WORLEBURY—WORLE
ALL the ebullient modernity of Weston is looked down upon by the
immemorially old, from that overhanging vantage-point, Worle Hill, where
the ancient camp and fortress of Worlebury, dwelling-place and
stronghold of many ancient peoples, shows traces of occupation by a race
who flourished some four thousand years since. Worlebury passed through
many hands, but the last people who sheltered there died in ruthless
battle thirteen centuries ago.
Worlebury rises to a height of 357 feet above Weston, and although
modern villas here and there impinge upon it, and the spire of Holy
Trinity Church and the unlovely backs of houses are a thought too
insistent from these grey ramparts of prehistoric times, it is in many
ways as remote from the seething crowd beneath as its height would
imply. The camp of twenty acres is divided into two unequal parts by a
ditch. It is conjectured that the larger portion was the place of
refuge, and the smaller the actual fortress, of the race who constructed
it. The whole is irregularly enclosed by ramparts of loose pieces of
limestone and rocky banks, roughly of live successive ranges, but here
and there, in places thought weakest, of as many as seven. On the side
facing the sea, where the limestone rocks of Worle Hill go precipitously
down, and artificial defence was not required, there are no ramparts.
This hilltop was until about 1820 a barren spot, quite innocent of
trees, but the plantations made at that time by the Smyth-Pigott of the
period have by now resulted in a crown of beautiful woodlands of larch,
oak, and other trees. Amid these woods the extraordinary ancient
ramparts of loose limestone fragments, the broadest of these defences
about a hundred feet across, glimmer greyly, like petrified rivers. The
flakes and knobs of stone, broken up and placed here in such immense
quantities and with incredible labour, vary in size from about that of
an ordinary brick to three times those dimensions, and are as clean and
sharp to-day as though but recently quarried.
It is not an easy matter to climb over these successive banks and
ditches, and it is quite evident that those who at different periods
stormed these defences and slew those who occupied them, must have been
determined people, little daunted by the losses they must needs have
suffered in the advance. The early defenders were men who used the sling
for chief weapon of defence, and great numbers of slingers’
platforms—little flat spaces contrived in strategical positions along
the sloping sides of the hill—remain, like so many primitive artillery
emplacements; while quantities of their ammunition—pebble-stones that
are not in the course of nature found on the crests of limestone
hills—may be picked up.
The first people, it is thought, who seized this hilltop, were Belgic
tribes from over seas, who, landing in the shallow waters that then
spread where the meadows below Kewstoke are now, or in the lakelike bay
on whose side Weston now stands, fortified the summit and held it as a
base from which to make further advances. The natives of these parts,
whose lands those ancient raiders coveted, were chiefly lake-dwellers,
living on the many islets that then studded these marshy seas and
salt-water lagoons, or housed on pile-dwellings ingeniously constructed
in the waters themselves. Larger communities of them lived for safety
inside stockades, whose fragments have been discovered of recent years
at Meare, in the neighbourhood of Glastonbury, where evidence of the
conflicts that followed the appearance of the raiders was found, in
charred remains of wrecked homes. Evidence was not wanting that this was
a conflict in which both sides suffered, and among the remains of a
stockade unearthed recently was found the trophy of a woman’s head,
which the science of ethnology proved to have been that of a person
belonging to the raiders’ tribes. Thus it appeared that the
lake-dwellers had seized and murdered one of their enemies’ women, and
had fixed the head upon a stake of their defences, by way of derision.
Those who first seized Worle Hill, and made the camp of Worlebury,
evidently intended to stay, for they constructed many well-like
dwelling-pits in the hilltops. Some of these remain. They are about four
feet deep, and had originally a surrounding wall, about two feet high. A
roof of boughs and twigs, kept in place by flat slabs of stone,
completed a specimen dwelling. We know so much for a certainty, because
in excavating examples of these houses the original roof has been found,
with the boughs and twigs and the flat stone slabs that had been
especially brought from the lias strata of Nailsea by these ancient
folk. Plentiful signs remained that at some period this camp had been
rushed and every dwelling burnt out, for charred barley was found,
together with remains of burnt logs and wattle-work roofing. Under the
remains of these roofs were pebble-stones, part of the ancient
occupants’ sling ammunition; and relics of their last meals, in the
shape of bones of birds and rabbits. Some flint arrow-heads also were
discovered, and, secreted behind a rocky ledge in one of these pits,
some iron ring-money. So, on some day of red ruin, at a date no man can
give, the first camp of Worlebury was destroyed.
Centuries passed, and the hilltop apparently was given over to solitude,
and nature buried these relics of a desperate day under moss and grass.
Whether, as sometimes has been supposed, the Romans at a later age
stormed a British camp on this height, is at least uncertain. The only
things Roman ever found here were some coins, and they may well have
belonged to the Romanised Britons who, after the withdrawal of the Roman
garrisons of Britain, fell a prey to the more virile barbarians from the
north of Europe, and retreated before them, being driven mercilessly
from one fortified post to another, and slain in many thousands. The
last great struggle in Worlebury took place at this period. Arthur, the
half-legendary King Arthur of so many romances, the great warrior-king
of more than three hundred years earlier date than Alfred the Great, had
been at length slain, in A.D. 542; and the Saxon onset, checked by his
successes, was renewed. Ceawlin, the great Bretwalda of the powerful and
rapidly growing kingdom of Wessex, overthrew the Britons at the bloody
battle of Barbury Hill, near Swindon, in A.D. 556, and in A.D. 577, with
great slaughter, gained the battle of Dyrham, between Bath and Bristol;
all those parts we now know as Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, together
with parts of Somerset, being thereby added to the kingdom of Wessex.
Soon after the battle of Dyrham, Ceawlin captured Worlebury, where the
Britons had taken refuge, and the evidence of what was then wrought here
was still visible in 1851, when archæologists systematically excavated
and examined the turf that covered the ancient pit-dwellings. In one pit
were found three skeletons, doubled up and lying across one another,
evidently just as they had been flung there after the fierce onset of
the storming party. The skull of one was cleanly gashed in two places,
as though by a sword; doubtless in this case the “saexe,” the short
sword the Saxons used, and from which, indeed, their name derives.
Another had a wound in the thigh and an iron spear-head was found
embedded in the spine. Evidently this was the framework of a warrior who
had been taken in the rear while engaging in executing a strategical
retreat; or, as we used to say at school, “doing a bunk.” Unfortunately
he had not started early enough. The third skeleton was that of a bolder
man of war, who had stayed to see it out and scorned to run, with the
result that he received a huge stone in the skull, and his collarbone
was driven up into his jaw. It was then too late to leave, and in fact
his bones remained here for close upon thirteen hundred years, with
these evidences of his ill-advised stand, plain to see. But his soul
goes marching on.
Other pit-dwellings contained skeletons, portions of rusted arms,
potsherds of a rude type of earthenware vessels, and beads; many of them
superimposed upon the infinitely older relics of the earlier defenders.
Many of them are to be seen in the collections of the Somerset
Archæological Society at Taunton. There is prominently displayed the
skull of a slaughtered warrior with no fewer than seven gashes in it. He
must have been a bonny fighter, to have attracted all this hewing and
slashing that at last put him out of action; or else the crowd
concentrating their efforts on him wasted those energies that might with
greater advantage have been distributed more evenly over the stricken
field. We can know nothing of who he was. No monument was ever raised to
his memory. But, although it may at first sight seem to be an indignity
that his shattered skull should be exposed here, yet, when you more
closely consider the rights and the wrongs of it, is this not his best
monument—showing that he fought for all he was worth, and was only slain
by overpowering odds? _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!_
Worle (locally “Wurle”) itself is a detestable village of vulgar and
poverty-stricken shops and out-at-elbows cottages, a blot on its
surroundings. As Weston rose from insignificance, Worle, which was
anciently its market-town and centre of supplies, sank into obscurity,
and now the sole interest of the place is its pretty church, containing
some good miserere seats. It was of old the property of Worspring
Priory, and Richard Spring, one of its later Priors, was at the same
time vicar of Worle. He resigned the Priory in 1525. His initials are
found carved on one of the misereres. A small stone in the churchyard is
inscribed:
A Maiden in Mold
60 years old
JOANNA
1644
The registers contain some curious items, among them, under date of
1609, the following note:
“Edward Bustle cruelly murthered by consent of his owne wyfe, who, with
one Humfry Hawkins, and one other of theyre associates, were executed
for the same murther, and hanged in Irons at a place called Shutt
Shelfe, neere Axbridge, and the body of the said Bustle barberously
used, viz., his throte cutt, his legs cutt of, and divers woundes in his
body, and buryed in a stall, was taken up and buryed in the church yard
at Worle, March Xth. A good president (_sic_) for wicked people.”
Apparently the degree of criminality of the unhappy Edward Bustle’s wife
was not great, for she not only escaped this hanging which, according to
the wording of the above note, she suffered, but married in the
following October a certain bold man, by name Nicholas Pitman.
A violent, but unexplained, local antipathy to lawyers was formerly
manifested at Worle, by the contumelious drumming out of any member of
the legal profession who chanced to be discovered in the village. Some
embittered page of local history is no doubt concerned in this now
obsolete custom, but this is probably almost as far removed in the
annals of the place as those distant ages when Worle was by way of being
a seaport. Where the flat meadows now spread, maplike below the village,
and where the Great Western Railway runs, ships in dim bygone æons rode
at anchor. Proof of that forgotten fact was accidentally discovered of
recent years, when, in digging the foundation of a new brewery, an
ancient anchor was unearthed from the sandy subsoil.
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