnhull is not precisely the type of village the readers of _Tess_ would
picture as the home of a heroine whose adventures have so constant a
background of dairying. It is, or was, a quarry-village, and the shallow
pits that supplied for stone the church and the cottages are still
prominent in a field to the left of the road to Shaftesbury. Thus
Marnhull is somewhat formal and prim, and instead of the abundant thatch
noticeable in the typical villages of dairy farms, its houses are roofed
with slates and tiles.
[Picture: Marnhull]
The church of Marnhull has a singularly fine tower, which, although the
details of its Perpendicular design are largely intermingled with
Renaissance ornament, is in general outline a beautiful and imposing
specimen of Gothic, built in that period—the early eighteenth
century—generally thought impossible for Gothic art. It was in 1718 that
this fine work arose out of the heap of ruins into which the old tower
had suddenly fallen, but it has almost every appearance of being three
hundred years older, and it seems likely that, as it now stands, it was a
free copy of its predecessor.
The body of the church is of much earlier date, and well supplied with
mediæval effigies and finely carved capitals to its pillars. But it is
not without amusement that one reads the flamboyant epitaph to the
Reverend Mr. Conyers Place, M.A.,
“the youngeft son of an ancient and reputable family in the County of
York, who, after he had been liberally educated at Trinity College,
in Cambridge, was invited to the Mafter-fhip of the Grammar School in
Dorchester, which he governed many years with great succefs and
applaufe till, weary of the fatigue of it, he chofe to refign it. He
was endowed with many excellent talents, both natural and acquired: a
lively wit, a sound judgement, with solid and extenfive learning: he
was eminently Studious, yet remarkably facetious: attached to no
party, nor addicted to any caufe but that of Truth and Religion, in
the defence of whofe Doctrines he wrote many learned and ingenious
Treatifes; while he was efteemed by all worthy of the greateft
Preferments, he lived content with the praife of deferving without
enjoying any but the small Rectory of Poxwell, in this County, which
he held two years, and in the Pofsefsion of which he died.”
Shaftesbury, six miles onward from Marnhull, is soon seen, standing as it
does majestically upon a commanding hill. It looks perhaps best from the
point where the old farmstead of Blynfield stands, at the foot of the
long and winding ascent, whence you see the hillside common stretching up
to the very edge of the town. From distant points such as this,
“Shaston,” as Mr. Hardy, the milestones, and old chroniclers agree to
call it, wears the look of another Jerusalem the Golden, and any who,
thus looking upon this town of old romance, should chance to come no
nearer, might well carry away an impression of a fairy city whose
architecture was equal to both its half-legendary history and its natural
surroundings. If such a traveller there be, let him rest assured that
nothing in Shaftesbury, saving only the view over limitless miles of
Vale, stretching away into the distance, is worth the climbing up to it,
and that to make its near and intimate acquaintance is only to dispel
that distant dream of an unearthly beauty which afar off seems to belong
to it.
Shaftesbury’s streets are in fact more than ordinarily commonplace, and
its houses grossly tasteless. It is as though, despairing of ever
bringing Shaftesbury back to a shadow of the magnificence of history and
architecture it once enjoyed, the builders of the modern town built
houses as plastiferously ugly as they could. “Shaston” is described with
a wonderful sympathy and lightness of touch by Mr. Hardy:—“The ancient
British Palladour was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague
imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey,
the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines,
chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now ruthlessly
swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive
melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape
around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place of a king
and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and
squires. The bones of King Edward ‘the Martyr,’ carefully removed
thither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which made it the
resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled it to maintain
a reputation extending far beyond English shores. To this fair creation
of the great Middle Ages the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the
death-knell. With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place
collapsed in a general ruin; the martyr’s bones met with the fate of the
sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where
they lie.”
“The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain;
but, strange to say, these qualities, which were noted by many writers in
ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed
over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England
stands virtually unvisited to-day. It has a unique position on the
summit of an almost perpendicular scarp, rising on the north, south and
west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the
view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture—South,
Mid, and Nether Wessex—being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant
traveller’s eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible by a
railway, it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and
it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the
north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that side.
Such is, and such was, the now-forgotten Shaston or Palladour.”
That finely inaccurate chronicler, or rather romancer, Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who never lacked “historical” details while his imagination
remained in good preservation, has some picturesque “facts” to narrate of
Shaftesbury. It was founded, says he, by Hudibras, grandfather of King
Lear, a trifle of 950 years before the Christian era. Between that
shamelessly absurd origin and the earliest known mention of the place, in
A.D. 880, when Alfred the Great founded a nunnery here, there is thus a
gulf—a very yawning gulf, too—of one thousand, eight hundred and thirty
years.
“Caer Palladour,” as it had been in early British times, became
“Edwardstow” when, in the year 979, the body of the young king “martyred”
at Corfe Castle was translated from its resting-place at Wareham, but
although his shrine was the scene of many miracles and greatly resorted
to, we do not find that change of name so greatly favoured as was the
like change made in East Anglia, when, early in the eleventh century, the
town that had been Beodric’s Weorth became, with the miracle-mongering of
St. Edmund’s shrine, that town of St. Edmundsbury which we know as Bury
St. Edmunds. No: as the expressive modern slang would phrase it, the
name of “Edwardstow” never really “caught on,” and Caer Palladour, which
had in the beginning of Saxon rule become “Shaftesbyrig,” has so
remained.
Nowadays the only vestiges of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury are the
fragments of encaustic tiles and carved stones, rarely and with
difficulty brought to light by antiquarian societies, painfully digging
on the spot once occupied by it; and the great abbey estates, the booty
at the Dissolution seized by, or granted to, Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton, now belong to the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor crest
of a wheatsheaf is prominent in the town.
There are three parish churches at Shaftesbury; St. James’s, as you climb
upwards towards the town, and Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s in the town
itself. It is St. Peter’s which is seen in the illustration of Gold
Hill, by whose incredibly steep ascent the pilgrim takes his way up from
the deep recesses of the Vale. This is the most difficult approach,
paved with granite setts divided off into broad steps, so that in wet
weather the hillside shall not slip away into those depths; and with the
craggy sides shored up by ancient stone buttresses of prodigious bulk.
The building that closes in the view next the church tower, leaving but a
narrow entrance alley into the town, is the Town Hall and Market House.
There are, of course, wider and less steep entrances to Shaftesbury, but
this shows it on its most characteristic side.
Shaftesbury is chiefly associated in the pages of the Wessex novels with
_Jude the Obscure_, for here it was that the long-suffering and
inoffensive Phillotson—who (why?) always reminds me of
Wordsworth—obtained the school, which he and the distracting Sue were to
jointly keep. Their house, “Old Grove’s Place,” is easily recognisable.
You come to it past Bimport, near the fork of the roads that run
severally to Motcombe and to East Stower, on the edge of the plateau. It
is an old house with projecting porch and mullioned windows through which
it would be quite easy, as in the story, to see the movements of any one
inside; and the upper room over the entrance is not too high above the
pavement for any one who, like Sue, leaped from the window, to alight
without injury. Those people are probably few who feel an oppressiveness
in old houses such as that which worried the highly strung and neurotic
Sue Bridehead: “We don’t live in the school, you know,” said she, “but in
that ancient dwelling across the way called Old Grove’s Place. It is so
antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully. Such houses are very
well to visit, but not to live in. I feel crushed into the earth by the
weight of so many previous lives there spent. In a new place like these
schools, there is only your own life to support.”
[Picture: Gold Hill, Shaftesbury]
Close by are the schools. Looking upon them the more than usually
sentimental pilgrim, with, it may be, some ancient tender passages of his
own, stored up in the inviolate strong-box of his memory, to be unlocked
and drawn forth at odd times, may think he identifies that window whence
Sue, safely out of reach, spoke with Jude, standing down on the footpath,
and said, “Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!”