"Wessex?" you say. "What county is that? We know Essex and Sussex,
but where is Wessex?" Well, it is not a county, and you will not find
the name on a map of England; but it is a good English name for all
that, and once was the name of an important English kingdom.
When Alfred the Great became King, he ruled over Wessex, the
south-western part of England, and the old name still clings to the
district, which is now cut up into several modern counties.
Wessex is a land of downs and dales, and broad stretches of fertile
country. It is the home of the chalk hills--those great, smooth,
rolling heights, covered with short, sweet grass, on which great flocks
of sheep pasture and speck the vast slopes with dots of white.
"There is hardly any part of our land which has remained so little
unchanged as these Downs of Wessex. It is not because they are rugged
and difficult to climb: they are not; they are often easy to surmount.
There are far wilder and higher looking hills in both Wales and
Scotland, which have inhabitants, which are ploughed in patches and
dotted with whitewashed cottages. Yet the Downs remain lonely, their
sky-line unbroken by any sign of the presence of man. Just as the
Roman saw them from his trireme, the Saxon from his long ship, the Dane
from his war-boat, so we see them to-day--great solitary green mounds,
600, 700, 800 feet high."
Why is this? The answer is simple. They lack water. Down their sides
flow no brooks, babbling from stone to stone; they are waterless, and
therefore treeless and houseless. They get plenty of rain, of course,
for when the sou'-westers blow up from the Atlantic they are drenched
by many a heavy storm. But the water does not run down their sides as
a river, or gather in their hollows as a lake. The chalk of which they
are composed is too porous for that, and the rain sinks swiftly and is
lost.
Water is so abundant in almost every part of our land that we are
inclined to forget that the first need of a house is its water-supply.
He who thinks to build on the Downs must first reckon how deep a well
he must dig through the chalk before the water can be reached. And he
finds that the cost of obtaining water is so great that he must build
his house elsewhere. One or two houses have been built high up on the
Downs by wealthy people who were resolved to carry out a fancy. In
winter the water-supply is furnished by the rain which falls on the
roofs; in summer it is carted from the valley at great expense.
In some parts of the Downs water is obtained by dew-pans or dew-ponds.
A space is hollowed out, as a rule, near the summit of a hill. It is
circular in form, and of no great depth. It is coated with clay or
cement, or some material which prevents the passage of water, and it
then fills with dew and rain, and, strange to say, many of these
dew-ponds never fail after they have once filled. You may visit them
in perfect certainty of obtaining some water.
"Those who best know the Downs, and have lived among them all their
lives, can testify how, for a whole day's march, one may never meet a
man's face; or, if one meets it, it will be the face of some shepherd,
who may be standing lonely, with his dog beside him, upon the flank of
a green hill, and with his flock scattered all around."
Another great feature of Wessex is its broad heaths--great sweeps of
country dark with furze and gorse and heath, save when they blaze in
May with the yellow blossoms of the gorse, or glow in autumn with the
purple of the heather.
And bordering these heaths and downs are great stretches of smiling
meadow and corn land, dotted by quaint and beautiful townlets and
villages. Of large towns there are but few, for Wessex knows nothing
of the toil and turmoil of great industrial centres. She tills her
land and tends her flocks, and those occupations mean old farmhouses
and cottages, half-timbered or stone-built, roofed with red tiles or
grey thatch, and little country towns, silent and sleepy save on
market-days, when the farmers and dealers come in and buy and sell
their cattle and their produce.
The coast of Wessex is washed by the English Channel, and through all
our history no other part of our coast-line has been so busy with
sailors and shipping as that which looks upon the narrow seas.
The Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, have landed at its river-mouths, and
marched inland. In later days, the pirates which swarmed along the
Channel have attacked and plundered its towns. All through the Middle
Ages the citizens of the little towns along the shore had to be
prepared at any moment to beat off the attacks of freebooters who
sought plunder wherever it was to be found. Thus, in 1338, Southampton
was attacked suddenly by pirates on a Sunday when the people of the
town were in church, and the town was plundered and burned.
To this day the visitor notes with wonder the size and strength of some
old parish churches along the coast. They seem needlessly large in
view of the small population of the village, and also needlessly
strong. But 500 years ago the church was also the fortress of the
place. When news was brought that an enemy was near at hand, all fled
into the church for protection; and while the women and children
crouched before the altar, where the priest prayed for the rout of the
foe, the men strung their bows, and prepared to launch showers of
arrows from every window and loophole.
All through the long French wars the Wessex ports were in the thick of
the fray, fitting out privateers and supplying men for the Navy. Along
these coasts the press-gangs were very busy when sailors were needed
for the fleet and not enough men had volunteered. The press-gang was a
body of seamen, commanded by a naval officer, and sent out to seize men
and carry them on board ship by force. Tales are told to this day in
Wessex of a press-gang marching into a village at dead of night and
rushing into cottages to drag men out of bed and make them prisoners to
serve the King at sea. Sometimes the ploughman was snatched from his
plough, the shepherd from his flock. At times these men returned after
many years' absence to tell of their lives on board a man-o'-war, and
the battles fought with Britain's enemies; others were never heard of
again in their native place.